ious requirements
of the masses can only be satisfied by concrete objects of worship and
by miracles (the more startling the better), that a spiritualized
faith can never be the possession of any but a few chosen souls, he
would not have proceeded with the founding of the Din i Ilahi. And
still we cannot call its establishment an absolute failure, for the
spirit of tolerance which flowed out from Akbar's religion
accomplished infinite good and certainly contributed just as much to
lessening the antagonisms in India as did Akbar's social and
industrial reforms.

A man who accomplished such great things and desired to accomplish
greater, deserves a better fortune than was Akbar's towards the end of
life. He had provided for his sons the most careful education, giving
them at the same time Christian and orthodox Mohammedan instructors in
order to lead them in their early years to the attainment of
independent views by means of a comparison between contrasts; but he
was never to have pleasure in his sons. It seems that he lacked the
necessary severity. The two younger boys of this exceedingly temperate
Emperor, Murad and Danial, died of delirium tremens in their youth
even before their father. The oldest son, Selim, later the Emperor
Jehangir, was also a drunkard and was saved from destruction through
this inherited vice of the Timur dynasty only by the wisdom and
determination of his wife. But he remained a wild uncontrolled cruel
man (as different as possible from his father and apparently so by
intention) who took sides with the party of the vanquished Ulemas and
stepped forth as the restorer of Islam. In frequent open rebellion
against his magnanimous father who was only too ready to pardon him,
he brought upon this father the bitterest sorrow; and especially by
having the trustworthy minister and friend of his father, Abul Fazl,
murdered while on a journey. Very close to Akbar also was the loss of
his old mother to whom he had clung his whole life long with a
touching love and whom he outlived only a short time.

Akbar lost his best friends and his most faithful servants before he
finally succumbed to a very painful abdominal illness, which at the
last changed him also mentally to a very sad extent, and finally
carried him off on the night of the fifteenth of October, 1605. He was
buried at Sikandra near Agra in a splendid mausoleum of enormous
proportions which he himself had caused to be built and which even
to-da