Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/437

V.] startle us by their boldness, as they attract us by their novelty.

Bengal has, as I have already said, evinced, in the history of her religious progress, a spirit of constant revolt against orthodoxy. Whenever an institution, basing itself on the dogmas of monastic pedants, has shut its portals against the immutable truths of nature and tried to blindfold men by learning and logic, the heterodox elements in this country have revolted against its theology and asserted themselves to break the fetters of social autocracy by proclaiming the true relation in which man stands to God and to his fellow men. It was this spirit which had, at one time, made Bengal a staunch votary of the Buddhistic creed; it was for this reason that the Jain Tirthankaras had found it a suitable soil for the promulgation of their doctrines; and last but not least the VaiṣṇavasVaiṣṅavas [sic] of Bengal shewed the strength that lay dormant in her masses, a strength which by a HerculianHerculean [sic] application of its resources upset the whole social fabric, broke through the thick walls of time-honoured institutions, and opened up a vista for the passage of heaven's light.

This great strength of the people had been silently gathering itself in the declining days of Buddhism, when the Vaiṣṅava creed had not yet assumed a new shape in Bengal. The Mahāyāna School of the Buddhists had branched itself in a hundred ways and the theory of the void (Çunyabād), though it occasionally led to scepticism and sophistry, counted a larve number of votaries who developed a creed of devotion not unlike the Vaiṣṅava