New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century.

New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century.
of a different kind, we find Macaulay speaking about the polytheistic idolatry he knew between 1834 and 1838.  “The great majority of the population,” he writes, “consists of idolaters.”  Macaulay’s belief was that idolatry would not survive many years of English education, and we shall now take note how in the century the sphere of idolatry and polytheism has been limited.  At the 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 disintegration of ancient faiths is in progress in the upper strata of society.  Most of the ablest thinkers become pure Theists or Unitarians."[76] That
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New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.