The Brahma Samaj maintained a bare existence till 1841, when Babu Debendra Nath Tagore, a member of a famous and wealthy Calcutta family, devoted himself to it.

Debendra Nath Tagore sought refuge from the difficulty by becoming an ascetic. The "Brahma Samaj of India," as Chunder Sen's party styled itself, made considerable progress extensively and intensively until 1878, when a number of the most prominent adherents, led by Anand Mohan Bose, took umbrage at Chunder Sen's despotic rule and at his disregard of the society's regulations concerning child marriage.

Dr George Thomson, a chemist and a disciple of Van Helmont, followed the example, and nearly lost his life by an attack which immediately followed.4 The plague of 1665 was widely spread over England, and was 4 On the plague of 1665 see Nath.

Nath Bh.).

Nath).

In the final judgment of the famous libel case of the Bombay Maharajas, before the Supreme Court of Bombay, in January 1862, these improprieties were severely commented upon; and though so unsparing a critic of Indian sects as Jogendra Nath seems not to believe in actual immoral practices on the part of the Maharajas, still he admits that "the corrupting influence of a religion, that can make its female votaries address amorous songs to their spiritual guides, must be very great."

Murray Mitchell, Hinduism Past and Present (2nd ed., London, 1897); Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya, Hindu Castes and Sects (Calcutta, 1896); A.

A movement towards Arianism and then towards Socinianism (Joseph Priestley, Nath.

For these reasons, every Hindu household - whether Brahman, Kshatriya or Sudra - that can afford to keep a paid cook generally entertains the services of a Brahman for the performance of its cuisine - the result being that in the larger towns the very name of Brahman has suffered a strange degradation of late, so as to mean only a cook "(Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya, Hindu Castes and Sects).