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Updated: May 16, 2025
This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of all great historical faiths. In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again and again the great Sufis have led reforms within Islam.
The occasion of another split was found in the marriage of Chunder Sen's daughter to the young Maharaja of Cooch Behar, in 1876. Chunder Sen had worked heroically for the enactment of a new marriage law for the members of the Brahmo Somaj, whereby no bride should be married before fourteen and no bridegroom under eighteen years of age.
Chunder Sen sometimes spoke of him as a devout Christian would speak. The Arya Somaj would not own His name, but it has graced its Hindu creed with many of His essential doctrines. Quite recently a new organ of the Brahmo Somaj, published at Hyderabad, has announced as its leading object, "to harmonize pure Hinduism and pure Christianity, with Christ as the chief corner-stone."
More than fifty years ago he started an association which became the Brahmo Somaj, which is a living and working society still. He went to England in 1831, and was received with great respect and friendliness. I have great reverence for the man, though I do not accept all his religious views."
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.
That Haverford may fully realize and improve its great opportunities as an approved seat of learning and the exponent of a Christian philosophy which can never be superseded, which needs no change to fit it for universal acceptance, and which, overpassing the narrow limits of sect, is giving new life and hope to Christendom, and finding its witnesses in the Hindu revivals of the Brahmo Somaj and the fervent utterances of Chunda Sen and Mozoomdar, is the earnest desire of thy friend.
The unbelieving Calcutta graduate has Hegel and Spinoza interwoven with his Vedantism, and the eclectic leader of the Brahmo Somaj, while placing Christ at the head of the prophets and recognizing the authority of all sacred bibles of the races, called on Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Mohammedans to unite in one theistic church of the New Dispensation in India.
From time to time missionaries and other Christian men, seeing no reason, from their standpoint, why these Brahmo friends should not come over in a body into the Christian fold, have been impatient with their lack of response.
In the previous decades the most conspicuous force in India, although numerically weak, was the already mentioned Brahmo Samaj, founded by Ram Mohun Roy in 1828. But it was colourless and wanting in constructive power. Educated opinion, at least in Bengal, seemed to be tending towards agnosticism and social revolution.
Thus, within a few years, Brahmo Somaj moved almost in a circle, in its search for a stable anchorage to its faith; and it returned to a point dangerously near to the Hindu position which it had left a few years before. The rapid movement above indicated was chiefly owing to an ardent youth, who rallied to the support of Debendra Nath, and who gradually took the reins into his own hands.
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