believed, the polytheism is the aboriginal Indian plant into which the pantheistic idea has been grafted as communities have become brahmanised, the pantheistic idea very readily presents itself to the mind of the educated Hindu.  In any discussion regarding human responsibility the idea crops up that all is God, “There is One only, and no second.”  We can scarcely realise how readily it comes to the middle-class Hindu’s lips that God is all, and that there can be no such thing as sin.  The pantheists are thus no separate sect from the theists, any more than the theists are from the polytheists.  The same man, if a member of the educated class, will be polytheist in his established domestic religion, theist in his personal standpoint and general profession, and probably a pantheist in a controversy regarding moral responsibility, or should he set himself to write about religion.

[Sidenote:  Illustration of polytheism, monotheism, and pantheism commingling.]

Take a statement of the mingling of polytheism, monotheism, and pantheism from the extreme south of India, a thousand miles away from Benares.  “Though those men all affirmed,” we read, “that there is only one God, they admitted that they each worshipped several.  They saw nothing inconsistent in this.  Just as the air is in everything, so God is in everything, therefore in the various symbols.  And as our king has diverse representative Viceroys and Governors to rule over his dominions in his name, so the Supreme has these subdeities, less in power and only existing by force of Himself, and He, being all pervasive, can be worshipped under their forms."[66]

[Sidenote:  Pure pantheism rare.]

At the top of all is the pure pantheist, a believer in the illusion of the senses, and generally though not always an ascetic.  For life is not worth living if it is merely an illusion, and the illusion must be dispelled, and the world of the senses renounced.  If “father and brother, etc., have no actual entity,” said the reformer Raja Rammohan Roy [1829] when combating pantheism, “they consequently deserve no real affection, and the sooner we escape from them and leave the world the better.”  So the pantheist is generally an ascetic cut off from the world to be consistent in his pantheism.  Yet again, we repeat that such pure pantheists are very rare, and that “in India forms of pantheism, theism, and polytheism are ever interwoven with each other."[67]

To one familiar with India, such a medley is neither inconceivable nor improbable; the debatable question only is, what sufficient account of the cause thereof can be given.  Why is it that Hindu doctrine has never set?  Why this incongruity between doctrine and domestic practice?  Why this double-mindedness in the same educated individual?  Much might be said in the endeavour to account for these characteristic features of India, the despair of the Christian missionary.  I confine myself to the bearing of the question upon the influence of Christian ideas, and particularly of Christian theism.