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THE ADVENT OF STRENUOUSNESS
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able suavity and unfailing politeness of the Indian. We are not immaculate patterns, with everything to teach and nothing to learn. But we undoubtedly put the vigour and strenuousness of action into a people rather too prone to spin logic, and the sight of stolid men practically working out their ideals has not failed to inspire the impressionable Indians. Spurred on, too, by the frank criticisms which in the rôle of candid friends we are often too free in offering, the Indians have during the last three-quarters of a century—since the time of Raja Ram Mohun Roy—shown a remarkable tendency to purify their religious ideals, to cast out the dross which their religion has accumulated in the centuries, and to get back to the true, pure ideas of the original founders. India is now quickening into an altogether fresh religious life. The materialism, which is already being discounted in the West, has never satisfied the Indian; movements are everywhere on foot to reawaken religious life. The Brahmo Somaj, founded by that real hero, Ram Mohum Roy, who braved all the persecution of social disfavour and bitter religious animosity in his efforts to purify his religion, and who died in a foreign land among the first Indians to visit England, has been carried forward by the eloquent Keshub Chunder Sen, pronounced by many competent men to be second only to the great Athenians as an orator. This movement represents the ideas of the Indians educated in English modes of thought, who, while unable to accept Christianity as a whole, are ready to absorb its essential spirit, whole at the same time they reject all that is worse in Hinduism. Another strenuous moment is that inaugurated by the Swami Dyananda, resulting in the founding of the Arya Samaj. Dyananda was of the more typically Hindu stamp. He sought his religion alone in the Indian jungle. His only possessions were a loin-cloth, a wooden staff, and a begging bowl. He probably did not know a single word of English, and his religion was of what in a Christian country we would call the Old