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