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Rh After Guru Govind had baptized his five disciples, a number significant in the Khálsa as forming a special congregation in which the Guru promised that his spirit should be ever present, he caused them to administer to him the same initiatory rite, taking the title of Singh, which was enjoined to be added as a baptismal name to all new professors of the faith In the present day the Singhs are the only Sikhs who are accepted as such in popular estimation, and the Nánaki Sikhs are considered to have lapsed into the body of the Hindu population.

Govind Singh's next step was to adapt the Sikh scriptures to his own views, and with this object he endeavoured to induce the guardians of the Ádi Granth at the sacred city of Kartárpur to permit him to make additions it; but the Sodhis, the Sikh priests who had the guardianship of the sacred volume and who were the descendants of Guru Rám Dás, refused to accept the authority of the new leader. They, with their great establishments at Anandpur and Kartárpur, had already become the Bráhmans of the Sikh creed, with the unbounded spiritual pride of their prototypes, and when they understood that the object of Govind Singh was to preach the democratic doctrine of equality in a far more liberal fashion than it had been promulgated by Nának himself, and that the lowest classes and even outcasts were to be admitted equally with Bráhmans to the higher privileges of the