Many a Holy of Holies has man
raised within this temple, and vainly have the builders sought by every
device of loveliness, sensuous or shadowy, to achieve for their
inventions the Beauty of Holiness. Your Nanuk was divinely taught, for
leaving alike the Material and the Ideal, he grasped the True."
Now they paused where sat a mendicant who besought charity. Atma
bestowed a gift, saying,
"Our great teacher said:
'The beggar's face a mirror is, in it
We best learn how our zeal in heaven appears.
Pause then and look--nor pious alms omit,
Lest on its brightness fall an angel's tears.'"
Then Bertram, pleased with this, asked more regarding the founder of the
Sikh faith, and Atma related what things the teacher had accounted holy.
"This," he said, "did he instruct:
'The hearts that justice and soft pity shrine
Are the true Mecca, loved of the Divine.
Who doth in good deeds duteous hours engage,
Performs for God an holy pilgrimage.
Who to his own hurt speaks the truth, he tells
The Mystic Speech that pious rite excels.
Rude orisons of alien He will bless
If they are offered but in faithfulness.'"
"It is good," said Bertram, "modes of worship are many, faiths are
nearly as various as the temperaments of mankind, but virtue is one. No
universal intuition prompts to a form of ritual as acceptable to God,
but the moral sense of all the race points unswervingly to the pole-star
of the soul--Truth, another name for Purity.
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