Page:Twelve men of Bengal in the nineteenth century (1910).djvu/166

142 on the other stood eastern culture, effete and decaying, strangled in the grip of custom and tradition. The full force of modern thought had been let loose about the old ideals and the old beliefs, threatening to overwhelm them in its first impetuous rush. There was imminent danger that the new system of life and thought, while sweeping away the old beliefs, might raise no new ones to supply their place. The restraints that the old caste system had enforced upon life generally, socially, morally and mentally had been roughly cast aside, and the new civilisation had as yet failed to impose other restraints that had the same binding force. The work that Keshub Chandra Sen was called upon to do was to combine all that was best in the old with all that was best in the new and to prevent a break with the old before a new religion and a new philosophy of life were found to which men might adhere. It was the old problem which so many have sought to solve without success, the reconciliation of the old and the new, of the East and the West. At a time when chaos threatened, Keshub Chandra Sen had the ability and the courage to formulate a new belief, purified and refined, out of the old, and at the same time the power to lead men after him along the lines which he laid down. The great and widespread influence that his life and conduct had even upon those who did not follow him in his new belief, set