According to the ancient canons of the Brahmanic faith, each man must pass through several stages. The youth is sent to the house of a teacher or Guru, whom he must obey and serve implicitly in every way and who teaches what is necessary for life, especially the Veda and his religious duties. He is a mere passive recipient, learner, and believer. At the next stage the man is married and must perform all the duties prescribed for the householder. But during both these periods no doubt is ever heard as to the truth of religion or the authority of laws and rites. But when the hair turns white and there are grandchildren, “a new life opens during which the father of the family may leave his home and village and retire into the forest with or without his wife. During that period he is absolved from the necessity of performing any sacrifices, although he may or must undergo certain self-denials or penances, some of them extremely painful. He is then allowed to meditate with proper freedom on the great problems of life and death, and for that purpose is expected to study the Upanishads,” to learn the doctrines in which all sacrificial duties are rejected, and the very gods to whom the ancient prayers of the Veda were addressed are put aside to make room for the one supreme impersonal being called Brahm. These mahatmas, like some medieval hermit-saints commemorated in the voluminous hagiology of the Bollandist Fathers, were reputed to have often attained very great age and wisdom and to be sought out in their retreats to solve great problems by men still in active life. The bodies of a few of them were fabled to have undergone a subtle process of transubstantiation and thus to have achieved a true mundane immortality.