hana Samaj is moribund. The fashion of
the day is for religious "revivals," in which the worship of Kali, the
sanguinary goddess of destruction, or the cult of Shivaji-Maharaj, the
Mahratta chieftain who humbled in his day the pride of the alien
conquerors of Hindustan, plays an appropriately conspicuous part. The
Arya-Samaj, which is spreading all over the Punjab and in the United
Provinces, represents in one of its aspects a revolt against Hindu
orthodoxy, but in another it represents equally a revolt against Western
ideals, for in the teachings of its founder, Dayanand, it has found an
aggressive gospel which bases the claims of Aryan, _i.e._, Hindu,
supremacy on the Vedas as the one ultimate source of human and Divine
wisdom. The exalted character of Vedantic philosophy has been as widely
recognized among European students as the subtle beauty of many of the
Upanishads, in which the cryptic teachings of the Vedas have been
developed along different and often conflicting lines of thought to
suit the eclecticism of the Hindu mind. But the Arya-Samaj has not been
content to assert the ethical perfection of the Vedas. In its zeal to
proclaim the immanent superiority of Aryan civilization--it repudiates
the term Hindu as savouring of an alien origin--over Western
civilization, it claims to have discovered in the Vedas the germs of all
the discoveries of modern science, even to wireless telegraphy and
aeroplanes.

Just as the political agitation in India has derived invaluable
encouragement from a handful of British members of Parliament and other
sympathizers in Europe and America, so this Hindu revival has been
largely stimulated and to some extent prompted by Europeans and
Americans. Not only the writings of English and German scholars, like
Max Mueller and Deutsch, helped enormously to revive the interest of
educated Hindus in their ancient literature and earlier forms of
religion, but it was in the polemical tracts of European writers that
the first protagonists of Hindu reaction against Christian influences
found their readiest weapons of attack. The campaign was started in 1887
by the Hindu Tract Society of Madras, which set itself first to inflame
popular fanaticism against the missionaries, who, especially in the
south of India, had been the pioneers of Western education. Bradlaugh's
text-books and the pamphlets of many lesser writers belonging to the
same school of thought were eagerly translated into the vernac