Christian thought and modern ideas will spring up and spontaneously flourish. The future progress of the Indian Church may be said to depend upon the growth of that national consciousness within it. The sense of independence and the duty of self-support and union are, properly, being fostered in the native churches. But one of the dangers ahead undoubtedly is that, like one of the other religious movements of the past century, or like the Ethiopian Church in South Africa, the Indian Church may become infected with the political rather than the religious aspect of the idea.
The Brāhma Samāj.
Rammohan Roy.
II. The Brāhma Samāj.—Next to the Christian Church in order of birth of the issue of the new age, comes the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association. It was founded in Calcutta in 1828 by the famous reformer, Raja Rammohan Roy, first of modern Indians. The Brāhma Samāj is confessedly the outcome of contact with Christian ideas. By the best known of the Brāhma community, the late Keshub Chunder Sen, it was described as "the legitimate offspring of the wedlock of Christianity with the faith of the Hindu Aryans." "No other reformation" [in India], says the late Sir M. Monier Williams, "has
resulted in the same way from the influence of European education and Christian ideas." The founder himself, Raja Rammohan Roy, was indeed more a Christian than anything else, although he wore his brahman thread to the day of his death in order to retain the succession to his property for his son. In London and in Bristol, where he died in 1833, he associated himself with Dr. Carpenter and the more orthodox section of the Unitarians, explicitly avowing his belief in the miracles of Christ generally, and particularly in the resurrection. In Calcutta, indeed, the origin of the Brāhma Samāj was acknowledged at its commencement. After attending the Scotch and other Churches in Calcutta, and then the Unitarian Church, Rammohan Roy and his native friends set up a Church of their own, and one name for it among educated natives was simply the Hindu Unitarian Church. It is a secondary matter that, to begin with, the reformer believed that he had found his monotheism in the Hindu Scriptures, now known to all students as the special Scriptures of pantheism.
Raja Rammohan Roy, the brave man who made a voyage to Britain in defiance of caste, the champion of the widow who had often been
virtually obliged to lay herself on her dead husband's pyre, the strenuous advocate of English education for Indians, the supporter of the claim of Indians to a larger employment in the public service, has not yet received from New India the recognition and honour which he deserves. To every girl, at least in Bengal, the province of widow-burning, he ought to be a hero as the first great Indian knight who rode out to deliver the widows from the torturing fire of Suttee.
Service of the Brāhma Samāj to India.
As its theistic name implies, the Brāhma Samāj professedly represents a movement towards theism, i.e. a rise from the polytheism and idolatry of the masses and a rejection of the pantheism of Hindu philosophy. Of course, noteworthy though it be, the foundation of the Brāhma Samāj in 1828 was not the introduction of monotheism to India. In the Indian Christian Church and in Mahomedanism, the
doctrine of one, personal, God had been set forth to India, and in one of the ancient Hindu philosophical systems, the Yoga Philosophy, the same doctrine is implied. But in India, Christianity and Mahomedanism were associated with hostile camps; the Yoga Philosophy was known only to a few Sanscrit scholars. In Brāhmaism, the doctrine of one personal God became again natural naturalised in India. That has been its special service to India, to naturalise monotheism and many social and religious movements. For in India, things new and foreign lie under a peculiar suspicion. In the social sphere, the Brāhma Samāj repudiates caste and gives to women a position in society. As Indian theists also, when their first church was opened in 1830, they gave the Indian sanction to congregational worship and prayer, "before unknown to Hindus." For, the brahman interposing between God and the ignorant multitude, the Hindu multitude do not assemble themselves for united prayer, as Christians and Mahomedans do; and at the other end of the Hindu scale, the professed pantheist as such cannot pray. In proof of the latter statement, we recall the words of Swami Vivekananda, representative of Hinduism in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, in a lecture "The Real and the Apparent Man," published in 1896. "It is the greatest of all lies," he writes somewhat baldly, although one is often grateful for a bald, definite statement, "that we are mere men; we are the God of the Universe.... The worst lie that you ever told yourself is that you were born a sinner.... The