to lead it in the path of social and religious
reform as well as of political advancement.

The social and religious reform movement which had been of great promise
before the Mutiny and for some years afterwards, when Keshab Chundra Sen
gave the Brahmo Somaj a fine uplift, slackened. Like the Brahmo Somaj in
Bengal, the Prirthana Somaj in Bombay no longer made so many or such
fervent recruits. New societies sprang up in defence of the old faiths,
some even glorifying all their primitive customs and superstitions, and
most of them, whilst professing to recognise the need for cleansing them
of their grosser accretions, displaying a marked reaction against the
West in their avowed determination to seek reform only in a return to
the purer doctrines of early Hinduism. The most important of all these
movements was the Arya Somaj in the Punjab, whose watchwords were "Back
to the Vedas" and "Arya for the Aryans." The latter has sometimes barely
disguised a more than merely platonic desire to see the British
disappear out of the Aryan land of India. But the Vedas at any rate
yielded to the searchers sufficient fruitful authority for promoting
female education on sound moral lines and for discouraging idolatry and
relaxing the cruel bondage of caste. That it has been and still is in
many respects a powerful influence for good is now generally admitted by
those even whom its political tendencies have alarmed. New sects arose
within Hinduism.[1] An ardent apostle of the Hindu revival in Bengal,
Swami Vivekananda, was the most impressive and picturesque figure at the
Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 and made converts in America and
in Europe, amongst them in England the gifted poetess best known under
her Hindu name as Sister Nivedita. How strong was the hold regained by
the purely reactionary forces in Hinduism was suddenly shown in the
furious campaign against Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill in 1891
which brought Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Chitawan Brahman of Poona, for
the first time into public life as the champion of extreme Hindu
orthodoxy. That measure was intended to mitigate the evils of infant
marriage by raising the age for the woman's consent to its consummation
from ten to twelve, and the death quite recently of a young Hindu girl
of eleven in Calcutta due to the violence inflicted upon her by a
husband nearly twenty years older than she was, had enlisted very
widespread support for Government amongst enlighte