Akbar, The Emperor Of India

AKBAR, EMPEROR OF INDIA. 35
to a stronger and more dangerous degree. It is also prob-
able that Akbar, who saw and heard everything, had learned
of the horrors of the Inquisition at Goa. Moreover, the
clearness of Akbar's vision for the realities of national life
had too often put him on his guard to permit him to look upon
the introduction of Christianity, however highly esteemed
by him personally, as a blessing for India. He had broken
the power of Islam in India; to overthrow in like man-
ner the 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 Chris-
tianity 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 devel-
oped and as the products of their time and the land of their
origin. All the nobler religions seemed to him to be radia-
tions 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 pre-
viously mentioned. With such views Akbar could not be-
come a Catholic Christian.
The conviction of the final reabsorption into deity, con-
ditions 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