“I do not say that the Shrine is without sanctity to me,” replied Atma evasively, “and the place is one of great attractiveness, while the journey thither, though longer, is more agreeable than other routes.  But your jesting challenge reminds me of what once befel the holy Nanuk, the founder of the Sikh religion.  He slept in the heat of the day on a grassy bank with his feet turned westward.  A Mohammedan priest finding him, struck him and demanded how he dared direct his feet towards the sacred city of Mecca.  ’How dare you, infidel dog, to turn your feet towards God?’ he demanded.  The wise one responded: 

     ’Though past the highest heaven of heavens I rise,
       Though cowering in the deep I hide mine eyes,
     I roam but through the Mosque his hands have wrought,
       Show me, O Moulvie, where thy God is not!’”

“Your wise man spoke a great truth,” said Bertram.  “The earth is a Temple, it was designed for a House of Prayer, and in it God has placed not a sect nor a nation, but all mankind.  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.