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Vol. Res. Vol. III. pp. 165-207; and Leyden, 'On the Rosheniah Sect, &c., As. Res. Vol. XI. pp. 363-428. Since his time, however, that strange love of caste-distinctions, which seems so ineradicable from the soil of India, has begun again to creep into Vaish.navism, and will probably end by establishing its power as firmly in this sect as in any other.
There was therefore a considerable mass of hymns ready to his hand, and his contemporaries and followers added largely to the number; the poems of the Padakalpataru in consequence are of all ages from the fifteenth century downwards; moreover, as Vaish.navism aspires to be a religion for the masses, the aim of its supporters has always been to write in the vulgar tongue, a fortunate circumstance which renders this vast body of literature extremely valuable to the philologist, since it can be relied on as representing the spoken language of its day more accurately than those pretentious works whose authors despised everything but Sanskrit.
There seems to be something almost contradictory in representing the highest and purest emotions of the mind by images drawn from the lowest and most animal passions. "Ut matrona meretrici dispar erit atque discolor." So must also Vaish.navism differ from true religion, the flesh from the spirit, the impure from the pure.
Thence for six years he roamed all over India preaching Vaish.navism, and returned at last to Puri, where he passed the remaining eighteen years of his life and where at length he died in the 48th year of his age in 1534 A.D. His Bengali followers visited him for four months in every year and some of them always kept watch over him, for he was now quite mad.
It is difficult for the European mind, trained to draw a broad distinction between the love of God and love for another human being, to enter into a state of feeling in which the earthly and sensual is made a type of the heavenly and spiritual, but a large-souled charity may be perhaps able to admit that by this process, strange though it be to its own habits and experiences, there may have been some improvement wrought in the inner life of men brought up in other schools of thought; and my own experience, now of fourteen years standing, enables me to say that Vaish.navism does, in spite of, or perhaps in virtue of, its peculiar modus operandi, work a change for the better on those who come under its influence.
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