e
beginning of the nineteenth century, we may now say that Indian Hindu
society consisted of a vast polytheistic mass with a very thin, an often
invisible, film of pantheists on the top. The nineteenth century of
enlightenment and contact with Christianity has seen the wide acceptance
of the monotheistic conception by the new-educated India. The founding
of the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j or Theistic Association in 1828 by Rammohan
Roy has already been called the commencement of an indigenous theistic
church outside the transplanted theism of Indian Christianity and Indian
Mahomedanism. Strictly rendered, the divine name _Brahm[=a]_, adopted by
the Br[=a]hmas, expresses the pantheistic idea that God is the _One
without a second_, not the theistic idea of one personal God; but what
we are concerned with is, that it was in the monotheistic sense that
Rammohan Roy adopted the term. To him Brahm[=a] was a personal God, with
whom men spoke in prayer and praise. As a matter of fact the pantheistic
formula, "One only, no second," occurs in the creeds of all three new
monotheistic bodies, Br[=a]hmas, Pr[=a]rthan[=a] Sam[=a]jists, and
[=A]ryas, but in the same monotheistic sense. The original Sanscrit of
the formula (Ekam eva advityam), three words from the Chh[=a]ndogya
Upanishad, is regularly intoned (droned) in the public worship of
Br[=a]hmas. Like a wedge between the polytheism of the masses below and
the pantheism of the brahmanically educated above, there came in this
naturalised theism, a body of opinion ever widening as modern education
enlarges its domain. It is one of the _events_ of Indian history. Now,
pantheistic in argument and polytheistic in domestic practices as
educated Hindus still are, they never call themselves pantheists, and
would resent being called polytheists; they call themselves theists.
"Every intelligent man is now a monotheist," writes the late Dr. John
Murdoch of Madras, an experienced observer.[74] "Many" (of the educated
Hindus), says a Hindu writer, "--I may say most of them--are in reality
monotheists, but monotheists of a different type from those who belong
to the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j. They are, if we may so call them, passive
monotheists.... The influence of the Hindu environment is as much
perceptible in them as that of the Christian environment."[75] Professor
Max Mueller and Sir M. Monier Williams are of the same opinion. "The
educated classes look with contempt upon idolatry.... A complete
disinte