1 46 HISTORY OF THE SIKHS.. ill i
2 that, all space was filled with Him. The most in¬
3 significant. animal that crawled on the earth, the
4 least; complicated flower that decked the face of
5 the desert, were alike the work of the same Divine
6 hand that formed the elephant and wide-spreading
7 banian tree ! Trusting to this bountiftil Being,
8 Nanuk despised all worldly riches, unless in so far
9 as they served to relieve his fellow-creatures; and
10 charity to all mankind was one of the precepts
11 which he was induced to preach to his followers,
12 next to devotion to the Deity. The life of a fellow-
13 creature was sacred in his eyes, for the same breath
14 was breathed into them all by the Almighty, and
15 was only to be taken away by Him. Murder, war,
16 and discord, whereby the lives of men were sacri¬
17 ficed, he deprecated ; and cruelty and intolerance
18 were held in abomination, by him, as heinous sins.
19 The doctrine of the fall of man, by a first act of
20 disobedience to the will of. his Creator, was not
21 admitted by Nanuk: he held that nothing was
22 needed but a pure and holy life to insure happi¬
23 ness ; grounded, as such, must be, in a belief of the
24 Deity ever present to watch man’s actions. After
25 all, Nanuk’s was an imperfect code of religion, and
26 finite in its application; but such as it was, there
27 are many professing Christians whose creed is
28 equally limited.
29 That the Sikhs, as originally constituted by
30 Nanuk, were a singular people, there can be no
31 doubt; but since the reformation of the tribe by
32 Govirsd, the tenth and last Gooroo, they have lost