Then again, what resulted from the Buddha’s ignoring the existence of a God, and telling his disciples to abstain from depending on any Being higher than what man himself could become? Of course this was opposed to every man’s innermost sense of his own needs and of his own nature. For man is so constituted that he cannot be happy without loving and trusting a Being higher than himself—a Being who takes the initiative in loving His creatures and is the proper object of their loftiest affections. Nor can man in his secret heart regard either himself or any one of his fellow-men as a being worthy of his highest adoration. Nor can he set his affections on a blank or an abstraction. And so, in spite of the Buddha’s teaching, his followers would act on their own convictions. They would believe in beings higher than themselves, and in a personal Creator knowable and lovable by themselves, and knowing and loving His creatures. Nay, they ultimately converted the Buddha himself into the very God he denied, calling him ‘The chief god of all the gods’ (Devātideva). Again, what was the effect of the Buddha’s leading men to believe that all supernatural revelation was unneeded—that all enlightenment came from within, and that every man was competent to think out true knowledge for himself by the exercise of his own reasoning powers, in the way that the Buddha himself had done? Of course the result was that the generality of men who shrank from the effort of thinking out truth for themselves, and were wholly destitute of any faculty for doing so, insisted on believing in a revelation from an external power, and ended in attributing infallibility to the Buddha’s own teaching, and worshipping the Law of Buddhism—as a visible embodiment of their deceased teacher—with all the ardour of enthusiastic bibliolatrists. Furthermore, what followed on the Buddha’s denying that any prayer, however earnest, could have any power to modify the operation of natural laws? Of course men longed for some form of supplication to a higher power, and so the Buddha’s disciples not only composed prayer-formularies, but invested the mere letters and syllables of such forms with an efficacy which no other body of religionists has ever thought of attributing to prayer of any kind. They not only repeated mystical sentences, which were called prayers, though really mere charms, believing that an occult virtue was inherent in the words, but invented a method of manufacturing such sentences (Dhāraṇī) like marketable commodities. They fabricated prayers, in fact, by machinery, inscribing them on wheels or on rolls inserted in cylinders, which in the present day are made to revolve by hand or by the force of water and wind, and will possibly, with the spread of science, be impelled by steam-power, so that each revolution may count for an infinite number of repetitions, and be set down to the credit of the owner or manager of the mechanism.