Vico and Michelet (Prof.  Flint’s Philosophy of History).

[Sidenote:  Polytheism receding before Monotheism.]

In some measure, then, we understand how Hindu polytheism, theism, and pantheism are related to each other; we realise in some measure the openness of the Indian mind, and we now ask ourselves how far the Christian doctrine of God has impressed itself upon that open mind.  Of the polytheistic masses it has already been pointed out that intelligent individuals will now readily acknowledge that there is truly one God only.  Further, that the polytheistic idolatry which is now associated with the masses once extended far higher up the scale, is evident to anyone reading the observations made early in the nineteenth century.  Early travellers in India, like the French traveller Tavernier of the seventeenth century, speak of the Indians without distinction as idolaters, contrasting them with the Mahomedans of India.  In the Calcutta Gazette of 1816, Raja Rammohan Roy, the learned opponent of Hindu idolatry, the Erasmus of the new era, is called the discoverer of theism in the sacred books of the Hindus.  Rammohan Roy himself disclaimed the title, but writing in 1817, he speaks of “the system of idolatry into which Hindus are now completely sunk."[71] Many learned brahmans, he says in the same pamphlet, are perfectly aware of the absurdity of idol worship, indicating that the knowledge belonged only to the scholars.  His own object, he said, was to declare the unity of God as the real thought of the Hindu Scriptures.  Across India, on the Bombay side, we find clear evidence of the state of opinion among the middle class in 1830, from the report of a public debate on the Christian and Hindu religions.  The antagonists were, on the one side, the Scottish missionary Dr. John Wilson and others, and on the other side two leading officials of the highest Government Appellate Court, men who would now rank as eminent representatives of the educated class.  One of these demanded proof that there was only one God.[72]

[Sidenote:  The beginning of the nineteenth century.]

[Sidenote:  Monotheistic belief a broadening wedge between pantheism and polytheism.]

Returning to Bengal, it would seem from Rammohan Roy’s evidence that in 1820 the standpoint of the learned at that time was exactly what we have called the standpoint of an intelligent individual among the masses to-day, namely, a plea that the multitude of gods were agents of the one Supreme God.  “Debased and despicable,” he writes, “as is the belief of the Hindus in three hundred and thirty millions of gods, they (the learned) pretend to reconcile this persuasion with the doctrine of the unity of God, alleging that the three hundred and thirty millions of gods are subordinate agents assuming various offices and preserving the harmony of the universe under one Godhead, as innumerable rays issue from one sun."[73] Turning to testimony