declared the highest authority in matters of faith--to be sure not so
much in order to found an imperial papacy in his country as to guard
his empire from an impending religious war--at any rate a man who saw
how the prosperity of his reign proceeded from his own personal
initiative in every respect, such a man could countenance no will
above his own nor subject himself to any pangs of conscience. To
recognize the Pope as highest authority and simply to recognize as
objective truth a finally determined system in the realm in which he
had spent day and night in a hot pursuit after a clearer vision, was
for Akbar an absolute impossibility.

Then too Akbar could not but see through the Jesuits although he
appreciated and admired many points about them. Their rigid dogmatism,
their intolerance and inordinate ambition could leave him no doubt
that if they once arose to power the activity of the Ulemâs, once by
good fortune overthrown, would be again resumed by them to a stronger
and more dangerous degree. It is also probable 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 manner 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