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BHAKTI-YOGA.
ing ideal as one's chosen ideal. All the other forms of Bhakti are only stages on the way to reach it. All our failures and all our successes in following the religion of love, are on the road to the realisation of this one ideal. Object after object is taken up, and his inner ideal is successively projected on them all, by the bhakta, to find that all such external objects are always inadequate as exponents of his ever-expanding inner ideal-and are naturally rejected by him one after another. At last the aspirant begins to think that it is vain to try to realise the ideal in external objects—that all external objects are as nothing, compared to the ideal itself. And in course of time, he acquires the power of realising the highest and the most generalised abstract ideal, entirely as an abstraction-and that, to him 'becomes quite alive and real. When the devotee has reached this point, he is no more impelled to ask-whether God can be demonstrated or
