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abstraction. This account, to a large extent, for his remarkable
powers of retention, every thing was realized in his mind and so
strongly impressed on it that nothing external could efface it.3
The education in the High School gave quite a different turn
to the mind of Guru Datta. As he read and assimilated English
authors,4 his old beliefs were shaken, and that faith which
characterized his talk was no longer observable. The change was
not due to mental incapacity for Guru Datta had remarkable power
of analysis and could, without any difficulty, relegate the various
items composing a statement to their respective categories.
However complicated a thought, and however great a jumble of
heterogeneous ideas, his mind was never confused. But just at the
time when he was prosecuting his studies at Multan, there was a
great religious commotion going in Punjab. The sudden inrush of
Western ideas, the gloss and glitter of the new civilization, the
currency of the novel modes of thought and life, and the Christian
Missionaries' eloquent and pathetic exhortation to the Hindus
against idol worship, had quite upset the thoughts of the educated
people. The school books, at least some of them, fostered and
encouraged a spirit of scepticism. Pandit Guru Datta found that
the Persian works that he had studied, and the Hindu beliefs in
which he was nurtured, were too much theoretical and absurd; and
naturally an aversion was produced in his mind towards them. He
became sceptic and began to doubt even the existence of God.
At this time, when the Western civilization was carrying
before its tide everything, when doubt and scepticism had almost
banished faith from the realm of religion, when, in consequence,
people were embracing Christianity in large numbers, and when
there was widespread unrest among the masses, there appeared
on the scene a mighty Reformer, Rishi Dayananda. His advent
reversed the order of things. Highly intellectual, he shattered to
pieces in no time the grounds of materialists; the Muhammedans,
Christians and Hindus, who came forward to argue with him and
to check the growth of the religion that he inculcated, sustained,
each one of them a crushing defeat. They found themselves face to
face with an intellectual giant who completely overpowered them
and left no passage for retreat. The humiliation of these people
shows that the respective religions whose cause they took up and
fought for, were without any inherent vitality. His ideas were at