Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/1002

 956. BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [ Chap. /1 Christianity ; ” and condemns even Sir William Jones for his pro-Hindu tendencies. The great scholar was, according to the critic, ‘‘ accustomed to study the Gastras with the image of a Hindu god placed on his table.” The Hindus were never known to possess any proselytising zeal; yet the poetry and devotion which pervaded the allegorical mode of their wor- ship could not fail to commend itself to many an enlightened European who would openly avow his partiality for it. These foreign admirers of our reli- gion were Raja Rama Mohana’s contemporaries— a circumstance which shows that the Hindu religion in Bengal had not yet sunk into utter grossness as it was represented to have done by its reformers ; Hinduism for, in that case it could not have counted its in our ; ‘ ; : village: votaries among the Europeans who lived in the টিন country. Almost a century has pssed since Rama Mohana Roy breathed his last. The incense still burns in the Hindu temples at the time of the Arati or evening service: the village offers still prepare clay images of the gods. The auspicious sound of the evening conch still resounds beyond the temples across our fields and lawns. The sacred books Bhagvata, Chandi and other Puranas, still tind hundreds of listeners, whose love is far more ennobling than if the works had possessed a mere- ly literary interest and how dreary would be the Hindu home without these things! To me it appears that if the allegorical forms of our religion were all swept away, the whole Hindu civilisation, intervening between the period of the Vedas and that of Rama Krishna Paramalhamsa’s sayings, would be overthrown, and the spiritual soul of India,