Atma

Nearly four hundred years ago, Nanak, a man of a gentle spirit, lived in the Punjab, and taught that God is a spirit. He enunciated the solemn truth that no soul shall find God until it be first found of Him. This is true religion. The soul that apprehends it readjusts its affairs, looks unto God, and quietly waits for Him. The existence of an Omnipresent Holiness was alike the beginning and the burden of his theology, and in the light of that truth all the earth became holy to him. His followers abjured idolatry and sought to know only the invisible things of the spirit. He did not seek to establish a church, the truths which he knew, in their essence discountenance a visible semblance of divine authority, and Nanak simply spoke them to him who would hear, -emperor or beggar,-until in 1540 he went into that spiritual world, which even here had been for him the real one.