future, on the good and on the true; whose piety is something more than a pretence, whose religion is a real living principle in the mind, not a hypocritical show without.

Nanuk did not content himself, however, with simple study and meditation, as many of his class do. He became a teacher and a preacher. He preached indifferently to both Hindoos and Mussulmans, urging the former to put away their images and idols, their mutilations and human sacrifices, their hideous and obscene rites, whilst he impressed upon the Mussulmans the absolute necessity of discarding that fiery spirit of intolerance, that thirst for infidel blood, which forms one of their chief characteristics, or rather did then form one of them.

His doctrines, as a whole, were those of pure Deism. He recognized all the prophets that had gone before him-he honoured Menu and Muhammad, Budha and Confucius, he merely added himself to the number, as the latest, and by no means the least noble illustration of the class. He was eminently an eclectic philosopher, and had faith in human nature besides. An eclectic philosopher, however, he was, with some of the prejudices of his

Hindoo race still clinging to him; for, whilst he preached peace to all mankind and reprobated all intolerance, he had no mercy for the slaughterer of a cow!

To us a strange dogma, a strange dogma truly, this of Nanuk's about the cow! but we were not born in the Punjab; we have not been taught Hindooism by fiery fakirs ready to spill their blood before our eyes to prove the truth of their convictions-ready to thrust an arrow through their tongue, if you doubt their sincerity! It is not a man's mind alone that shapes his convictions-it is not his reason only that guides that mind,-we are all of the age and country in which we live,-formed, fashioned, moulded by the society around us,-ever sinking our own individuality in the waves of public opinion-conforming to social practices in which we see nothing but absurdity-upholding social doctrines, of which we see neither the utility nor the necessity. Let us cease to wonder then that the benevolent Nanuk, who so ardently and eloquently preached peace amongst all mankind, should have regarded the killing of a cow as the one crime that could not be forgiven.

He would not believe in the depravity of man. He was of those who saw God in man as well as in nature, and he could not persuade himself that where God dwelt all could be evil and disordered. He rejected, therefore, absolutely, the doctrine of a fall and the necessity of an atonement. The religious systems of the East are divided into those two great classes-the sacrificers and the nonsacrificers; those that believe an atonement is necessary of some kind, and has been offered or may be offered daily, and those who reject sacrifices altogether, and trust in man's unaided powers to attain the good and the true. Where they have believed atonements necessary, they have sacrificed oxen, sheep, or men, as in Druidism, Magianism, Hindooism; where they have ignored atonements altogether, they have placed their faith in the hand or in the heart, in the sword or in the doing of good.

Muhammad endeavoured to combine the two; Gotama Budha, Confucius and Nanuk trusted solely in the latter. The first class of faiths saw God nowhere, or thrust him to such a distance that the poor sinner had no access to him but by the stepping-stones of

priests and altars, temples and sacrifices; the second saw God in everything, and most of all, in man. Verily, the lying spirit of untruth has led poor man a strange dance after salvation-a far stranger dance than any willo'-the-wisp has done, ever yet seen or fancied!

We may learn from it all, however, one useful lesson, which is this—that religion is a real want of, and necessity for, the heart of man, not a foreign device thrust upon him from without, by any means. God is too far off, says the Devil, for you to have anything to do with him-that is his atheism; God is within you, is everywhere about you, all is good and excellent if you will only will it so -that is his pantheism; and, between the two, all mankind oscillate and vibrate, now verging on the one, now pressing towards the other. Even the truth itself has been twisted, so as to accommodate itself to the one fallacy or the other, in all ages.

At Rome, God is too far off; priests, saints, virgins, confessionals, and convents are necessary as stepping-stones, and in the contemplation of the medium, the end is lost sight of. In Germany, neology teaches, with its

open-mouthed and honest-looking eclecticism, that God is within us, that all is God, and therefore all must be good; as to mediators, or a mediator, it laughs at the idea-sees no necessity whatever for any such!

The unity of God was the doctrine that Nanuk most urgently insisted upon, and was most zealous in preaching. Muhammadism taught that doctrine, and he showed from the Hindoo Vedas that they taught it likewise; here, then, was a common basis, a foundation laid for a system to combine the two.

"I am sent," said he, for he always insisted, like all earnest men, that he had a mission from heaven to fulfil, "I am sent to the Mussulman, to reconcile your jarring faiths, and I implore you to read the Hindoo Scriptures as well as your own; but reading is useless without obedience to the doctrine taught, for God has said no man shall be saved except he has performed good works. The Almighty never thinks of asking to what tribe or sect a man belongs, but only what he has done."* Peace, peace with one another; peace with

*Malcolm. Asiatic Researches, vol. xi.