he second great religion of his
empire, Brahmanism, to which the great majority of his subjects clung
with body and soul, and then in place of both existing religions to
introduce a third foreign religion inimically opposed to them--such a
procedure would have hurled India into an irremediable confusion and
destroyed at one blow the prosperity of the land which had been
brought about by the ceaseless efforts of a lifetime. For of course it
was not the aim of the Jesuits simply to win Akbar personally to
Christianity but they wished to see their religion made the state
religion of this great empire.

As has been already suggested, submission to Christianity would also
have been opposed to Akbar's inmost conviction. He had climbed far
enough up the stony path toward truth to recognize all religions as
historically developed and as the products of their time and the land
of their origin. All the nobler religions seemed to him to be
radiations from the one eternal truth. That he thought he had found
the truth with regard to the fate of the soul in the Sufi-Vedantic
doctrine of its migration through countless existences and its final
ascension to deity has been previously mentioned. With such views
Akbar could not become a Catholic Christian.

The conviction of the final reabsorption into deity, conditions also
the belief in the emanation of the ego from deity. But Akbar's
relation to God is not sufficiently identified with this belief. Akbar
was convinced that he stood nearer to God than other people. This is
already apparent in the title "The Shadow of God" which he had
assumed. The reversed, or rather the double, meaning of the sentence
_Allahu akbar_, "Akbar is God," was not displeasing to the Emperor as
we know. And when the Hindus declared him to be an incarnation of a
divinity he did not disclaim this homage. Such a conception was
nothing unusual with the Hindus and did not signify a complete
apotheosis. Although Akbar took great pains he was not able to
permanently prevent the people from considering him a healer and a
worker of miracles. But Akbar had too clear a head not to know that he
was a man,--a man subject to mistakes and frailties; for when he
permitted himself to be led into a deed of violence he had always
experienced the bitterest remorse. Not the slightest symptom of
Caesaromania can be discovered in Akbar.

Akbar felt that he was a mediator between God and man and believed
"that the deity revealed i