"Put on armour," says Nánac, "that will harm no one; let thy coat of mail be that of understanding, and convert thy enemies to friends. Fight with valour, but with no weapon except the word of God." All the principles which Nánac inculcated, were those of pure deism; but moderated, in order to meet the deep-rooted usages of that portion of mankind which he wished to reclaim from error. Though he condemned the lives and habits of the Muhammedans, he approved of the Korán[109]. He admitted the truth of the ancient Védas, but contended that the Hindú religion had been corrupted, by the introduction of a plurality of gods, with the worship of images; which led their minds astray from that great and eternal Being, to whom adoration should alone be paid. He, however, followed the forms of the Hindús, and adopted most of their doctrines which did not interfere with his great and leading tenet. He admitted the claim to veneration, of the numerous catalogue of Hindú Dévas, and Dévatás, or inferior deities; but he refused them adoration. He held it impious to slaughter the cow; and he directed his votaries, as has been seen, to consider ablution as one of their primary religious duties. Nánac, according to Penjábi authors, admitted the Hindú doctrine of metempsychosis. He believed, that really good men would enjoy Paradise; that those, who had no claim to the name of good, but yet were not bad, would undergo another probation, by revisiting the world in the human form: and that the bad would animate the bodies of animals, particularly dogs and cats: but it appears, from the same authorities, that Nánac was acquainted with the Muhammedan doctrine regarding the fall of man, and a future state; and that he represented it to his followers as a system, in which God, by showing a heaven and a hell, had, in his great goodness, held out future rewards and punishments to man, whose will he had left free, to incite him to good actions, and deter him from bad. The principle of reward and punishment is so nearly the same in the Hindú and in the Muhammedan religion, that it was not difficult for Nánac to reconcile his followers upon this point: but in this, as in all others, he seems to have bent to the doctrine of Brahmá. In all his writings, however, he borrowed indifferently from the Korán and the Hindú Sástras; and his example was followed by his successors; and quotations from the scriptures of the Hindús, and from the book of Muhammed, are indiscriminately introduced into all their sacred writings, to elucidate those points on which it was their object to reconcile these jarring religions.