Hence the relatively slight ascendency enjoyed by the Brahmans in the Punjab amongst the Hindus themselves, even the Brahmans having split up into so many sub-castes and sub-sub-castes that many a non-Brahman Hindu will hardly accept food cooked by the lower order of Brahmans—­and, next to inter-marriage, food is the great test of caste.  Nevertheless it is amongst the Hindus of the Punjab that one of the earliest apostles of reaction against the West has found the largest and most enthusiastic body of followers.  Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, was a Brahman of Kathiawar; he was not born in the Punjab, and it was not in the Punjab but in Bombay, where, however, it struck no roots, that he founded the Arya Samaj.  Only in the later years of his life did the Punjab become the chief centre of his activities.  The doctrines he taught were embodied by him in his Satyarath Prakash, which has become the Bible of his disciples, and in his Veda Bashya Basmika, a commentary on the Vedas.  He had at an early age lost faith in the Hindu Pantheon, and to this extent he was a genuine religious reformer, for he waged relentless war against the worship of idols, and whether his claims to Vedantic learning be or be not conceded, his creed was “Back to the Vedas.”  His ethical code, on the other hand, was vague, and he pandered strangely in some directions to the weaknesses of the flesh, and in others to popular prejudices.  Nothing in the Vedas, for instance, prohibits either the killing of cattle or the eating of bovine flesh.  But, in deference to one of the most universal of Hindu superstitions, Dayanand did not hesitate to include cow-killing amongst the deadliest sins.  Here we have in fact the keynote of his doctrines.  The sanctity of the cow is the touchstone of Hindu hostility to both Christian and Mahomedan, and the whole drift of Dayanand’s teachings is far less to reform Hinduism than to rouse it into active resistance to the alien influences which threatened, in his opinion, to denationalize it.  Hence the outrageously aggressive tone of his writings wherever he alludes either to Christianity or to Mahomedanism.  It is the advent of “meat-eating and wine-drinking foreigners, the slaughterers of kine and other animals,” that has brought “trouble and suffering” upon “the Aryas”—­he discards the word Hindu on account of its Persian origin—­whilst before they came into the country India enjoyed “golden days,” and her people were “free from disease and prosperous and contented.”  In fact, “Arya for the Aryans” was the cry that frequently predominated in Dayanand’s teachings over that of “Back to the Vedas,” and Lajpat Rai, one of his most zealous disciples, has stated emphatically that “the scheme of Swami Dayanand has its foundation on the firm rock of Swadeshi and Swajati.”