has such a wealth of exquisite ornamentation been lavished as
upon the dainty palace of Raja Birbal, the most learned and illustrious
Hindu, who gave his spiritual as well as his political allegiance to
Akbar. The Mahomedan brothers Abul Fazl and Faizi, whose conversation,
untrammelled by orthodoxy, so largely influenced his religious
evolution, had their house close to the great mosque, sacred to the
memory of a Mahomedan saint who, according to popular legend, sacrificed
the life of his own infant son in order that Akbar's should live. In the
great hall of the Ibadat Khaneh, built by him for the purpose, Akbar
himself took part in the disputations of learned men of all
denominations in search of religious truth. The spirit which inspired
Akbar during that period of his life breathes nowhere more deeply than
in one of the inscriptions which he chose for the "Gate of Victory," the
lofty portal, perhaps the most splendid in India, leading up to the
spacious mosque quadrangle: "Jesus, on whom be peace, said: 'The world
is a bridge. Pass over it, but build not upon it. The world endures but
an hour; spend that hour in devotion.'"

It was at Fatehpur that Akbar sought to set the seal upon his conquests
in peace and in war by evolving from a comparative study of all the
religions of his empire some permanent remedy for the profound
denominational and racial discords by which, unless he could heal them,
he foresaw that his life's work would assuredly some day be wrecked. Did
he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had
already taken the civil law, into his own hands? Or was even as noble a
mind as his not proof against the overweening _hubris_ to which a
despotic genius has so often succumbed? One momentous evening, in the
Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and
confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor's infallibility in the
domain of faith. From claiming the right to explain away the Koran,
which is the corner-stone of Islam, its alpha and omega, to repudiating
it altogether, there was but a short step. Akbar very soon took it. He
promulgated a new religion, which he called the Din-i-Ilahi, and a new
profession of faith, which, instead of the old Islamic formula, "There
is no God but God, and Mahomed is his prophet," proclaimed indeed in the
same words the unity of God, but declared Akbar to be the one Viceregent
of God. The new religion, theistic in doctrine, not only