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 itself to him in the mystical illumination of his soul."[41] This conviction Akbar held in common with many rulers of the Occident who were much smaller than he.  Idolatrous marks of veneration he permitted only to a very limited degree.  He was not always quite consistent in this respect however, and we must realize how infinitely hard it was to be consistent in this matter at an Oriental court when the customary servility, combined with sincere admiration and reverence, longed to actively manifest itself.

  [Footnote 41:  Noer, II, 314, 355.]

Akbar, as we have already seen, suffered the Hindu custom of prostration, but on the other hand we have the express testimony to the contrary from the author Faizi, the trusted friend of the Emperor, who on the occasion of an exaggerated homage literally says:  “The commands of His Majesty expressly forbid such devout reverence and as often as the courtiers offer homage of this kind because of their loyal sentiments His Majesty forbids them, for such manifestations of worship belong to God alone,"[42] Finally however Akbar felt himself moved to forbid prostration publicly, yet to permit it in a private manner, as appears in the following words of Abul Fazl[43]: