ass
the final judgement on the tenor of men's lives, according to
proceedings drawn up by his secretary Chitragupta. If men's actions
have been good, their souls are, as the next stage, advanced a step
towards the great essence, Brahma; and, if bad, they are thrown back,
and obliged to occupy the bodies of brutes or of people of inferior
caste, as the balance against them may be great or small. There is an
intermediate stage, a 'Narak', or hell, for bad men, and a
'Baikunth', or paradise, for the good, in which they find their
felicity in serving that god of the three to which they have
specially devoted themselves while on earth. But from this stage,
after the period of their sentence is expired, men go back to their
pilgrimage on earth again.

There are numerous Deos (Devas), or good spirits, of whom Indra is
the chief; [3] and Daityas, or bad spirits; and there have also been
a great number of incarnations from the three great gods, and their
consorts, who have made their appearance upon the earth when required
for particular purposes. All these incarnations are called 'Avatars',
or descents. Vishnu has been eleven times on the globe in different
shapes, and Siva seven times.[4] The avatars of Vishnu are celebrated
in many popular poems, such as the Ramayana, or history of the Rape
of Sita, the wife of Rama, the seventh incarnation;[5] the
Mahabharata, and the Bhagavata [Purana], which describe the wars and
amours of this god in his last human shape.[6] All these books are
believed to have been written either by the hand or by the
inspiration of the god himself thousands of years before the events
they describe actually took place. 'It was', they say, 'as easy for
the deity to write or dictate a battle, an amour, or any other
important event ten thousand years before as the day after it took
place'; and I believe nine-tenths, perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred,
of the Hindoo population believe implicitly that these accounts were
also written. It is now pretty clear that all these works are of
comparatively recent date, that the great poem of the Mahabharata
could not have been written before the year 786 of the Christian era,
and was probably written so late as A.D. 1157; that Krishna, _if born
at all_, must have been born on the 7th of August, A.D. 600, but was
most likely a mere creation of the imagination to serve the purpose
of the Brahmans of Ujain, in whom the fiction originated; that the
other incarnations wer