ENDS AND MEANS,
the conversion of the other; but the methods used were
those of persuasion and argument, not those of force.
Neither Hinduism nor Buddhism is disgraced by any-
thing corresponding to the Inquisition; neither was ever
guilty of such iniquities as the Albigensian crusade or such
criminal lunacies as the religious wars of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The Moslems who invaded India
brought with them the idea of a God who was not the
order of the army of being, but its general. Bhakti towards
this despotic person was associated with wholesale slaughter
of Buddhists and Hindus. Similarly lhakti towards the
personal God of Christianity has been associated, through-
out the history of that religion, with the wholesale slaughter
of pagans and the retail torture and murder of heretics.
It is the business of the rational idealist to harp continually
upon this all-important fact. In this way, perhaps, he may
be able to mitigate the evil tendencies .which history shows
to be inherent in the way of devotion and the correlated
belief in a personal deity.
It has been necessary to dwell at considerable length on
the subject of the emotional method of religious self-
education, for the good reason that this method possessed,
and still possesses, very great historical importance. To
the third method of religious self-education, the method
of meditation, I, must also devote a good deal of space.
It is important not only historically, because of its influence
on the affairs of men, but also metaphysically, because of
the light it throws on the nature of ultimate reality. With
its metaphysical significance I shall deal in the next chapter.
In this place I am concerned mainly with the social and
psychological results of the methods.1
1 For further information on the subject consult A. Tillyard,
Religious Exercises; Bede Frost, The Art of Mental Prayer; and the
anonymous Concentration and Meditation, published by the Buddhist
Lodge, London. All these contain bibliographies.
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