the Sikh community that with the tenth Guru, Govind Singh, the Guruship was altogether abolished. Govind apparently discerned this. By developing a religious commonwealth he saved the Sikhs from sinking into a state of dull apathy to the world around them, to drifting into a community of monks, jogis, and fakirs. Nanak ever enjoined his disciples to remain in their secular occupations and not to leave the world,—that their religion was one of common life. He taught that the state of a householder was equally acceptable to God as retirement from the world; that salvation did not depend on outward circumstances, or in the performance of austerities, but on the inward state of the mind, which even in the daily business of life may remain absorbed in meditation on God. The evil practices of mendicant fakirs as well as the superstitions of the Brahman priesthood are frequently exposed in the 'Granth' and severely censured. His sound sense as well as that of Govind Singh saw that austerities,
