Religious and Social Reform

The papers which have been selected for publication in this volume contain nearly all that is of permanent interest in the matured utterances of Mr. Ranade, on the several religious and social questions which concern the Hindu community. The downward fortune of that community in its religious, moral, social and industrial phases forcibly appealed to his patriotic emotion as a catastrophe looming in the future if things went on as they had done. He believed it to be the peculiar mission of the particular branch of the Hindu race to which he belonged to arrest this catastrophe, and himself and his colleagues as bound by a sacred duty to take the lead.