Chapter (অধ্যায়): XVII THE SWAMI'S MISSION CONSIDERED AS A WHOLE PAGE-198Page: 198 of 336
world, warned man that he must go beyond all books.
Truth being thus the one goal of the Hindu creeds, and this being conceived of, not as revealed truth to be accepted, but as accessible truth to be experienced, it followed that there could never be any antagonism, real or imagined, between scientific and religious conviction, in Hinduism. In this fact the Swami saw the immense capacity of the Indian peoples for that organised conception of science peculiar to the modern era. No advance of knowledge had ever been resisted by the religious intellect of India. Nor had the Hindu clergy, - a greater glory still! -ever been known to protest against the right of the individual to perfect freedom of thought and belief. This last fact indeed, giving birth to the doctrine of the Ishta Devata * - the idea that the path of the soul is to be chosen by itself - he held to be the one universal differentia of Hinduism; making it not only tolerant, but absorbent, of every possible form of faith and culture. Even the temper of sectarianism, characterised by the conviction that God Himself is of the believer's creed, and his limited group the one true church, and allying itself, as it now and then will, with every statement that man has ever formulated, was regarded by Hinduism, he pointed out, as a symptom, not of falsehood or narrowness, but only
* The Chosen Ideal.