adversaries of Ram Mohun Roy that it was an unpardonable breach of social decorum on the part of the most virtuous of Sudras to sit on the same bench or carpet with a Brahmin. The conventional usages of society paid an external homage, almost bordering on worship, to the representatives of the priestly class, who were ignorant and unspiritual to a degree. There was living in Calcutta in those days a Sudra spice-seller who had collected the dust from the feet of a hundred thousand Brahmins to wear it as a remedy for an attack of leprosy, and he was a type of his people. The rules of caste made it sinful for the different castes to inter-marry or dine with one another. The weight of social opinion pressed heavily on the lower classes, who aspired to nothing higher or nobler than common menial service or brutalising labour unredeemed by a single ray of intellectual light. The poverty and degradation of the masses were frightful. Centuries of ignorance and political slavery had reduced them to the condition of children, and, like children, they revelled in childish things. Even in religion, they believed in and practised puerile things that were unworthy of rational beings.

But no class were greater sufferers from the social evils of the time than the women of Bengal. A few centuries ago a certain Hindu ruler of

Eastern Bengal, which was the principal seat of Brahminism at that time, had divided all the Brahmins of the province into certain orders of social prestige, according to their merits and attainments, calling the highest of them Kulins. The system of Kulinism gave rise in course of time to extensive polygamy. In as much as the privileges of these orders were made hereditary and as an alliance with a Kulin was looked upon as a means of obtaining social honour for a family, such an alliance was naturally sought after by the fathers of all marriageable girls. Thus the custom came to be generally adopted of a Kulin man marrying a number of wives. Under this horrid custom there were in Bengal, at the time under review, thousands of young women who were living a life of practical widowhood, nominally wedded to husbands who owned in many cases scores of other wives. But far more miserable was the lot of the Hindu widows of the higher castes, many of whom were burnt alive, sometimes by their own choice, but oftener by compulsion, on the funeral pyres of their husbands. And those of them who shrank back from self-immolation were doomed to perpetual widowhood and were subjected to such austerities as made their lives a burden to them. Indeed, the death of a husband brought a sudden change in the life of

Instances were not rare, spending quite as much Whilst the rich wasted

not entirely over in 1830.
at that time, of rich men
on their foolish vanities.
their substance in such vanities, the poor regaled
themselves with Kabis and Panchalis, in which two
rival parties of singers struggled to sing down each
other with impromptu retaliatory songs, often
couched in the most vulgar and indecent language.

It was in the midst of a state of things like this that Raja Ram Mohun Roy consecrated on the 23rd of January, 1830, in the presence of five hundred of his countrymen and one English gentleman, Mr. Montgomery Martin, the first house of prayer for the pure spiritual worship of the One True God, with the following manifesto, which forms a part of the trust-deed of the new church:

"The said messuage or building, land, tenements, hereditaments and premises with their appurtenances to be used, occupied, enjoyed, applied and appropriated as and for a place of public meeting of all sorts and descriptions of people without distinction, as shall behave and conduct themselves in an orderly, sober, religious and devout manner, for the worship and adoration of the One Eternal Unsearchable and Immutable Being, who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe, but not under or by any other name, designation or title peculiarly used for and applied to any particular being or beings by any man or set of men whatsoever, and that no graven image, statue, or sculpture, carving, painting, picture, portrait or the likeness of anything shall be admitted within the said messuage, building, land, tenements and hereditaments and premises; and that no sacrifice, offering or oblation of any kind or thing, shall ever be permitted therein;

'