ENDS AND MEANS
being frankly sexual* Seventeenth-century drapery writhes
like so much tripe. In the equivocal personage of Margaret
Mary Alacocque, seventeenth-century piety pores over a
bleeding and palpitating heart. From this orgy of emotion-
alism and sensationalism Catholic Christianity seems never
completely to have recovered.
The significance of bhakti in its relation to cosmological
belief is discussed in the next chapter. Our business
here is only with its psychological and social aspects.
Its results, as we have already seen, are generally good
up to a certain point, but bad beyond that point.
Nevertheless, bhakti is so enjoyable, especially to people
of viscerotonic habit, that it is bound to survive. In our
own day a majority of Europeans find it intellectually
impossible to pay devotion to the supernatural persons
who were the objects of worship during the Counter-
Reformation period. But the desire to worship persists,
the process of worshipping still retains its attraction. The
masses continue to tread the path of devotion; but the
objects of this bhakti are no longer saints and a personal
God; they are the personified nation or class, and the
deified Leader. The change is wholly for the worse.
It is clear that, given the existence of viscerotonic and
somatotonic types, religious practices of the emotional and
physiological kind will always be popular. Physiological
practices can adapt themselves to almost any sort of belief.
The emotional method, on the other hand, inevitably
imposes upon those who practise it a personalistic theology.
Those who enjoy bhakti can never be persuaded to give
up their pleasurable practices and the belief correlated
with them. In these circumstances, what is the rational
idealist to do? So far as I can see, he has two main tasks.
He must do his best to advertise the fact that the physio-
logical and the emotional are not the only methods of
religious self-education, and especially that there is an
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