tact with other races and other creeds diverted or
heightened this first purpose of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of
earthly power, Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which dazzled
for a moment even the steady gaze of Napoleon. Apprehending the unity
beneath the diversity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo,
Persian, Mohammedan, Christian, Akbar dared the lofty enterprise and
essayed to extract the common truth of all, selecting, as Julian had
done, twelve centuries before him, the sun as the symbol of universal
beneficence, and truth, and life. He failed, but failed greatly.

The distinctions of a great State, art, action, empire, supremacy in
thought, supremacy in deed, supremacy in conception of the ideal of
humanity, like rays emanating from the same divine centre, thither
converge again. Any attempt to explain their succession and decay in
terms of a mechanical law must thus lead either to the reserve of
Machiavelli, to the outworn fantasies of Bossuet, or to such formulas
as those of Ruskin and Gibbon, in which synchronous phenomena are woven
into a chain of causes and effects.

Even in the sphere of individual existence death is but a mode of human
thought, a name which has no counterpart in the frame of things. As
life is but a mode of the divine thought, so death is but a mode of
human thought, a creation of the intellect the more vividly to realize
itself and life. Every effect is in turn a cause. Therefore every
cause is eternal, an infinite series, existing at once successive and
simultaneous; for the effect is not the death of, but the continued
life of the cause. Universes and the soul of man are but
self-transformations of the first last Cause, the One, the Cause within
Cause immortal, effect within effect unending. "Man," it has been
said, "is the inventor of Nothingness. Nature and the Universe know it
not." The past wields over the present a power which could never be
derived from Death and Nothingness. No age, as was pointed out in the
first lecture, has felt this power so intimately as the present. As if
we had a thousand lives to live, we consume the present in the study of
the past, and sink from sight ourselves while still contemplating the
scenes designed for other eyes. Even our most living impulses we
interpret as if they were sacred runes carved by long-vanished hands,
so that it seems as if the dead alone lived, and the living alone were
dead.

But the sou