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ON THE SIKHS.
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and beards. He is then enjoined to be kind and charitable, to reverence Amritsar, to devote himself to the Khálsa, and to study the sacred books. The children of the Sikhs all pass through this form of
initiation.
From this sketch, imperfect as it must necessarily be, it will be seen that the Sikh religion scarcely deserves the name of a religious faith. A vague notion of a Creator and source of all things, and of a divine guardian and protector, pervades the poetry of Nának and his fellow bards, but it is little else than a poetical acknowledgment of a deity who is defined by negatives — who is without form—without time without attributes. The only worship of him, if it can be called such, consists in the allusions that occur in the odes and hymns which are chaunted at the daily services, to a benevolent and powerful being, designated sometimes as Parameswara —the supreme being; Sat Vám- the true name; Tat-karta ---the maker of that which is; Adi-purusha— the first spirit; Bhagavánthe lord: but still more frequently as Rám or Hari, the popular names of Vishnu. Belief in the intervention of a providence in mundane affairs exercises verly little influence upon Sikh practice. There is no public adoration of any of the Hindu divinities, nor, as far as is known, are any temples erected to them: but their existence is not disputed, and the characters given them by the Hindus and the legends told of them are (levoutly credited: and there are probably some esoteric rites in which the worship of the Tan
