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Updated: June 19, 2025
And from the first the movement has been a popular one, addressing itself to the masses and seeking to bring them over to its way of thinking and living. In this it has been, as we have seen, entirely removed from the Brahmo Somaj, which has been too content to remain a religion of the classes. Like the other movement, however, it has been largely local in its spread and influence.
What is needed is a thorough preparation in all missionaries, and that involves an indispensable knowledge of the forces to be met. The power of the press is no longer a monopoly of Christian lands. The Arya Somaj, of India, is now using it, both in the vernacular and in the English, in its bitter and often scurrilous attacks.
The Brahmo Somaj, the most vital of all these reform movements, professed even to reconcile Hinduism with theism, though without importing into the new creed the belief in any personal God.
The Arya Somaj is a movement somewhat kindred to the Brahmo Somaj, in so far as it is a definite protest against modern Hinduism and is theistic in its teaching. The Theism of this Somaj, however, is quite different in character from that of the Brahmos. Dayanand Saraswati was a Brahman, born in the Gujarati country about 1825. He developed into a man of keen intellect and of deep convictions.
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.
It is a significant fact that during the recent season of "Unrest" the government regarded the Arya Somaj as a hotbed of sedition and a nourisher of hostility to the West and to western things. The Arya Somaj is awake to the importance of training men as messengers of its Gospel of Theism.
There is to-day, in North India, no enemy to the Christian cause so wide awake and so bitter as the Arya Somaj. It is so thoroughly national in its spirit, is so compactly organized, and lends itself so easily to the racial and political agitation of the day, that Christianity finds in it its greatest foe in those regions.
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."
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.
The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity; the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and universality. The God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown God of many a righteous unbeliever.
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