Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/47

Rh R Y R Y 35 speculate, and at fifteen left home to study Buddhism in Tibet, where his criticisms on the Lama-worship gave much offence. After some years' travel he returned, but, his anti- idolatrous sentiments obliging him to leave home, he lived at Benares until his father's death in 1803. After this, he spent about ten years in the East India Company's service, latterly as dewan or head officer in the collection of revenues. During this period he first began to assemble his friends together for evening discussions on the absurdities of idolatry, and he also issued his first work, Tuhfat-al Muwahhiddin (" A Gift to Monotheists "). This treatise was in Persian, with an Arabic preface, and was a bold protest against superstition and priestcraft. These pro- ceedings brought on him much hostility, and even perse- cution, and in 1814 he retired to Calcutta for greater safety. Here he soon established a little Friendly Society (Atmiya Sabha), which met weekly to read the Hindu Scriptures and to chant monotheistic hymns. In 1816 he translated the Vedanta into Bengali and Hindustani, following this by a series of translations from the Upani- shads into Bengali, Hindustani, and English, with intro- ductions and comments of his own. These works he pub- lished at his own expense and disseminated widely among his countrymen. His writings excited much opposition and gave rise to numerous controversies, in which his ability, tact, and learning rendered him fully a match for his antagonists. But the deadliest blow which he inflicted upon Hindu superstition was his effective agitation against the rite of suttee, the burning of living widows on the funeral piles of their deceased husbands. In 1811 he had been a horrified witness of this sacrifice in his elder brother's family, and had vowed never to rest until he had uprooted the custom. He exposed the hollow pre- tences of its advocates in elaborate pamphlets, both in Bengali and English, and pressed the matter in every possible way, till at last the tide of public feeling turned, and on December 4, 1829, Lord William Bentinck issued a regulation abolishing suttee throughout all the terri- tories subject to Fort William. Rammohun was an active politician and philanthropist. He built schoolhouses and established schools in which useful knowledge was gratu- itously taught through the medium both of the English and the native languages. He wrote a suggestive Bengali gram- mar, of which he published one version in English (1826) and one in Bengali (1833). He wrote valuable pamphlets on Hindu law, and made strenuous exertions for the freedom of the native press; he also established (1822) and mainly conducted two native newspapers, the Sambdd Kaumudi in Bengali, and (if rightly identified) the Mirdt- al-Akhbdr in Persian, and made them the means of diffusing much useful political information. Becoming interested in Christianity, he learned Hebrew and Greek in order to read the Bible in the original languages; and in 1820 he issued a selection from the four Gospels entitled The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness. This was attacked by the Baptist missionaries of Serampur, and a long controversy ensued, in which he published three remarkable Appeals to the Christian Public in Defence of the " Precepts of Jesus." He also wrote other theological tracts (sometimes under assumed names) in which he attacked both Hindu and Christian orthodoxy with a strong hand. But his personal relations with orthodox Christians were never unfriendly, and he rendered valuable assistance to Dr Duff in the latter's educational schemes. He also warmly befriended a Unitarian Christian Mission which was started in Calcutta (1824) by Mr William Adam, formerly a Baptist missionary, who, in attempting to convert Rammohun to Trinitarianism, had himself been converted to the opposite view. This Unitarian Mission, though not a theological success, attracted considerable sympathy among the Hindu monotheists, whose Atmiya Sabha had then become extinct. At last Rammohun felt able to re-embody his cherished ideal, and on August 20, 1828, he opened the first "Brahmya Association" (Brahma Sabha} at a hired house. A suitable church building was then erected and placed in the hands of trustees, with a small endowment and a remarkable trust-deed by which the building was set apart " for the worship and adoration of the Eternal, Unsearchable, and Immutable Being who is the Author and Preserver of the universe." The new church was formally opened on the 1 1th Magh (January 23) 1830, from which day the Brahma Samaj dates its existence. Having now succeeded in his chief projects, Rammohun resolved to visit England, and the king of Delhi appointed him Lis envoy thither on special business, and gave him the title of raja. He arrived in England on April 8, 1831, and was received with universal cordiality and respect. He watched with special anxiety the parlia- mentary discussions on the renewal of the East India Company's charter, and gave much valuable evidence before the Board of Control on the condition of India. This he republished with additional suggestions (Exposition of the Practical Operation of the Judicial and Revenue Systems of India), and also reissued his important Essay on the Right of Hindus over Ancestral Property (1832). He visited France, and wished to visit America, but died unexpectedly of brain fever at Bristol, September 27, 1833. His Bengali and Sanskrit works were lately reissued in one volume, by Rajnarain Bose and A. C. Vedantabagish (Calcutta, 1880), and his English works will shortly be published in two volumes by Eshanchanclra Bose. Nagendranath Chattopadhaya's Bengali memoir of him (1881) is the iullest yet published. ROY, WILLIAM (c. 1726-1790), a famous geodesist, was employed in some of the great national trigonometrical measurements which were made during last century. In 1746, at the age of twenty, when an assistant in the office of Colonel Watson, deputy quartermaster-general in North Britain, he began the survey of the mainland of Scotland, the results of which were embodied in what is known as the "duke of Cumberland's map." In 1756 he obtained a lieutenancy in the 51st regiment, and proceeded with it to Germany, where his talents as a military draughtsman brought him to notice, and procured him rapid promotion. He ultimately reached the rank of major-general. In 1784, while deputy quartermaster-general at the Horse Guards, his services were called into request for conducting the observations for determining the relative positions of the French and English royal observatories. His measure- ment of a base line for that purpose on Hounslow Heath in 1784, which was destined to be the germ of all subse- quent surveys of the United Kingdom, gained him the gold medal of the Royal Society of London. Owing to unfore- seen delays, the triangulation for connecting the meridians of the two observatories was not carried out until 1787. He had completed his undertaking, and was finishing an account of it for the Phil. Trans, when he died in 1790. Besides several papers in Phil. Trans. , Roy was author of the work entitled Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain, published in 1793. ROYAL HOUSEHOLD. In all the mediaeval mon- archies of western Europe the general system of govern- ment sprang from, and centred in, the royal household. The sovereign's domestics were his officers of state, and the leading dignitaries of the palace were the principal admin- istrators of the kingdom. The royal household itself had, in its turn, grown out of an earlier and more primitive institution. It took its rise in the comitatus described by Tacitus, the chosen band of comites or companions who, when the Roman historian wrote, constituted the personal following, in peace as well as in war, of the Teutonic