LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 Shelf ...,.&- 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
 JUN 
 
 
BRAHMOISM 
 
 OR, 
 
 HISTORY OF REFORMED HINDUISM 
 
 FROM ITS ORIGIN IN 1830, 
 
 UNDER RAJAH MOHUN ROY, 
 
 TO THE PRESENT TIME. 
 
 WITH A PARTICULAR ACCOUNT OF 
 
 BABU KESHUB CHUNDER SEN'S CONNECTION 
 WITH THE MOVEMENT. 
 
 BY 
 
 BAM CHANDRA BOSE, M.A., 
 
 OF LUCKNOW, INDIA. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 FUNK & WAGNALLS 
 
 10 and 12 Det Street. 
 
 London: 44 Fleet Street. 
 
 1884. 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 
 
> 
 
 
 X*< 
 
 ^ 
 
 G 
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1884, by 
 
 FUNK & WAGNALLS, 
 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 
 
PKEFACE 
 
 These papers embody the substance of lectures de- 
 livered in various places in India, both in Urdu and in 
 English, and their publication here and circulation here 
 and in India, is likely to dispel the clouds of misapprehen- 
 sion and morbid sentimentalism which stand in the way 
 of genuine Christian progress. Their rambling character, 
 and a good deal of the repetition by which they are 
 disfigured, will find, in the opinion of the indulgent 
 reader, a justification in the fact that they were written 
 at different times and under diverse circumstances. 
 Three of them— the second, the third, and the fifth — 
 have appeared as articles in the Indian Evangelical 
 Review, and the sixth as such in one of the periodicals 
 in this country. They are published in the shape of a 
 volume, in the hope that they may receive favorable con- 
 sideration, in the hands especially of those well-meaning 
 Christian men and women whose reverence for the Brah- 
 mo religion — if religion a series of shifting beliefs can be 
 called — is due to imperfect acquaintance with its dogmas 
 and principles ; and with a view to show cause why we, 
 Christian missionaries, ^cannot hold out the right hand 
 of fellowship to its champions without a glaring com- 
 promise of principle and very culpable betrayal of the 
 interests of the truth intrusted to us. 
 
 Ram Chandra Bose. 
 
 May 20, 1884. 
 
OO^TEISTTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introductory Remarks 7 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Adi Somaj 83 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 The Progressive Somaj 61 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The Progressive Somaj Continued 86 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The New Dispensation 110 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The New Dispensation Continued 140 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 Sadharan Brahmo Somaj 168 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Rajah Ram Mohun Roy as a Hymnologist 193 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 The Aspirations op Young India 207 
 
BRAHMOISM, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 
 
 Brahmoism cannot with any shadow of propriety be 
 called a new religion. Regarded, however, as a novel 
 form of faith, its champions need not blush to see it 
 placed in juxtaposition with the two moral creations of 
 the nineteenth century which may with some degree 
 of propriety be called new religions. These are, stated 
 in the chronological order in which they have de- 
 veloped, Mormonism and Comtism. 
 
 Mormonism was established in the year 1830, the 
 very year which witnessed the birth of the Brahmo 
 Sabha in Calcutta, by Joseph Smith, generally called 
 Joe Smith, a man devoid of education, but obviously 
 possessed of qualities fitted to make him a leader among 
 certain classes of people, evincing a character in which 
 we see an odd mixture of credulity and cunning. By 
 a series of visions, revelations, and angelophanies he 
 was led to discover and translate a strange book, pur- 
 porting to embody a connected and coherent history of 
 America since the confusion of tongues at Babel, and 
 to confer upon that book the pre-eminence in relation to 
 the varied books of the Bible which had been given to 
 the Koran by Mohammed long before his birth. To 
 
8 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 the fanciful narratives thus disinterred by him he added 
 a series of revelations as occasions arose ; and in this 
 way he elaborated a system of theology of the most 
 grotesque character, and a system of morality of a de- 
 grading type. 
 
 The theology of Mormonism is an odd mixture of 
 pantheism, materialism, and hero-worship of a mytho- 
 logical, idolatrous, not Carlylish type. It begins with 
 "an infinite quantity of self -existing matter," and 
 evolves from " the union" of " two" of its " element- 
 ary particles" a God who cannot possibly exist apart 
 from a human body, and who ' ' eats and drinks and 
 loves and hates." The process of evolution it indicates 
 is very slow indeed. The particles after an incalculably 
 long period of self -development become a man of fee- 
 ble powers, which, however, expand as he grows in 
 knowledge till, instead of a human being of limited 
 capacities, is seen a God of enlarged intelligence and 
 potencies. He goes on improving now, and will go on 
 improving throughout eternity, in knowledge and 
 power, and therefore he is not now and never will be 
 infinite in knowledge and power. It is maintained, as 
 a corollary from this position, that every man living is 
 a God in embryo, and may in process of time attain 
 knowledge and power enough to create and rule a 
 world. There has, moreover, been a succession of 
 Gods — God the Father being God of Adam, Adam 
 being God of Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ being God of 
 Joe Smith, and Joe Smith being God of us poor mor- 
 tals. Is there no eternal and abiding principle to which 
 the homage both of gods and men is due ? Yes : that 
 principle is Truth, which has appeared, does and will 
 appear, in endless varieties of forms. 
 
 Mormonism upholds a sort of trinitarianism amid the 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 9 
 
 hosts of its gods emanating, at various times, from an 
 interminable heap of intelligent and self -moving matter 
 by a slow process of evolution. It brings forward 
 what may be called a double trinity, one ancient and 
 one modern. The modern trinity consists of two em- 
 bodied Gods, the Father and the Son, and one intellect- 
 ual principle of union and action, the Holy Spirit, who 
 exhibits divine power and wisdom when on account of 
 corporeal limitations the Father and Son cannot act. 
 But the modern trinity is the facsimile of another, the 
 ancient trinity consisting of Jehovah, Elohim, and 
 Michael, who was Adam. Hence Adam's superiority 
 to Christ ! 
 
 Mormonism upholds the doctrines of universal salva- 
 tion, but the glimpses it presents of heavenly felicity 
 are in grossness and sensuality scarcely surpassed by 
 the views of Paradise embodied in Mohammedanism. 
 In heaven they marry and are given in marriage ; and 
 the most favored of the Latter-day Saints expect to 
 have in heaven harems as full at least as those they are 
 compelled to leave behind for a time when they go out 
 of this world. And besides, they settle by nice calcula- 
 tions the number of acres they are to have, each of 
 them, around his palatial residence in heaven, to im- 
 prove by tillage and adorn by art. One good feature 
 of their community, unremitting toil proceeding from 
 or sustained by admirable habits of industry, is perhaps 
 the only redeeming feature of their grossly sensual de- 
 scriptions of heavenly bliss. 
 
 Such is one of the two great creations of the nine- 
 teenth century in the department of religion, briefly 
 and very imperfectly sketched ! Joe Smith and his 
 associates had the effrontery to believe that this heap 
 of oddity, eccentricity, extravagance, and contradiction 
 
10 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 would in time supplant the glorious faith of the Chris- 
 tian Church ! It is impossible to say which of the two 
 things — the grotesque religion he initiated or the gro- 
 tesque hope he entertained — brings out his universally 
 acknowledged mental aberration with the greater 
 prominence. 
 
 But now we come to the second of the two great 
 religious innovations, inventions rather, of the cen- 
 tury. Auguste Comte was born a few years earlier 
 than the date which witnessed the birth of the founder 
 of Mormonism ; and there is intellectually that differ- 
 ence between the two which subsists between a giant 
 and a pigmy. A man of wonderful versatility and 
 wonderful attainments, he seemed fitted to communi- 
 cate a new impetus to the spirit of scientific inquiry 
 and philosophic thought. And if he only had the 
 patience of thought and calmness of intellect, without 
 which great discoveries in the region of science and 
 philosophy cannot be made, he would have left behind 
 him something more permanent, though perhaps less 
 brilliant, than the crude, hasty, and ill-digested specu- 
 lations with which his name is associated. About 
 fifteen years after Joe Smith had laid the foundation 
 of his execrable creed, Comte fell over head and ears in 
 love with the wife of a galley-slave, and discovered 
 that he had a heart which needed something more than 
 cold, philosophic abstraction. A religion appeared to 
 the enamored philosopher a necessity, and a religion he 
 had no difficulty whatever in evolving out of his fertile 
 brain. The first problem was how and where to find a 
 God, for even Comte could not but conclude that a 
 religion without a God would be something like an 
 institution without its vitalizing principle. He solved 
 this vexed question by calling attention to what he was 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 11 
 
 pleased to call " the Collective Humanity," an abstrac- 
 tion indeed when we take a retrospective view of the 
 history of the world, but appearing in a concrete form 
 in the generations to come, in posterity. This new 
 Supreme Spirit should be called Posthumous Humanity, 
 but as it embraces the nonentities of the past as well 
 as the realities of the present and the embryos point- 
 ing to the future, it may be designated by the name 
 of Collective Humanity. But why, it may be asked, 
 call it Collective Humanity, when from the sum-total 
 human beings are excluded whose business is merely 
 " to digest food and manure the earth " ? But there is, 
 after all, no impropriety, as useful animals, such as 
 " horses, dogs, oxen, etc.," are brought in to make up 
 the complement of the number required ! 
 
 But is not a visible symbol of the invisible deity 
 needed to bolster up pious feeling and devotional 
 enthusiasm ? Comte therefore had to look for an 
 appropriate symbol, and he had not happily far to go. 
 What could be better fitted to draw the soul naturally 
 apathetic out into a stream of passionate devotion than 
 the beautiful Madonnas in the great cathedrals of his 
 own and neighboring countries ? A lovely woman of 
 about thirty with a lovely infant son in her arms — 
 what can be a better symbol of the genius of humanity 
 than such a person ? But such a symbol is not always 
 within reach for purposes of private worship, and 
 therefore a man should daily prostrate himself in mute 
 adoration before his mother as representing the past, 
 his wife as representing the present, and his daughter 
 as representing the future. The mother, the wife, and 
 the daughter form the trinity of Comtism, and the 
 three feelings stimulated by their worship are venera- 
 tion, attachment, and kindness. This caricature of 
 
12 BKAHMOISM. 
 
 worship accompanied with caricatures of the sacra- 
 ments and feasts of the Eomish Church, all under the 
 absolute control of a hierarchy of savcmts, presided 
 over by a supreme pontiff of philosophy, is the religion 
 of Auguste Comte. That it was entertained for a 
 moment by such a man as Comte ; that it did not 
 perish with him, but has, on the contrary, found advo- 
 cates among men of education in civilized countries — 
 this is a proof of the oft-repeated truth that when 
 men presumptuously cast aside the light that is in 
 them they are judicially given over to fatuity and 
 madness. 
 
 What a relief to turn from these grotesque and ex- 
 travagant types of faith to the religion of the Brahmo 
 Somaj, which upholds a creed insufficient indeed, and 
 to some extent erroneous, but by no means associated 
 with eccentricities of such glaring character ! Its 
 superiority is to be traced to a variety of reasons, some 
 of which it is desirable to point out. And, first of all, 
 it is desirable to mention the good sense with which 
 the champions of Brahmoism have recognized some of 
 those truths which may justly be called intuitive. 
 Mormons and Comtists are drawn into the region of 
 oddities and eccentricities, intellectual aberrations and 
 religious tomfooleries, because they declare war against 
 their moral nature, and presumptuously cast aside its 
 primary beliefs. They extinguish the flickering lamp 
 of truth in their hearts, and grope in a darkness of 
 their own creation. Hence the facility with which 
 they literally make fools of themselves or become 
 laughing-stocks to all sensible men ! The Brahmos, 
 with commendable good sense, avoid the rock on which 
 not only their faith, but even that which makes them 
 rational beings is wrecked. They accept the funda- 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 13 
 
 mental truths of religion on the testimony of their 
 moral consciousness, as they believe in the objectivity 
 of the material world on the testimony of the senses, 
 superadded perhaps to this testimony. 
 
 Like the thoughtful Kant, they cannot play either 
 with " the starry heavens" or with their own " sense 
 of responsibility." They instinctively believe in the 
 existence of a God, not an inscrutable force, an imper- 
 sonal first cause, or a being of Hmited power though 
 boundless good- will, but a personal Deity of unerring 
 wisdom and hmitless power, holy and full of love, just 
 and merciful. They recognize our duty, not merely to 
 express faith in the existence of such a Being and then 
 quietly shelve Him, but to love and serve Him, and 
 allow Him to regulate our life and conversation. They 
 believe in a distinction between right and wrong, essen- 
 tial, eternal, and immutable, not merely one created by 
 society for its convenience and therefore changeable as 
 its emergencies. They believe, in short, in an un- 
 changeable and imperative law of righteousness, ema- 
 nating from God Himself, and bearing therefore the 
 impress as well of His authority as of His glorious 
 attributes. They believe in a future state of rewards 
 and punishments, wherein the moral anomalies noticed 
 in this life will be rectified, and the balance of justice 
 restored. They believe in our free agency, and in the 
 fact that our happiness and misery here and hereafter 
 hang upon our relation to God and our attitude toward 
 His perfect law. In a word, they believe in all the 
 doctrines and principles of which simple naturalism or 
 the religion of nature consists ; and therefore they 
 have truth on their side as far as they go, though cer- 
 tainly not unmixed with error. Hence the immense 
 superiority of their faith over the extravagant creeds 
 
14 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 which rear their superstructures on the ruins, so to 
 speak, of the instinctive beliefs of humanity. 
 
 Their faith, in the second place, indicates a progress 
 from darkness to light, not vice versa. The Mormons 
 and Comtists shut their eyes to the Sun of Eighteous- 
 ness and commence a retrograde move from a good 
 toward a bad faith. No wonder they get entangled in 
 ludicrous error and add madness to folly ! The Brah- 
 mos, on the contrary, move from a degenerate toward 
 a better faith. Their system may justly be character- 
 ized as a reform. It may be regarded as an attempt to 
 revive the ancient faith of the country, of which its 
 modern manifestation may in one sense be represented 
 as a miserable caricature ; or it may be regarded as an 
 attempt to supplant the national faith by a system of 
 eclecticism transferred wholesale from lands more 
 enlightened than our own, or modified and accommo- 
 dated to the moral exigencies of the country. But in 
 either of these aspects it is a move in the right direc- 
 tion, inasmuch as it is evident that that national faith 
 is so corrupt in its nature and disastrous in its conse- 
 quences that almost any departure from it, excepting, 
 of course, such as land us in the absurdities embodied 
 in Mormonism and Comtism, indicates genuine prog- 
 ress. 
 
 Again, it should be remembered that Brahmoism has 
 had from the very beginning a larger amount of moral 
 earnestness than either of the two systems, which 
 may in one sense be represented as its rivals. Mor- 
 monism was originated by a man whose mind, weak 
 and ill-balanced, was a prey to visions and revelations, 
 and who, like Mohammed, certainly did add a great 
 deal of low cunning to the exuberance of fanaticism 
 characteristic of his impulsive nature. For a time it 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 15 
 
 showed earnestness enough to make progress in spite of 
 a series of persecutions — cruel, brutal, and most as- 
 suredly unworthy of a country which is emphatically 
 the home of political freedom and religious toleration — 
 but the earnestness it displayed had more of the deter- 
 mined spirit of worldliness in it than of godliness and 
 piety. Since the martyrdom of its founder, Mormon- 
 ism has degenerated into a vice or nuisance ; and what- 
 ever earnestness it now shows is hellish and conse- 
 quently of an execrable type. Comtism has at times 
 been doubtless associated with what is called the 
 enthusiasm of humanity, but as a system of religion it 
 has never appealed to any portion of our nature higher 
 than the aesthetic. Brahmoism has from the beginning 
 been a religion of a purer stamp, and it has manifested 
 commendable earnestness in adopting and assimilating 
 purer types of worship, and introducing moral reforms 
 of, on the whole, a desirable character. It is un- 
 doubtedly true that it has had official patronage enough 
 to cripple its vitality, and that if it had been persecuted 
 as Mormonism was during the first few years of its 
 existence, it would perhaps have been nipped in the 
 bud. But some degree of earnestness of a right type it 
 has shown, as a matter of fact, and its obvious superi- 
 ority over the other two systems is partially to be 
 traced to it. 
 
 And, lastly, the superiority of Brahmoism must be 
 ascribed partly to the superiority in a religious point 
 of view of the community directly benefited by it over 
 those influenced by the two rival creeds. Though 
 frivolous on the whole, our educated countrymen are 
 not so ludicrously senseless as the peoples swayed by 
 the naked absurdities of Joe Smith or Auguste Comte. 
 A grotesque creed might very easily be spread among 
 
1G BBAHMOISM. 
 
 the uneducated masses of our countrymen. But, 
 thanks to English education, such a creed, if intro- 
 duced among those who form the upper ten thousand, 
 would have no chance whatever of considerable or per- 
 manent success. A god incapable of living except in a 
 body with possibilities of infinite progress before him, 
 or an abstract idea worshipped in the shape of a beau- 
 tiful woman with a lovely child in her arms, would be 
 laughed off the stage by them. A few among them 
 are Comtists, but they are followers of Comte's English 
 disciples, who, while they adopted his philosophy and 
 his classification of the sciences, laugh at his religion as 
 an indication of his dotage. 
 
 The champions of Brahmoism need not, we repeat, 
 blush to see their system alongside of the religions of 
 the age, to which the term ' ' novel ' ' may with a deal 
 of propriety be applied, along, of course, with the ex- 
 pression generally associated with it, ' i queer. ' ' Brah- 
 moism is one of the signs of the times, and in some 
 respects a good one. Its bright side may be pointed 
 out with devout thankfulness. 
 
 1. It has been from the very beginning a standing 
 protest against polytheism and idolatry. If there was 
 anything to which its celebrated founder, Kajah Earn 
 Mohun Roy, seemed irreconcilably opposed, it was idol- 
 atry. He disliked and even abhorred it from his youth 
 up, and he allowed no opportunity of publicly express- 
 ing his hatred to it to slip out of his hands. He wrote 
 against it, he spoke against it, he deplored its ascen- 
 dency in the country in public and in private, and he 
 ultimately embodied an implacable hostility to it in an 
 organization which was fitted not to give it quarter. 
 The fact that he once or twice represented it as neces- 
 sary to the ignorant does not detract from his hostility 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 17 
 
 to it. Brahmoisin has with some degree of fidelity 
 represented his irreconcilable antagonism to the popular 
 idolatry of the country. It has perhaps relaxed its 
 zeal against it a little in the attempts it has at all times 
 made to coquette with it, but on the whole its trumpet 
 has not given an uncertain sound in this matter. As a' 
 standing protest against popular forms of idolatry, we 
 may bid it God-speed. 
 
 2. It has, since the organization of the progressive 
 Somaj, been a standing protest against the caste system. 
 Eajah Ram Mohun Eoy strove to maintain his caste, 
 at least ostensibly, even hi England ; and no form of 
 service fitted to indicate his renunciation of its privi- 
 leges was held when his remains were buried at Bristol. 
 His successor, Babu Debendro JNath Tagore, was 
 equally determined to leave the monster intact ; but 
 Babu Keshub Chunder Sen made it not merely a moot- 
 point, but a test question, and has ever since his separa- 
 tion from the Adi Somaj been firm on this point, how- 
 ever veering on others. And it must be admitted that 
 in this matter he has sacrificed expediency to principle, 
 and conscientiously thrown off advantages which he 
 might have secured by carrying out a temporizing 
 policy. The avowed antagonism of his Somaj to the 
 formidable system of caste is a good sign. 
 
 3. Bralimoism, again, has • to the best of its ability 
 thrown itself into the work of social and political 
 reform. It has introduced a needed innovation into 
 the marriage laws of the country, has bestirred itself in 
 the cause of female education, has organized associa- 
 tions to check the spread of drunkenness in the land, 
 and has always been most forward to back efforts 
 fitted to help the needy and raise the poor. It has 
 been not merely a theoretical religion, but a practical 
 
18 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 system, and its humanitarianism is worthy of praise 
 and encouragement. 
 
 4. Again, Brahmoism is doing its best to resist the 
 tide of atheism which is flowing out specially of gov- 
 ernment schools and colleges. What may be called the 
 religion of negations is unhappily becoming fashionable 
 among the very best educated alumni of these institu- 
 tions. This religion appears under a garb of modest 
 doubt or unbelief, and therefore shorn of its repellent 
 features ; but in reality it does its best to hold up to 
 ridicule the primary, instinctive beliefs on which the 
 superstructure of every positive religion is based. It 
 does not boldly deny in unequivocal terms the existence 
 of God, the propriety of worship, moral distinctions, 
 the future reward of virtue and the future punishment 
 of vice. But the denial is implied in its tone, its utter- 
 ances, its affected modesty, and its sarcastic smile. 
 This insidious foe is abroad, and no Christian fights it 
 more systematically, more energetically, than the 
 Brahmo. 
 
 5. Brahmoism, moreover, has been popularizing ideas 
 which are foreign to the literature of the country — 
 which are characteristically as well as admittedly 
 Christian — viz. , the fatherhood of God and the 
 brotherhood of man. In an article entitled " The 
 Kelation of the Brahmo Somaj to Hinduism and Chris- 
 tianity," in the Theistic Annual for 1873, there are 
 statements which point out with emphasis the great 
 source from which these lofty ideas have been bor- 
 rowed. On page 28 of the brochure occur the follow- 
 ing sentences : " The idea of the brotherhood and 
 equality of all mankind before God, I am sorry to say, 
 is not to be found, because it is never recognized in any 
 of our ancient writings. The idea is decidedly foreign, 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 19 
 
 Western, and I think I might say Christian." And on 
 page 31 of the same paper we have this admission : '" I 
 do not deny there are innumerable passages in Hindu 
 books calling the Divine Being by all manner of 
 names, but such names and the sentiments they embody 
 are very different from the deep personality of spiritual 
 relation typically expressed when Jesus exclaimed f 
 " Our Father in heaven !" These ideas may and do 
 lie buried beneath heaps of error in the religions of the 
 world, but Christianity has not merely exhumed and 
 vitilized them, but given them a practical significance 
 they never possessed before its appearance. And 
 Brahmoism, by popularizing them in a country where 
 they are scarcely, if at all, recognized and never 
 reduced to practice, is doing good. 
 
 6. And, lastly, the universal veneration in which the 
 name of our Lord is held in almost all circles of our 
 educated countrymen is to be ascribed, partly at least, 
 to the teaching and influence of the Somaj. Time was, 
 even within the recollection of middle-aged men in 
 India, when the excellency of the character of our Lord 
 was so little perceived that attempts to question its 
 spotless purity were made by a few even of those who 
 stood at the head of the educated community at Cal- 
 cutta. A pamphlet was written entitled, " Chris- 
 tianity — -"What is it ?" by a man who used to distin- 
 guish himself both as an essayist and a speaker in the 
 debating clubs of the metropolis, and in it a virulent 
 attack on the moral character of our Lord was made. 
 But a great change has come over the educated commu- 
 nity since its appearance in the matter. One scarcely 
 now comes across among its members a person ignorant 
 and stupid enough to throw out hints and innuendoes 
 to the disparagement of the character of Christ, while 
 
20 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 the monster ready to come out with an open attack 
 thereon in print has entirely disappeared from the 
 stage of religions controversy in India. This change 
 has been brought about by the spread of correct infor- 
 mation regarding the life of our Lord, facilitated 
 mainly by the missionaries. But it must be admitted 
 that in this matter they have been helped by the Somaj, 
 which may in one sense be considered a fruit of their 
 labor of love. 
 
 Having pointed out some of the excellences of 
 Brahmoism, we consider it our duty to refer to a 
 few of its defects before we proceed to a careful ex- 
 amination of its historical development and doctrinal 
 principles. Let us conclude this paper with a brief 
 notice of a few of the mistakes into which our Brahmo 
 friends have fallen. 
 
 1. They have fallen into the mistake of renouncing a 
 few of those beliefs which may justly be characterized 
 as intuitive. They have retained a few of the instinc- 
 tive beliefs of humanity, the ultimate principles of 
 faith, and in this they have acted wisely ; but the} r 
 have cast overboard a few, and this is one of the most 
 prominent mistakes they have made. They have 
 retained the instinctive beliefs of man unf alien, but 
 they have thrown aside the instinctive beliefs, or what 
 may properly be called the instinctive beliefs of man 
 fallen. 
 
 The religion of humanity may justly be represented 
 as consisting of two formations — the primitive and sec- 
 ondary. The primitive formation is simple naturalism 
 or the religion of nature, which finds its complete, or 
 all but complete, embodiment in four of the five well- 
 known symbols of Lord Herbert of Cherbury : (1) There 
 is a God. (2) He ought to be worshipped. (3) Yirtue 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 21 
 
 and piety are the chief elements of worship. (4) There 
 is a future life of rewards and punishments. These 
 principles are the basis of all faith, and may be found, 
 buried it may be, under heaps of error in every system 
 of religion properly so called. The religion they con- 
 stitute of themselves would have been adequate to the 
 exigencies of human nature if man had not sinned, but 
 the relations in which he stands to the Being whose 
 righteous law he has presumptuously transgressed are 
 disturbed, and his own nature is vitiated. Something 
 therefore must be added to the original religion of 
 humanity to make it suited to his altered circum- 
 stances. Lord Herbert of Cherbury is aware of this, 
 and adds to the principles of naturalism another 
 symbol, the necessity of repentance. Repentance, he 
 affirms, is a duty. 
 
 But when this father of modern infidelity in England 
 dwells upon the sufficiency of his five symbols, he is at 
 war with the instincts of fallen man, who naturally 
 builds up another formation or stratum of beliefs upon 
 his foundation. These beliefs it is desirable to enu- 
 merate. 
 
 a. Belief in the necessity of a divine intervention or 
 direct miraculous interference to rectify the disorder of 
 the moral world is universal and instinctive. Every 
 sin a man commits is, as Dr. Bushnell justly says, a 
 miracle — an action performed in contravention of the 
 laws of nature — and brings in a miracle of disorder. 
 The result of man's sin is the complete unhingement of 
 the machinery of nature : man sits in the world amid 
 universal wreck as a child who has let fall a beautiful 
 tea-service from, a table, and shrieks and sits aghast 
 amid scattered fragments of broken cups and broken 
 saucers. And man is no more able to reorganize the 
 
22 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 world than the child is to replace the beautiful cups 
 and saucers he has broken into pieces. And so he 
 instinctively cries for divine intervention as the child 
 cries for help. And he not only believes in the neces- 
 sity of such intervention, but maintains that God has 
 intervened — come between a ruined humanity and a 
 ruined world to rectify the disorders of both. 
 
 b. Belief in the necessity of a divine revelation — 
 objective, not merely subjective — is also universal and 
 instinctive. One result of sin is darkness in the soul, 
 the extinction of that knowledge of God and our duty, 
 which but for sin would have been our glorious heri- 
 tage. Experience brings man to a recognition of two 
 indisputable facts — that he is destitute of proper knowl- 
 edge of God and his duty, and .that he cannot by his 
 own effort struggle out of his spiritual ignorance. And 
 he instinctively cries for a revelation, and maintains, 
 moreover, that one has been granted. There is not 
 merely a universal recognition of the need of a revela- 
 tion, but a universal belief that God has been pleased 
 to vouchsafe a revelation for the enlightenment and 
 guidance of fallen man. 
 
 c. The necessity of mediation, moreover, is univer- 
 sally and instinctively recognized by man. Men who 
 have no adequate ideas or approximately adequate ideas 
 of the intense holiness of God or of their own unutter- 
 able corruption may laugh at the idea of approaching 
 the Deity through a Mediator ; but humanity instinc- 
 tively believes that sin has rendered direct communica- 
 tion between the righteous Kuler of the universe and 
 His rebellious subjects impossible. The religions of the 
 world prove this to a demonstration. Nay, so strong 
 is the tendency to have recourse to mediation that some 
 of those who have been most prominent in their oppo- 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 23 
 
 sition to it have themselves been converted into media- 
 tors. Mohammed vehemently opposed the doctrine, 
 and distinctly gave his people to understand that he 
 was not a mediator ; but his ashes had not become cold 
 ere he was raised to the dignity of a mediator by his 
 followers. And if Brahmoism live and become the re- 
 ligion, not of small groups of solitary thinkers but of 
 the masses, Mr. Sen or some other leader will erelong 
 be converted into a mediator in spite of all the loud talk 
 against mediation associated with it ! 
 
 d. "What has been said of the necessity of mediation 
 may with equal propriety be said of the necessity of an 
 atonement for sin. The universality of the doctrine of 
 sacrifice proclaims this necessity in tones of thunder. 
 Man's tendency to a recognition of the necessity of an 
 atonement for sin — not a spiritual and intangible, but a 
 palpable, bloody atonement for sin — is so strong that all 
 attempts to overcome it have been foiled. The his- 
 tory of Buddhism is full of instruction in this as in 
 other respects. Buddha declared a war of extermina- 
 tion against one and all the moral instincts of human- 
 ity, going the length of even ignoring, if not denying, 
 the existence of God. But he has been conquered by 
 these instincts, has himself been worshipped as a god, 
 recognized as an incarnation, honored as a prophet or 
 the source of a special revelation, and regarded univer- 
 sally by his followers as a being who came down from 
 heaven to rectify the disorders brought in by sin. 
 One of the doctrines he opposed most vehemently is 
 the doctrine of sacrifice. How utterly futile his oppo- 
 sition has been is proved by the fact that sacrifices are 
 universally offered in countries wherein his sway has 
 been acknowledged and his religion has been in the 
 ascendant. 
 
24 BRAHilOISlT. 
 
 e . And lastly, belief in an incamaticn is universa 
 and instinctive. The belief of humanity which ap- 
 pears at first sight the strangest is that God has ap- 
 peared in a visible and tangible form on the stage of 
 human history. This belief is a unique phenomenon, 
 and has to be explained. It cannot be traced to human 
 philosophy, which has always enlarged upon the impos- 
 sibility of the great God taking any interest in human 
 affairs, and which has laughed at the idea of His taking 
 so much interest therein as to be induced to forsake His 
 heavenly glory and come into the world in a human 
 form. Man is naturally prone to have such an over- 
 whelming sense of God's greatness as to look upon such 
 condescension on His part as impossible. This univer- 
 sal conviction, therefore, cannot be traced to him. 
 Left to himself, he could not possibly have elaborated 
 the idea of an incarnation. His universal belief in it 
 must therefore be traced to some other source. Admit 
 that prophetic announcements regarding an incarnation 
 have existed in some form or other from the beginning 
 of clays, and that in the fulness of time God did appear 
 on the stage of history under the limitations of a 
 human form, and the strange phenomenon is rationally 
 explained. 
 
 These instinctive beliefs lie embedded in one and all 
 the religions of the world, and they are associated 
 with the deepest longings of the human heart. Brah- 
 moism in casting: them overboard has committed the 
 same sort of mistake to which the vagaries and crotch- 
 ets of Mormonism and Comtism are to be traced. 
 While it deserves praise for the good sense with which 
 it has retained the intuitions embodied in what we 
 have called the primitive formation of the religion of 
 humanity, it has laid itself open to censure by throw- 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 25 
 
 ing aside those of which its secondary formation is 
 composed. 
 
 2. The second mistake of our Brahmo friends is the 
 readiness with which they have held up to public view 
 as correct representations of Christian doctrine, the 
 caricatures thereof presented in the writings of noted 
 infidels. As candid men they should have borrowed 
 their notions of our holy religion from the Bible and 
 standard works on Christian theology ; but instead of 
 pursuing this sensible course they have allowed them- 
 selves to be victimized by misstatements and false rep- 
 resentations emanating from the enemy's camp. They 
 have allowed dashing, reckless writers of the Theodore 
 Parker stamp to indoctrinate them in this matter, and 
 it is no wonder that they have received poison instead 
 of wholesome food. 
 
 Let us illustrate this by an example. The Theistic 
 Quarterly fieview for May, 1880, contains an article 
 from the pen of Mr. A. D. Tyssen entitled, " The 
 Schools of Religious Thought in England." It has 
 scarcely fallen to our lot to see so many misrepresenta- 
 tions grouped together in a paper of so small a size. 
 Speaking of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the 
 writer says : " The Son is the name for Jesus ; and 
 the Holy Ghost is a name for the divine influence shed 
 by God upon man, iv7iich was personified and deified by 
 the Christians of the third century or thereabouts." 
 The italics are ours. If this statement were publicly 
 made in England, the ignorance and temerity of the 
 writer would be at once recognized, and little mischief 
 done, if any at all. But here there is danger of a state- 
 ment so obviously false being accepted as true. 
 Under the caption " The Mcene Creed," Mr. Tyssen 
 has these sentences : " The early Christians began call- 
 
26 BRAHMOIStf. 
 
 ing Jesus the Son of God without attributing any very 
 definite meaning to the expression. Then certain 
 theories were invented to justify it, one of which was 
 the miraculous conception of Jesus." Here is a priori 
 history with a vengeance. Speaking of the High 
 Church party, the writer says : " There are two theo- 
 ries in the New Testament of the communication of a 
 divine grace to the apostles. One of these is that on 
 one occasion (John 20 : 20) Jesus aspired on them and 
 said, ' Eeceive ye the Holy Spirit. ' The other theory 
 is that some days after Jesus ascended, as is alleged, 
 into heaven, the Holy Ghost descended on the apos- 
 tles, and apparently the other followers of Jesus also, 
 one hundred and twenty in number (Acts 1 : 15), in the 
 shape of fiery tongues, and conferred on them the 
 power of speaking foreign languages." Theories in- 
 deed ! Facts are without the slightest evidence coolly 
 represented as theories. Speaking of ' ' the influences 
 which are acting upon religious thought in the present 
 day, ' ' he says : ' ' These are nothing less than a mass 
 of evidence, growing stronger and stronger every day, 
 tending to show that the whole basis of the Christian 
 religion is false, and its structure unstable at every 
 point. ' ' 
 
 Mr. Tyssen presents this " mass of evidence." We 
 cannot of course be expected to analyze this volumi- 
 nous ( !) mass in the fag-end of our paper, but we shall 
 present two or three examples. Mr. Tyssen first al- 
 ludes to the tendency of modern astronomy to overturn 
 our faith, and says : " Now the whole Christian theory 
 of the relation of Jesus to God is based on the assump- 
 tion that the human inhabitants of this planet are the 
 sole objects of God's care and attention. But surely 
 the other worlds must exist for some good purpose : 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 27 
 
 are they not peopled with intelligent moral beings ? Do 
 they not require a revelation and a redemption just as 
 much as ourselves ? Is the second person of the God- 
 head going round to these millions of globes and in 
 each sacrificing himself up to the first person ; or are 
 the inhabitants of this globe the only set to be re- 
 deemed, and all others to be annihilated or doomed to 
 eternal torture ?" The writer being obviously an in- 
 telligent man, it is impossible to refrain from bringing 
 a charge of disingenuousness and malicious libel against 
 him. How coolly he assumes two things in spite of 
 direct statements to the contrary — the confinement of 
 the benefits of Christ's death to this world, and the 
 similarity between its moral condition and that of the 
 innumerable worlds scattered over the universe ! The 
 bold writer does not even spare the moral teaching of 
 our Lord as he speaks of " a conviction that the moral 
 precepts of the Bible are in many cases deficient and in 
 some clearly wrong. Thus, " take no thought for the 
 morrow" is wrong ; " resist not evil " is wrong ; " give 
 to him that asketh thee is wrong. " Nothing can be 
 done for persons who ivill not understand. Speaking 
 of " the supernatural events in the Bible," the writer 
 says : i( JVb one now can believe the stories of the 
 flood, the sun standing still, and Jonah living in the 
 whale's belly." No one, we suppose, barring the mill- 
 ions of intelligent men who call themselves Christians 
 of the orthodox type J 
 
 The naked fallacy of these and other statements of 
 the sort with which this short paper is fraught makes 
 them innocuous in Christian lands, where people know 
 something about their religion. But here, where 
 people do not take the trouble of studying Christianity, 
 they a,re regarded as Gospel truth, and its claims are 
 
28 BEAHMOISM. 
 
 consequently laughed at. As a rule our Brahmo 
 friends, as we shall have occasion to show, look at our 
 holy religion through the distorting medium of such 
 libellous statements, and in this they commit a mistake 
 which tends to rob them of the character of fair reason- 
 ers to which they lay claim. 
 
 3. We shall here point out only one more of the 
 grievous mistakes into which our Brahmo friends have 
 fallen. They have assumed the attitude and tone of 
 teachers a little too soon. The claims they advance 
 are at first sight preposterous, and justify the array of 
 sarcasms of which they so loudly complain. They claim 
 an extraordinary or rather miraculous insight into the 
 religions of the world. They profess to understand 
 Hinduism better than the Hindus, Mohammedanism 
 better than Mohammedans, and Christianity better 
 than Christians. There are learned men in the country 
 who have grown gray in the atmosphere of Hindu lit- 
 erature, who have the holy scriptures of the country 
 and their precious contents at their ringers' end, but 
 they are assured by a number of young men, very good 
 indeed, but by no means distinguished by breadth of 
 scholarship or acuteness of thought, that their labors 
 have been in vain and that tliey have egregiously failed 
 to understand the very rudiments of their religion ! 
 There are learned Mohammedans who have thoroughly 
 mastered the Koran and the entire mass of literature 
 connected with and bearing upon it ; but they must 
 with cheerful submission sit at the feet of men to 
 whom the language of their sacred book is even a 
 greater mystery than its mystical declarations, and 
 learn the very A B C of their religion. And as to 
 learned archbishops and bishops, clergymen and mis- 
 sionaries, their ignorance of the teaching of Christ, in 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 29 
 
 spite of the fact that they have made it tiie subject of 
 their life-long study, is deplorable indeed. If any body 
 of men need to repair to the Brahmo church for in- 
 struction with the greatest eagerness, they are the 
 men ; and yet such is human obduracy that they of all 
 men are the most prone to keep aloof from what is so 
 beautifully adapted to raise them from the depths of 
 degrading ' ' Christolatry' ' to the glorious height of 
 pure theism ! Such attitude on the part of the de- 
 servedly esteemed champions of Brahmoism is ridicu- 
 lous, and that because there is in reality nothing to jus- 
 tify it. If they had really discovered some new truths, 
 dug out some buried jewels of thought from the accumu- 
 lated sacred literature of the world, and exposed them 
 before the admiring gaze of its vast populations, their 
 pompous assumption of the dignity and functions of 
 heaven-appointed teachers of mankind might have had 
 a shadow of sense about it. But as they simply appear 
 in borrowed feathers, the attitude they assume as such 
 is ludicrously out of place. If they had taken up the 
 modest position of learners, and thoughtfully and 
 prayerfully trodden the path of inquiry, they might 
 have, instead of being entangled in mazes of vagaries, 
 had the sunshine of genuine truth in their souls ! 
 
 Brahmoism, it must be confessed, has exerted but a 
 very limited influence over the educated natives of 
 India, and the most advanced among them are prone to 
 look upon it as a superstition, perhaps a trifle better 
 than Christianity. And yet Brahmoism presents in 
 almost every Indian city a very refreshing sight — a 
 number of young men, too small to be taken notice of 
 by the outside world, united by a creed loftier by far 
 than those prevalent in the country, and a service far 
 more rational than the mummeries and tomfooleries as- 
 
30 BRAIIMOISM. 
 
 sociated with current forms of worship. It is indeed 
 very satisfactory to see small communities of Brahmos 
 meeting together to worship God, not after the irra- 
 tional modes utilized in the country, but in the sen- 
 sible style brought in by Christians — to sing appro- 
 priate hymns of praise, to offer up impassioned prayers 
 for pardon and for purification, and to deliver discourses 
 more or less able on religious and moral topics. But 
 there are serious drawbacks to the satisfaction with 
 which we contemplate these scenes of devotional en- 
 thusiasm. 
 
 These communities lack in their constitution the 
 fibre of genuine thorough-paced earnestness, and there- 
 fore they allow themselves in religious matters simply 
 to drift. There are some sincere men among their 
 members, but few even among these have such enthu- 
 siasm of loyalty as will enable them to stand a series of 
 persecutions or to maintain their faith through thick 
 and thin. The Brahmo publications are brimful of 
 complaints about their indifference and apathy, and 
 the fact that, though professedly attached to their new- 
 fangled system, they are by no means willing to make 
 the slightest sacrifice for it is universally acknowledged. 
 Their attitude, therefore, invites general banter and 
 sarcasm in a country where any form of religion which 
 fails to lead to extraordinary sacrifices is considered a 
 sham. 
 
 But the presence of this element of weakness in 
 Brahmoism — the acknowledged indifference and apathy 
 on the part of the^great majority of its professors — is 
 not here brought forward as fitted to invalidate its 
 claims. It is referred to simply as a bad sign, and 
 therefore a discouraging feature, though by no means 
 confined to Brahmoism. But the most discouraging 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 31 
 
 thing about the Brahmos as a body is an easy-going 
 faith, giving rise to delusive peace. They are as a 
 body most lamentably averse to calm inquiry and labo- 
 rious investigation, more apt to be swayed by rhapso- 
 dies than influenced by arguments. Without being 
 moved by a proper insight into their religious wants, 
 without being influenced by any of those religious con- 
 victions and apprehensions from which the agonizing 
 cry, What shall I do to be saved ? springs forth, and 
 without that adequate amount of intellectual labor 
 which accompanies successful investigation in all de- 
 partments of knowledge, they have got hold of a few 
 sporadic truths and built them up into a crude system. 
 And they stand upon it as upon firm rock, determined 
 to shake their heads at all arguments fitted to open 
 their eyes to the vulnerable points of their own posi- 
 tion, and the invulnerable character of that which they 
 attack with such reckless impetuosity. The missiona- 
 ries who have measured their strength with them in the 
 arena of fair controversy have been forced to acknowl- 
 edge that as a class they are impervious to reasoning. 
 Declamation is their forte, and whenever brought to 
 the corner by a fine of fair argumentation they adroitly 
 elude its point by descanting on the supposed uselessness 
 of arguments in the sphere of personal religion. They 
 forget that personal religion is an impossibility apart 
 from a body of truth susceptible of moral demonstra- 
 tion, and resting its claims on evidence of some kind or 
 other. And they are far from being alive to the fact 
 that mere declamation, however well fitted to stir up 
 undiscerning susceptibilities, cannot lead them to the 
 truth, and that if they wish to find out the pearl of 
 great price they must dig deep, analyze and weigh evi- 
 dence with calmness, and tread the path of investiga- 
 
32 
 
 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 tion with assiduity and perseverance. That they may 
 crive up the frivolity of an easy-going credence and 
 make religion the subject of an earnest inquiry and la- 
 borious research is our heartfelt prayer ! 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE A D I SOMAJ. 
 
 The Adi Somaj is the parent of all the associations 
 which cluster around the banner of Brahmoism. An 
 account of its origin, progress, constitution, and pres- 
 ent status must therefore precede that of its offshoots, 
 the Bramo Somaj of India or New Dispensation and 
 the Saclharan Somaj. 
 
 Let us in the first place point out the sources from 
 which our information regarding the origin and de- 
 velopment of the Adi Somaj is derived. These are 
 varied and of undoubted authority. Among them the 
 first place is to be given to Miss Carpenter's loving 
 Memoirs of Rajah Ram Mohun Roy. Miss Sophia 
 Dobson Collet's short " Historical Sketch of the Brah- 
 mo Somaj," published in 1873, embodies a plain, un- 
 varnished account, prized by all parties, by the Brah- 
 mos themselves as well as by those who take serious 
 exceptions to the conclusions she seems anxious to es- 
 tablish. Mr. Dall's Lecture on " The Brahmo Somaj 
 in India," delivered at !Naini Tal in June, 1874, adds 
 some personal items of an interesting character to the 
 valuable information contained in Miss Collet' s pam- 
 phlet. A few important items of fresh information 
 maybe culled from an article entitled " A Brief Survey 
 of the Brahmo Mission" in The Theistie Annual for 
 1874, and from a tract entitled " The Brahmo Somaj 
 Vindicated," published in 1868. Our information re- 
 
34 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 garcling the doctrinal platform occupied by the Adi 
 Somaj is mainly derived from Dr. Mullens 's well-known 
 book entitled " Yedantism, Brahmoism, and Chris- 
 tianity," a repertory of information and a masterly 
 refutation of the arguments arrayed in favor of its 
 position. 
 
 The Adi Somaj was founded by Rajah Ram Mohun 
 Roy in January, 1830, the year which was signalized in 
 America by the birth of Mormonism. The great man 
 was born at Radhanagar in the district of Burdwan, of 
 Brahmin parents. He early developed a tendency to 
 religious inquiry and life, coupled with intellectual 
 powers of a superior order. When a boy he was a fol- 
 lower of Yishnu like his parents, and he showed his 
 loyalty to his creed by devoutly reading a chapter of 
 Bhagavat every morning. But when he was sixteen 
 years old he was so thoroughly convinced of the futil- 
 ity and senselessness of the popular idolatry that he 
 determined to oppose it publicly by writing a manu- 
 script against it. This led to a breach between him 
 and his father so wide that he was obliged to leave the 
 home of his early years. He travelled in different 
 parts of the country, all the time making religion, both 
 theoretical and practical, the main subject of his study. 
 He also spent three years in Thibet studying the forms 
 of faith prevalent there. Here also his opposition to 
 idolatry manifested itself and brought him into grief. 
 
 When he was about twenty his father was reconciled 
 to him, and he returned to the home of his childhood 
 with improved health and settled principles. His con- 
 victions, however, did not give him rest, and he entered 
 into earnest controversies with the champions of the 
 popular faith, and thereby made himself an object of 
 universal dislike, insomuch that his father was obliged 
 
THE ADI SOItfAJ. 35 
 
 once more to separate himself ostensibly from him. 
 This renewed breach, however, was apparent, not real, 
 as the wayward son continued to receive substantial 
 help from the apparently incensed father. His dislike 
 to idolatry became uncontrollably vehement after his 
 father's death, and led him to overt acts of hostility 
 such as rendered a reconciliation between him and the 
 interested parties opposed to him an impossibility. He 
 took advantage of the press, newly introduced into the 
 country, and published a series of works subversive of 
 the position maintained by his opponents. 
 
 Rajah Earn Mohun Roy was a diligent student of 
 theology. He mastered not only English and Bengali, 
 but Sanscrit, Arabic, Persian, Greek, and Hebrew, with 
 a view to study the sacred scriptures of the Hindoos, 
 Mohammedans, and Christians in the original. But it 
 should be observed that during at least the time he de- 
 voted to such sacred study, he sought religious truth to 
 satisfy a craving of the intellect rather than a longing 
 of the heart. And certainly no religion does at first 
 sight commend itself to the intellect of man as more rea- 
 sonable than the monotheism which he made his creed. 
 It is when the longings of the human heart are care- 
 fully looked into that the insufficiency of mere theism 
 becomes manifest, together with the necessity of a 
 remedial system adapted to its diseased condition. 
 
 The conclusion to which his theological investigations 
 brought him was on the whole well grounded. A pure 
 system of monotheism may partly be represented as 
 the basis on which the superstructures raised by the 
 varied religions of the world are founded. Could not 
 this system be extricated and made the basis of a re- 
 ligious union among mankind I Rajah Ram Mohun 
 Roy concluded that this achievement could be realized, 
 
36 BRAHJI0IS3I. 
 
 and the great desire of his life was to found a church 
 within the precincts of which the followers of the 
 diverse and conflicting religions of the world might 
 join in public adoration of the great God in whom they 
 all believed. He was in many respects an earnest man, 
 and his theory of the feasibility of effecting a union 
 of all religions under the form of a monotheism distilled 
 from them appeared in a visible and tangible shape. 
 
 In January, 1830, the year which witnessed the 
 abolition of female immolation or Suttee rite, for which 
 he had labored hard, he, along with a few select 
 friends, laid the foundation of the Association, which 
 eventually developed into the Brahmo Somaj. He 
 called the Association ' ' Brahmo Sabha, ' ' or the Society 
 of Brahma, the Supreme .Deity, bought a house in 
 Chitpore Eoad, Calcutta, for its meetings, and fur- 
 nished it with a small endowment to meet all necessary 
 charges. The whole establishment was placed in the 
 hands of trustees appointed by him, and provision was 
 made in the trust-deed for the permanent exclusion of 
 all idolatrous worship, and the maintenance of such as 
 was fitted to lead to ' ' the promotion of the contem- 
 plation of the Author and Preserver of the Universe," 
 and " the strengthening of the bonds of union between 
 men of all religious persuasions and creeds." 
 
 About nine or ten months after the foundation of 
 this Association, the Kajah proceeded to England as 
 an agent mainly of the Emperor of Delhi. In Eng- 
 land, where his fame as a distinguished scholar and re- 
 former had preceded him, he was received with very 
 great honor by almost all classes of respectable people, 
 especially by ladies and gentlemen of rationalistic ten- 
 dencies. A great many hopes were centred in him 
 by distinguished persons in India, but his death,- occur- 
 
THE ADI SOMA J. 37 
 
 ring in the third year of his stay in England, led to 
 their being dashed to the gronnd. A very interesting 
 account of the busy life he led in England, the honors 
 heaped upon him in every place he visited, the cordial 
 reception. he was especially favored with in rationalistic 
 circles at Bristol, and the affectionate care with which 
 he was nursed when ill, is given in Miss Carpenter's 
 little book entitled " The Last Days of Rajah Ram 
 Mohun Roy." This book is by no means deficient in 
 faithful and accurate delineation, inasmuch as, though 
 written by an ardent admirer with the object of setting 
 forth his greatness, it is a correct index of those great 
 mistakes, perhaps not regarded as such by the amiable 
 writer herself, which it is our duty to point out. 
 
 The first and perhaps the greatest mistake of his life 
 was the very attractive Quixotic idea by which he al- 
 lowed himself to be victimized with an ease incompati- 
 ble with the astuteness he always displayed as a man 
 of business. This was the idea of reconciling the jar- 
 ring religions of the world under the shade of a simple 
 rationalistic creed. This had been attempted by many 
 illustrious foreigners before his day, by a few of the 
 reformers of his own country, and by a Mohammedan 
 sovereign at whose eccentricity he must have heartily 
 laughed ; and the complete failure of all attempts pre- 
 viously made should have been a deterrent warning to 
 him. It is to us a matter of surprise that a man of his 
 calm and penetrating intellect should have conceited 
 it possible to conciliate the Hindus by means of a 
 system which represented idolatry as a great crime, to 
 conciliate Christians by a religion which declared a 
 war of extermination against the doctrine of the 
 Trinity. Had he not allowed his clear intellect to be 
 clouded and warped by a romantic but essentially false 
 
38 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 theory, he would have been the first person to recog- 
 nize the incongruity of the position he occupied with 
 the hope he cherished — he would have clearly seen 
 that so long as he opposed, either directly or indirectly, 
 doctrines held as life by the followers of the different 
 religions of the world, it was idle to talk of their recon- 
 ciliation and union under his auspices. A little 
 thought, in a word, might have brought him to the 
 conclusion that the hostility with which the varied 
 religions of the world regarded each other and with 
 which they were sure to look at his new-fangled faith, 
 was implacable, and therefore fitted to laugh at all his 
 attempts to effect its removal. The sequel was — he 
 strove to please everybody and succeeded in pleasing 
 no one. 
 
 His second mistake was his pursuance of a supple 
 temporizing, rather than an inflexible, uncompromising 
 policy. He professedly believed in Unitarianism, and 
 published an octavo volume of about six hundred and 
 fifty pages, representing the Precepts of Jesus ' c as the 
 sole guide to peace and happiness." He called Jesus 
 " the founder of truth and of true religion," " a being 
 in which dwelt all truth," "the spiritual Lord and 
 king of Jews and Gentiles." He called himself " a fol- 
 lower of Christ," " a believer in Him as the Son of God 
 in a sense peculiar to Him alone." And in spite of all 
 these public acknowledgments of fealty to Christ, he 
 set up what might justly be called a Hindu frame- 
 work, and unscrupulously thrust the Master, whose 
 follower he never hesitated among Unitarians and 
 Christians to represent himself to be, into the back- 
 ground. He constituted the TJpani shads, not the New 
 Testament, the canonical scriptures of his association, 
 and scrupulously observed the caste system in the 
 
THE ADI SOMA J. 39 
 
 forms of worship he established. The sacred scriptures 
 were read by Brahmins in a closed room, apart from 
 the rude gaze of the worshippers of various castes as- 
 sembled in the consecrated hall, the portions of the ser- 
 vice these, might consider their own being the sermons 
 delivered and the hymns sung. Nay, from considera- 
 tions purely personal, the redoubtable Kajah simulated 
 reverence for the caste system in public, while in pri- 
 vate he never scrupled to trench contemptuously upon 
 its rules ; and by death-bed directions went so far as to 
 debar himself from the privilege of religious burial, 
 that his fidelity to its injunctions might be known to 
 his countrymen, and that nothing prejudicial to the in- 
 terests of his legitimate heirs might occur ! All this 
 might be venial in the case of a shrewd man of busi- 
 ness ; but his conduct, when viewed in connection with 
 his claims as a reformer, cannot but be pronounced both 
 inconsistent and reprehensible. 
 
 It is admitted that he was induced to adopt this 
 course by prudential considerations. He believed in the 
 principle of killing the devil by easy blows, and he main- 
 tained the propriety of avoiding overt acts of hostility, 
 such as might create a breach between him and his 
 countrymen, and thereby make it impossible for him to 
 influence them for good. He considered it desirable to 
 come down to their level that he might gradually raise 
 them to his. But intelligent and observant as he was, 
 he might have known that a temporizing policy of the 
 sort he determined upon pursuing had never succeeded, 
 and could not but prove a failure. Arid it, in this case, 
 did prove a failure, though fortunately he did not live 
 to see and be mortified by it. The caste system, to 
 which he ostensibly paid homage in the forms of devo- 
 tion he instituted, ultimately led to the first great dis- 
 
40 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 ruption by which the very life of his association was 
 endangered, and to the shock from which it has never 
 recovered. The following bit of conversation, reported 
 by Mr. Dall in his pamphlet alluded to, shows that 
 even the bare mention of the name he revered, and 
 wished to see revered, was tabooed within the precincts 
 of his church by his successor. " On first visiting 
 Debendro Nath Tagore, in 1855, I asked him whether 
 he ever allowed the name of Jesus to be heard in his 
 church. ' No, never, ' he replied. ' And why not ? ' 
 I said. ' Because some people call him God.' " 
 
 Another of his great mistakes was that he sought 
 Theism where it could not be found, or rather that he 
 supported his monotheistic creed by documents which 
 were in spirit and in letter opposed thereto. He pro- 
 fessed to have discovered a system of pure Theism in 
 the Upanishads, and he made these venerable docu- 
 ments the main if not the sole stay of the creed, 
 under the banner of which he expected to see the 
 diverse and clashing religions of the world reconciled. 
 But the conclusion upheld by the Upanishads was the 
 very antipodes of what he expressed an anxiety to 
 bolster up by these remains of the sacred literature of 
 the country. Nobody can read the Upanishads, even 
 cursorily, without being driven to the conclusion that 
 pantheism, not theism, is the creed upheld by the spirit 
 and letter of their teaching. The cosmogonies em- 
 bodied therein (each evolving the wonders of creation 
 either through an omnific spirit or through the so-called 
 elements, or through food, out of the essence of Brah- 
 ma, or out of some unmanifested substance behind the 
 manifested Deity), the insight presented into the 
 origin and nature of mam as well as of the world, the 
 way of salvation pointed out, knowledge of man's per- 
 
THE ADI SO MA J. 41 
 
 feet identity with Brahma, and the view given of his 
 ultimate absorption into the Divine Essence — all these 
 are irrefragable proofs of the dominant, pantheistic 
 tendency of these hoary records. And those who pre- 
 tend to find nothing but theism in them are among 
 the parties who, in analyzing the contents of all docu- 
 ments, allow themselves to be dragged as slaves by their 
 foregone conclusions. 
 
 "What was the result of this serious mistake ? For 
 years the religion of Rajah Ram Mohun Roy's associa- 
 tion was, not the monotheism he was anxious to see 
 established, but the ancient pantheism of the country. 
 His successors, some of whom were learned Pandits, 
 did not play fast and loose with the Upanishads, as 
 those do who pretend to discover pure theism in them ; 
 and they fearlessly set up the creed these documents 
 were fitted to uphold. Nay, they went further. 
 They added the Brahmo Sutras of Uyas and the com- 
 ments of Shanker Acharya to their sacred literature, 
 and moved heaven and earth to resuscitate the religion 
 of which these two persons were the most redoubtable 
 champions in ancient India. They propounded the 
 doctrine of an all-pervasive spiritual essence, the doc- 
 trine of emanation or self -development, and the doc- 
 trine of absorption ; and they illustrated and fortified 
 these doctrines by means of analogies and arguments 
 borrowed from the existing records of the ancient pan- 
 theism of our country. And it was not till the unten- 
 able nature of the creed of the Upanishads had been 
 rendered manifest by a literary expedition to Benares 
 that pantheism was abolished and the monotheism of 
 the founder was restored. 
 
 It is in our humble opinion difficult to settle whether 
 Rajah Ram Mohun Roy was a monotheist or a pan- 
 
42 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 theist. His published utterances in England are in 
 favor of the assumption that he was a theist of the 
 Unitarian school, but the great work of his life was the 
 revival of pantheism, and the beautiful songs he com- 
 posed were decidedly pantheistic. However settled his 
 convictions and principles were when he died among 
 his Unitarian friends at Bristol, his mind seems to have 
 wavered for a long time between pantheism and mono- 
 theism. And this made him vacillate, and went far to 
 justify the opinion entertained by his countrymen of 
 him, that he was in essentials all things to all men, a 
 Hindu among the Hindus, a Mussulman among Mus- 
 sulmans, and a Christian among Christians. 
 
 But perhaps the explanation of his vacillation is 
 simple enough. He was not thoroughly an earnest 
 man, and his religion was more a theory of the head 
 than a moving principle of the heart. This will be 
 represented as a very harsh judgment, especially when 
 it is remembered that he encountered a series of petty 
 persecutions by denouncing idolatry at a time when 
 the spread of English education had not rendered it 
 fashionable or even safe to do so. That he was moved 
 by a noble and disinterested passion in the beginning 
 of his career none will venture to deny. But may it 
 not be safely assumed that the exuberance of patron- 
 age and praise lavished upon him by not a few distin- 
 guished members of the ruling class tended to de- 
 moralize him to some extent ? At all events, it is a 
 matter of fact that the noble impulse which guided him 
 in the days of his youth gave place, long before he 
 laid the foundation of his Association, to cool, calcu- 
 lating, worldly wisdom, such as is unfavorable to the 
 growth of genuine piety in the soul. It should also be 
 borne in mind that Eajah Earn Mohun Koy's religion 
 
THE ADI SOMA J. 43 
 
 was not based on a deep conviction of sin and an equally 
 deep insight into the longings of the human heart. It 
 was at best a superficial affair, and the forms it assumed 
 in different places and under diverse circumstances were 
 in perfect keeping with its want of coherence, depth, 
 and earnestness. In one respect, however, the Eajah 
 was almost thoroughly consistent throughout his life- 
 time, and that is his antagonism to popular idolatry, 
 which he never hesitated to represent as a " detestable" 
 sin, though at times he was prone to vindicate it as fit- 
 ted to lead men of grovelling minds to rise to the 
 adoration of the supreme spirit through the worship of 
 tangible images. 
 
 Kajah Earn Mohun's departure from the country 
 some months after the inauguration of his system was 
 almost a fatal blow to it. The Association lingered for 
 almost nine years without being able to make its influ- 
 ence felt beyond a very narrow and narrowing circle. 
 In the year 1833 it received an impetus from a noble- 
 man to whom, as the second great leader of the 
 Brahmo movement, great prominence ought to be given 
 in an account of its origin, rise, and development. 
 
 Babu Debendro Nath Tagore was born in 1818 in 
 one of the most refined though excommunicated homes 
 in Calcutta. A son of the celebrated millionaire, Babu 
 Dwarka Nath Tagore, he was brought up in the lap of 
 profuse wealth and luxury ; and in the days of his 
 youth he did not escape the demoralizing influence of 
 such education. The Theistic Annual of 1872 presents 
 an extract, under the heading of " Anecdotes and Chap- 
 ters from Keal Life," from a sermon of his, giving an 
 account of the striking way in which he was roused 
 from voluptuous indolence and made alive to a sense of 
 his duty to God and man. From " the sixteenth to 
 
44 BRA.HMOISMV 
 
 the twentieth year" of his life he went on " intoxi- 
 cated with the pleasures of the flesh, ' ' regardless of his 
 " spiritual interests and dead to conscience and to 
 God.' ' Let his own words relate the manner in which 
 he was awakened. " Once, on the occasion of a do- 
 mestic calamity, as I lay drooping and wailing in a re- 
 tired spot, the God of glory suddenly revealed Himself 
 in my heart and so entirely charmed me and sweetened 
 my heart and soul, that for a time I continued rav- 
 ished — quite immersed in a flood of light. The world 
 outside and the world within both seemed bathed in a 
 sweet and serene stream of celestial effulgence. What 
 was it but the light of truth, the water of baptism, the 
 message of salvation '( Was it a vision that so charmed 
 me ? No, the living presence of the living God, who 
 could doubt ?" But this season of ecstasy was fol- 
 lowed by a long period of struggle, and it was not till 
 he reached the twenty-fifth year of his life that he felt 
 his " inferior propensities curbed," " the wild fury of 
 passion abated, " " conscience reinstated in its exalted 
 place," "the world shorn of its attractions," and 
 " God " made " his only comfort and delight." 
 
 Babu Debendra iSTath Tagore founded the Tattwa- 
 hodhini Sdbha, or Society for the Knowledge of Truth, 
 in 1839, almost three years before his spiritual strug- 
 gles had given place to a holy calm — on the ruins, so 
 to speak, of Rajah Bam Mohun Boy's association, yet 
 with a view to perpetuate his work. The grand aim 
 of this society was to "make known the religion of 
 Brahma," and thereby effect the regeneration of the 
 country. With a view to the accomplishment of this 
 object, it determined, in the first place, to exhume the 
 religion of Brahma from the sacred literature of the 
 Hindus, long since dead and buried, to ascertain what 
 
THE ADI SOMAJ. 45 
 
 their original shastras were and what their precepts 
 with reference to worship, sacrifices, offerings, feasts 
 and fasts, and to trace the modern system of poly- 
 theism from its origin through the Darsans, Purans, 
 Tantras, and other sacred books, down to the present 
 time. In the second place, it purposed to prepare and 
 circulate treatises on Astronomy, Natural History, 
 Physiology, and Metaphysics, with a view to set forth 
 the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, noticeable in 
 His works. And, lastly, it was resolved that a com- 
 plete system of morals should be elaborated to draw 
 men, prone to go astray, toward the blessings of prac- 
 tical religion. 
 
 The task before the association was gigantic, but, 
 nothing daunted, the members addressed themselves to 
 it. Most opportunely they had a press and a fount 
 of type presented to them, and they eagerly utilized 
 the present by reprinting five of the Upanishads and 
 some of Rajah Earn Mohun Roy's works. They 
 started a monthly periodical, called the Tattwabodhini 
 Patriha, and appointed one of the very best Bengali 
 writers of the day as its editor. The periodical em- 
 braced a wide range of subjects, though its great busi- 
 ness was to create an interest in the sacred literature 
 of the country. They established a school, which, how- 
 ever, they had to give up for want of funds. They ap- 
 pointed a learned Pandit as their minister, and under 
 his guidance they held weekly meetings, at first at 
 Babu Debendra Nath Tagore's house, but ultimately 
 in their long hall in Chitpore Eoad. Monthly meet- 
 ings were also held, and in them sacred texts from the 
 Upanishads were read and expounded, and prayers 
 were offered up. The order of the weekly service was 
 the recitation of and meditation on the Gayatri, the 
 
46 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 w ell- known and oft-repeated Brahmin prayer, the 
 chanting of a hymn from one of the Upamshads, an 
 exposition of select texts from the Vedas, or an essay 
 on some branch of natural theology, a short sermon by 
 the president or some leading member, and a number 
 of Bengali hymns sung by a choir occupying the recess 
 opposite the dais reserved for the minister and his as- 
 sistant. 
 
 The society lacked organization and coherence, and 
 to supply this want a " covenant," like the following, 
 was drawn out : 
 
 " The Brahrnist Covenant. 
 
 c ' Om. This day, the day of the month of in 
 
 the year I adopt the religion of the worshippers of 
 
 Brahma. 
 
 " 1. I will live devoted to the worship of that one 
 supreme Brahma who is the creator, preserver, and de- 
 stroyer (of the universe), the cause of deliverance ; all- 
 wise ; all-pervading ; full of joy ; the good ; and 
 without form. I will worship him with love, and by 
 doing things that will give him pleasure. 
 
 "2. I will worship no created thing, as the supreme 
 Brahma, the Creator of all. 
 
 " 3. Except on days of sickness or calamity I will 
 every day, when my mind shall be at rest, in faith and 
 love, fix my thoughts in contemplation on the Supreme. 
 
 " 4. I will live earnest in the practice of good 
 deeds. 
 
 " 5. I will endeavor to live free from evil deeds. 
 
 " 6. If, overcome by temptation, I perchance do 
 anything evil, I will surely desire to be free from it 
 and be careful for the future. 
 
THE ADI SOMAJ. 47 
 
 " 7. Every year, and in all my worldly prosperity, I 
 will offer gifts to the Brahmo Somaj. 
 
 " 8. Oh God ! grant unto me that I may entirely 
 observe this excellent religion. ' ' 
 
 This is, we believe, the revised covenant utilized 
 when pantheism was formally abandoned by Babu 
 Debendra Nath Tagore and his party, but it gives us 
 insight into the nature and provisions of the original 
 document. 
 
 Mr. Tagore and twenty of his friends signed the 
 original covenant, and were solemnly initiated into 
 the new faith by their honored minister, Pandit Ram 
 Chunder Vidyabagish, in December, 1843. Thus organ- 
 ized, the society made great progress for about a lus- 
 trum. A grand local habitation was secured, their 
 present long and beautifully furnished hall in Calcutta, 
 and branch associations were established in the vicinity 
 of that city and a few in distant places. The member- 
 ship increased from 83 in 1843 to 573 in 1847, and the 
 income of the society rose during the period from 
 3476-9-0 rupees to 6727-0 rupees. But from 1847, the 
 most prosperous year, all things considered, the society 
 has had, there was a falling off, both in its member- 
 ship and its income, until, in the Eeport for 1851, we 
 find the former represented by 488 and the latter by 
 3155-0-10 rupees. 
 
 Dr. Mullens, from whose very valuable book and 
 table of statistics presented therein many of these facts 
 have been borrowed, explains this rapid progress and 
 equally rapid declension in a proper manner. English 
 education was, especially during this time, shaking the 
 established faith of the country to its centre. Multi- 
 tudes of young men were abroad, too enlightened to 
 believe for a moment in the current superstition of the 
 
48 BRAHM0IS3I. 
 
 country, but by no means earnest enough to ascertain 
 the truth by calm inquiry and laborious investigation. 
 They could not remain stationary, nor had they the 
 moral courage and the spirit of self-renunciation to go 
 as far as the truth might lead, and they sought a mid- 
 way asylum which the Yedantism revived by the 
 society offered them, besides flattering their national 
 vanity. And they took shelter in large numbers ; but 
 when they found out that they had nothing more than 
 cold moral discourses to feed upon, their enthusiasm 
 cooled down, and many of them retreated, preferring 
 the uncertainties of universal doubt to the coldness of 
 a lifeless creed. 
 
 The period of decadence was a transitional period 
 with reference to the creed of the Tatwabodhini 
 Sobha. It witnessed the gradual loosening of the bonds, 
 and ultimate downfall of Yedantism, and its superces- 
 sion by what is called "Natural Theism." Every 
 book embodying a historical survey of this association, 
 Dr. Mullens' s excepted, gives an account of the way in 
 which the change or rather revolution of belief was 
 effected ; but the most detailed account we have seen 
 of it is that presented in the tract entitled " The 
 Brahmo Somaj Vindicated," published in 1868. The 
 particulars given below are borrowed almost entirely 
 from this able though declamatory pamphlet. 
 
 One day Babu Debendra Nath Tagore got hold, by 
 the purest accident, of a stray leaf of the well-known 
 Sanscrit pamphlet, the " Isa Upanishad,' ' and naturally 
 became anxious to look into its contents. But as he 
 was ignorant of Sanscrit, he had the leaf read and ex- 
 plained to him by a learned Pandit. He was so de- 
 cidedly charmed and edified by the truths contained 
 in it that he determined to study Sanscrit, and thereby 
 
THE ADI S0MAJ. 49 
 
 render himself competent to study the sacred literature 
 of which it was a very small fragment. He also de- 
 puted four Pandits to Benares that they might study 
 the four Yedas there, copy them out, and return 
 to Calcutta with the precious treasure. These Pandits 
 left Calcutta in 1845, and after a couple of years of 
 study and investigation spent in the holy city, returned 
 with the copies eagerly looked for by their employer. 
 Babu Debendra jNath Tagore studied them with en- 
 thusiasm ; but the result was a great disappointment 
 rather than a deepening of the favorable impressions 
 made upon his mind by the stray leaf. He found such 
 puerility, error, and contradiction in these venerable 
 records that his faith in their infallibility was thor- 
 oughly shaken. A season of hesitation followed ; but 
 ultimately truth triumphed, and the association gave 
 up in 1850 its Yedantism, together with its belief 
 in the canonical authority of the Yedas. Pantheism 
 was formally abandoned, a form of theism was 
 adopted, the original covenant was changed, and a 
 book was published presenting the doctrines of the new 
 faith in clear forcible language, but without much 
 regard to lucidness of arrangement and precision of 
 expression. This book, called the " Brahmo Dharmo," 
 is even now the creed of the Adi Somaj. Dr. Mullens 
 presents an able abstract of its contents in his small but 
 very excellent work, and translates several of its state- 
 ments. Of his labors we shall avail ourselves in our 
 exposition of its doctrines and principles. 
 
 This new religion is based upon four cardinal princi- 
 ples, which are : 
 
 1. " Before the production of this world there ex- 
 isted only the supreme Brahma. Nothing else existed 
 whatsoever. He created all this. 
 
50 BRAmioisM. 
 
 2. " He is wisdom, eternity, joy, and goodness per- 
 sonified ; the everlasting ruler of all, all wise, without 
 a second, most wonderful in power. 
 
 3. " From his worship alone is happiness produced 
 here and hereafter. 
 
 4. ' ' That worship consists in loving him and per- 
 forming actions which give him pleasure. ' ' 
 
 These principles, barring perhaps a little clumsiness 
 of expression, are correct ; but they are too vague and 
 general to be of any use to the soul awakened to a 
 sense of its sinfulness and guilt, and therefore anxious 
 to be saved. 
 
 From generals let us descend to particulars. But 
 before we present an insight into these we have one 
 remark to make. The " Brahmo Dharma," though 
 avowedly occupying a standpoint opposed to Pantheism 
 or Yedantism, as it was called, is by no means com- 
 pletely emancipated from its trammels. It is burdened 
 with pantheistic phraseology and pantheistic reasoning, 
 and its position on many of the intricate questions 
 mooted is a sort of via media between Pantheism and 
 Theism ; while the passages it quotes from the Upan- 
 ishacls add to the air of uncertainty and confusion 
 spread over its doctrinal and preceptive statements. 
 
 1. With reference to the standard of Brahmo theol- 
 ogy, the ' ' Brahmo Dharma 5 ' does by no means repudi- 
 ate the infallibility of the ancient Yedas without equivo- 
 cation. On the contrary, there are passages which seem 
 to indicate a disposition to uphold the position origi- 
 nally occupied. In the third chapter we have this state- 
 ment : "In order to obtain a special knowledge of 
 the Supreme Brahma, the disciple must go to a 
 teacher. The wise teacher, if he perceive the pupil 
 before him to be of a thoroughly peaceful and tran- 
 
THE ADI S0MAJ. 51 
 
 quil mind, will instruct him in that science by which 
 the imperishable and self-existing perfect One may be 
 known. The Big-Yeda, the Yajur, the Sam, the 
 Atharvan Yeda, the rules of accentuation, the rites 
 of religion, grammar and the glossary, prosody, and 
 astronomy — these constitute the inferior science. That 
 is the most excellent science by which a knowl- 
 edge of the imperishable Supreme Brahma is obtained. " 
 This is an exact fac-simile of the method of attaining 
 emancipating knowledge indicated in the Upanishads, 
 and presupposes the infallibility of the sacred books of 
 the country. But perhaps the belief of the Adi Somaj 
 is — that of all religious books of the world these are 
 the most fitted, though destitute of the character of 
 infallibility, to give us that knowledge of God which 
 results in the salvation of the soul here and its final 
 emancipation from the effects of sin hereafter. 
 
 2. What the " Brahmo Dharma " says of God is 
 not free from the tinge of uncertainty by which 
 nearly all its statements are characterized. Its great 
 watchword JEJcamebaditiyam — " One without a sec- 
 ond," was the battle cry of ancient pantheism, and 
 must be interpreted according to new rules before it 
 Can be made to embody the fundamental idea or truth 
 of Natural Theism. And it reproduces the passages of 
 the Upanishads in which God is represented as " the 
 ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the 
 speech, the breath of the breath, the eye of the eye," 
 and thereby apparently sanctions pantheistic notions. 
 But on the whole it inclines to Theism, and represents 
 God as " the Great Spirit," " without birth," who 
 has no producer, no master, ' ' and who is the eter- 
 nal one. ' ' He is said to be " without organs of per- 
 ception, without organs of action," to have " His eye 
 
52 BLRAHM0IS3I. 
 
 present everywhere, His face everywhere, His arm 
 everywhere, His feet everywhere ;'■■' and "He knows 
 all things that can be known," " presides over all as 
 their king ;" and "He pervades whatever things are 
 included in this egg of Brahma. ' ' He is l ' spotless, • ' 
 " without sin," and " pure in nature," " the fountain 
 of holiness, " " the punisher of sin, ' ' the • • Lord of 
 wealth." " At all times He decrees to all His subjects 
 the rewards and punishments which they deserve." 
 " He is the refuge of all and the friend of all." And 
 yet he is said to be Asneha, " without love," though 
 Mangral Swarup, ' ' the type of benevolence and good- 
 ness. ' ' 
 
 3. What the book says regarding the relation of the 
 world to God is, like what it says of the divine nature, 
 not free from a tinge of Pantheism. For instance, here 
 is a reproduction of the theory of evolution, pro- 
 pounded in the Upanishads : " He reflected about the 
 creation of the universe, etc. . . . From this Supreme 
 sprang breath, reason, and senses, also ether, air, light, 
 water, and this earth, which supports all things in the 
 world. ' ' Again the idea of pantheistic pervasiveness 
 runs through this sentence : " He who sees that all 
 things abide in the Supreme Spirit, and perceives the 
 existence of the Supreme Spirit in all things, feels not 
 dislike toward any." The book, however, repudiates 
 Pantheism, and puts a theistic construction on these 
 and other reproduced utterances of the authors of the 
 Upanishads. Nor are passages wanting setting forth 
 an essential distinction between the Creator and His 
 creation. " He is different from all things, known or 
 unknown." "He has sprung from no cause, neither 
 has He become anything else." " He is the witness of 
 all, and possesses none of the qualities of created 
 
THE ADT SOMAJ. 53 
 
 things. 5 ' He is represented as not only essentially 
 different from His works, but as the Creator and Pre- 
 server of the Universe, its Ruler and Judge. ' ' From 
 the joyous Supreme all these living things sprang, and 
 by Him they remain alive. " " By His control the sun 
 and moon are firmly upheld," as well as "the earth 
 and the sky, minutes, hours, day and night, the phases 
 of the moon, the months, seasons, years. " " Through 
 fear of Him the wind goes forward, the sun rises, the 
 fire flames, the clouds pour forth water, and death 
 moves on. " " He is the Bridge on which all worlds 
 rest, and by which their dissolution is prevented." 
 Yarious orders of intelligent creatures above man are 
 admitted, and the Supreme Spirit is emphatically de- 
 clared to be " the great God of gods, the Debta of 
 Deltas, the Lord of lords. ' ' 
 
 4. A code of morality, fair and lofty, is embodied in 
 the " Brahmo Dharma." Man's duties to himself and 
 to his family and to society at large are pointed out 
 with clearness and circumstantiality. Man is ex- 
 horted to subdue his senses and his passions and appe- 
 tites, avoid self-indulgence in food and drink, practice 
 self-restraint in all matters, and partake of pleasure 
 and pain with moderation and calmness. He is ex- 
 horted to appreciate the sanctity of marriage, to be a 
 good husband, a good father, a good neighbor, a good 
 citizen — to " esteem his elder brother as a father, his 
 wife and sons as his own body, his servants as his 
 shadow, and his daughters as objects of kindness." 
 He is moreover exhorted to be strictly virtuous — to 
 " avoid bad company," to regard " another's wealth 
 as clods of earth, and all living creatures as himself," 
 to " bear all the abuse of others" and " insult no 
 one," and to be examples of " patience, forgiveness, 
 
54 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 subjugation of mind, honesty, purity of mind and 
 body, control of the passions, knowledge of the Shas- 
 tras, knowledge of Brahma, speaking the truth, and 
 freedom from anger," or of " the ten signs of virtue." 
 But the motives to virtue pointed out are, some of 
 them at least, among the weakest ever brought for- 
 ward to sustain a virtuous life. There are six : a. 
 " All actions which are unblamed (by others) you may 
 perform ; actions which are blamed you must not 
 perforin. " h. " Whatever virtue we practise, you 
 may do ; but don't practise anything besides." e. 
 " Apply yourself to that which you consider to advance 
 your own good. " cl. u Follow out with the greatest 
 zeal whatever course will give satisfaction to yourself, 
 and leave everything opposed to it." e. " The man 
 who performs works of virtue obtains holy praise. " f. 
 " Such a man obtains respect in this world and pros- 
 perity in the next." Thus public opinion, the exam- 
 ple of human teachers, self-interest, self -gratification, 
 respect in the world are placed in the same category 
 with "holy praise," supposing that to be the praise 
 which comes from God, and with prosperity in the 
 next ! 
 
 5. The views of sin presented in the " Brahmo 
 Dharma" are superficial, and by no means thoroughly 
 correct as far as they go. The vexed question with ref- 
 erence to the origin of sin, and its transmission by the 
 laws of generation from father to son and downward, 
 is quietly and judiciously shelved ; nor is the slightest 
 attempt made to show how sin came into this world. 
 No attempt, moreover, is made to define sin, or to dwell 
 upon its malignant nature. Particular sins, or rather 
 sinful dispositions, such as anger, ingratitude, injustice, 
 .worldliness, are enumerated, and some are classified. 
 
THE ADI SOMAJ. 55 
 
 " Endeavors to get others' wealth, evil thoughts of 
 others, unbelief in God and a future world, are three 
 sins of the understanding. Unkind speeches, lies, 
 scandal about others, and improper conversation are 
 four sins of the tongue. Theft, improper envy, and 
 whoredom are three sins of the body." There is a 
 tendency manifest to trace all these varieties of sins 
 and sinful dispositions to ignorance rather than to in- 
 herent depravity, and exhortations having for their 
 object our freedom from its control are by no means 
 few and far between. " Deliver yourselves from the 
 darkness of ignorance. Ye souls ! arise ; wake up 
 from the sleep of ignorance and learn wisdom from a 
 fitting teacher." The fact that sin is punished in this 
 world and shall be punished in that which is to come is 
 recognized, while its reflex demoralizing influence upon 
 the sinner is pointed out. " The Supreme decrees to 
 all its subjects rewards and punishments which they 
 deserve." " The man who practises sin obtains dis- 
 grace and reaps miserable fruits." " The man who, 
 uninfluenced by vice, thinks sin, speaks sin, and prac- 
 tises sin, loses thereby all his good qualities." The 
 " Brahmo Dharma " does not appear thoroughly 
 emancipated from the notion of diverse heavens, placed 
 one above another in an ascending scale, and diverse 
 hills placed one below another in a descending scale, 
 brought out into bold relief in the Upanishads. ' ' Foolish 
 men obtain those worlds which are without joy, and are 
 covered with dense darkness." Nothing like an ade- 
 quate idea of the intense malignity of sin and the aw- 
 ful character of the punishment in store for it is to be 
 met in any Brahma production, or in any book apart 
 from the Bible. 
 
 6. From the views of sin presented in the book, the 
 
50 BRAHirOISiT, 
 
 transition to what it says about salvation is of course 
 natural and eas} r . Nothing displays the vacillating 
 character of its creed so well as the theory of salvation 
 it holds up. That theory is in some respects an exact 
 copy of the one embodied in the Upanishads. Sal- 
 vation is based on knowledge, the knowledge of Brahma, 
 as all our calamities are traced to ignorance ; and sac- 
 rifices and ceremonies are represented as matters of sub- 
 ordinate importance. " The man who knows not the 
 imperishable Supreme, though he sacrifice in the world, 
 many thousand years, will not obtain lasting benefits. ' ' 
 They who know the Supreme Brahma become immor- 
 tal ; all others suffer misery. " They surely know 
 that ancient and most excellent Supreme Brahma, who 
 recognize him as the breath of the breath, the eye of 
 the eye, the ear of the ear, and the mind of the mind.'' 3 
 This sentence is thoroughly pantheistic, and reminds 
 us of similar utterances in the Upanishads ; but the 
 drift of all these passages is plain— to know Brahma is 
 eternal life. But how is this blessed knowledge to be 
 attained ? Here again the stereotyped method of the 
 Upanishads is pointed out. The devotee or the 
 candidate for Brahma knowledge must look for an ac- 
 credited or wise teacher, and spend some time under 
 proper tuition. He must then retire from the world 
 and betake himself to hermit solitude ; and under the 
 shade of a giant tree in a sequestered forest he must 
 meditate, his head erect, his passions subdued, his body 
 unaffected by the extremes of cold and heat, and his 
 mind concentrated on the Supreme. One element is 
 added in the Brahmo Dharma to the method of 
 obtaining deliverance from the trammels of ignorance 
 and its miseries pointed out in the venerable records so 
 often alluded to — viz., worship. " Not by many fair 
 
THE ADI SOMA J. 57 
 
 words, nor by a good memory, nor by hearing oft may 
 he (the Supreme Brahma) be known. The worship- 
 per who prays to him obtains him. The Supreme 
 Spirit reveals himself to such a worshipper. " This is 
 evidently, a modern notion grafted on the old trunk. 
 It is strange that the Brahmo Dharma ignores in 
 its scheme of salvation the very existence of sin, which 
 it in other places points out ; and it does not dwell on 
 the necessity of repentance. 
 
 7. We shall conclude our review or expose of the 
 doctrines inculcated in the " Brahmo Dharma " with a 
 word about the future life into which it presents an in- 
 sight. Like the varied systems of philosophy which 
 have prevailed in the country, it retains the doctrine 
 of transmigration. " The man who is ignorant and 
 impure gains not the rank of Brahma, but returns 
 into the world. The wise man having gained that 
 dignity is born no more." The varied hells and 
 heavens enumerated in the ancient scriptures of the 
 country are posited here also ; but the degrees of pun- 
 ishment and reward, or misery and happiness realized 
 within their precincts, are all terminable. The idea of 
 eternal punishment is emphatically repudiated, as well 
 as the eternity of happiness attainable in the varied 
 heavens through which the souls of the good pass 
 before their final emancipation from the thraldom of 
 repeated births and deaths. But the doctrine of ab- 
 sorption, one of the most characteristic doctrines of 
 ancient Yeclantism, is not retained ; and eternal abode 
 with, not in, God is the idea brought out, though by no 
 means very clearly. Some years ago a question was 
 raised fitted to indicate a new phase in the time-hal- 
 lowed doctrine of absorption. The question is this : 
 Does the soul when merged in the Deity after a series 
 
58 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 of lives and deaths retain its individual consciousness 
 within His all-embracing consciousness ? The parties by 
 whom this question was raised seemed inclined, in op- 
 position to the ancient philosophy of the country, ac- 
 cording to which conscious existence in any form is an 
 evil to be deprecated, to answer it in the affirmative. 
 It is possible — nay, even probable, that if the ancient 
 doctrine of absorption were altered so as to insure the 
 retention of the individual consciousness of the soul 
 when absorbed in the Deity, it would occupy a promi- 
 nent place among the shibboleths of modern Brahmo- 
 ism of the Adi Somaj school. 
 
 Let us conclude this chapter with a brief reference to 
 one or two of the important conclusions to which the 
 foregoing synopsis of the contents of the book under 
 review, the ' ' Brahmo Dharma, ' ' is fitted to bring us. 
 
 This system, it is evident, is like the one now mak- 
 ing progress under the banner of the Ayra Somaj, a 
 compromise between ideas antiquated and obsolete, 
 and such as have a dash of freshness about them. It 
 may be called Pantheistic Theism or Theistic Panthe- 
 ism, and under either of these queer names it is a 
 heterogeneous mixture of theories that cannot be 
 brought together without an explosion. It made a 
 little progress so long as education was at a very low 
 ebb in the country ; but in proportion as knowledge 
 advanced its grotesque character was perceived, and all 
 confidence in it shaken. The progressive members of 
 the Brahmo Somaj outgrew its many-sided, self -con- 
 tradictory creed, and seceded ; while those who were 
 determined to shut their eyes to its absurdities made 
 rapid progress in the wrong direction, until one of its 
 most enlightened champions was not ashamed to affirm 
 that " Hinduism is the best of all prevailing religions." 
 
THE ADI SOMAJ. 59 
 
 For years it lias been dwindling into insignificance, 
 beyond the pale of the sympathy of the educated 
 community ; but as it has an endowed church, its ser- 
 vices are regularly kept up in its fine long hall. There 
 is, however, nothing stirring about them, though the 
 singing is excellent and the officiating minister is a 
 scholarly as well as a good man. The Arya Somaj of 
 Pandit Daya Nand will share a similar fate. Its up- 
 holders are as a class behind the least enlightened of 
 the alumni of the colleges and the schools of Bengal ; 
 but education is making progress where its temporary 
 ascendancy among particular persons is being estab- 
 lished. Very soon will the people outgrow its hetero- 
 geneous mongrel creed, and as nobody has yet come 
 forward to endow it, as Babu Debendra Nath Tagore 
 has done in the case of the Adi Somaj, its complete 
 collapse it does not need the prescience of a prophet to 
 foretell. 
 
 Our second remark is that the unbounded gratula- 
 tion with which we are apt to look upon parties whom 
 we regard as not far from the kingdom of God is often 
 misplaced. We cannot but rejoice when we see per- 
 sons of superior intellect and independent thought 
 brought step by step, by advancing light, toward the 
 truth as it is in Jesus. But we ought to rejoice with 
 trembling, as a little procrastination on their part, a little 
 hesitation to make the necessary sacrifice, a little com- 
 promise of principle, a little attempt to stifle conviction 
 or play with conscience may lead to our buoyant and 
 exulting hopes to be dashed to the ground. There was 
 boundless joy in mission churches when Rajah Ram 
 Mohun Roy paid a few fashionable compliments to our 
 Lord, and hopes of his speedy conversion were enter- 
 tained and made public in varieties of ways. But the 
 
60 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 Rajah died outside the pale of the Christian Church as 
 a weak, vacillating professor of Unitarianism ; and the 
 association he laid the foundation of has almost, 
 throughout the entire period of its existence, been anti- 
 Christian. It is always a dangerous thing to hold the 
 truth in unrighteousness ; and it is our duty, when we 
 see persons loitering before the gate of the Church and 
 led by conceit or want of the spirit of religious earnest- 
 ness to refuse to enter in, to toll the tocsin of alarm, 
 and not come out with congratulations and encomiums 
 which vanity and ambition may convert into stepping- 
 stones to absolute spiritual ruin. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE PROGRESSIVE SOMA J. 
 
 The Adi Somaj or Conservative Brahmoism, thus 
 reorganized in 1852, showed very little vitality till the 
 year 1858, when a young man of an enthusiastic tem- 
 perament and a fertile mind joined it, and infused a 
 new life into its veins. This young man was Babu 
 Keshub Chunder Sen, then in the twenty-first year of 
 his age, destined to be the third, and in some respects 
 the ablest, and in all respects the most enthusiastic, 
 leader of Brahmoism. The history of the movement 
 for many years has been the history of this remarkable 
 man, and therefore a short biographical sketch pre- 
 senting the salient features of his early life must pre- 
 cede our account of the reforms with which his name 
 must ever be associated. For the information to be 
 given under this head we are indebted to himself, his 
 own accounts of his early life presented in two specially 
 of those of his addresses in England which appear col- 
 lected in Miss Collet's book entitled " Keshub Chun- 
 der Sen's English Visit," his Town Hall lecture, " Am 
 I a Prophet ?" delivered in 1879, and a paper entitled 
 " Retrospects of Life " in the Theistic Quarterly 
 Review for January, 1880. There are discrepancies 
 in these accounts of a very serious character ; but these 
 we shall pass over or try to reconcile in our sketch. 
 
 Keshub Chunder Sen, grandson of the well-known 
 
62 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 Babu Eam Cornel Sen, was born in 1838. A tender 
 scion of a Vaishnava family, he was carefully brought 
 up amid the ideas, pure and impure, characteristic of 
 the sect to which his parents belonged. Like boys and 
 girls in general, he believed in the religion of his fore- 
 fathers without any inquiry whatever, and strove to 
 be faithful to its injunctions, specially of a ritualistic 
 type. But fortunately for himself, he was early sent 
 to the Presidency college for his education, and the 
 knowledge he acquired within its walls destroyed his 
 hereditary faith in the national religion ; but it gave 
 nothing to fill " the void ' ' thus created. The result 
 was that ' ' for two or three years' ' he regarded the 
 concerns of his soul with perfect indifference and 
 apathy, though he was evidently determined to allow 
 nothing to tempt him out of the path of moral recti- 
 tude. But the period of apathy gave place to a period 
 of anxiety. A sense of sin and guilt was awakened 
 within him and a longing to be saved was generated. 
 All tendency to despondency was checked by a 
 heavenly voice which seemed to say, i 6 No, sinner, 
 thou hast hope." This first lesson, learned under the 
 direct teaching of the Spirit of God, led him to culti- 
 vate the habit of prayer. Nor was he required to 
 struggle long in prayer, for God revealed Himself to 
 him in a mysterious way and led him to peace and joy. 
 He affirms again and again that in his struggles after 
 the joys of salvation he was helped neither by man nor 
 by book, but by God Himself, who ultimately brought 
 him out of darkness into His marvellous fight. 
 
 But he does acknowledge his indebtedness to the 
 Bible and other good books which helped him on in 
 the path of righteousness, if they did not usher him 
 into it. In his lecture on "Am I a Prophet ?" he 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ. 63 
 
 refers to a vision which brought him into what might 
 be called a personal contact with John the Baptist, 
 Jesus of Nazareth, and Paul, and the influence which 
 emanated from their example led to his renunciation 
 of self and consecration of his powers of heart and mind 
 to the service of his Maker. But the influences brought 
 to bear on him, throughout his career as a reformer, if 
 not during this most critical period of his life, are con- 
 fessedly varied ; and as their heterogeneous character 
 explains his own heterogeneous character, and the 
 heterogeneous character of his creed, they must be set 
 forth in his own words : " To me the Bible is a bless- 
 ed home to which I often love to retire after my re- 
 freshing devotions, and I read and meditate over the 
 Old Testament and the New. From such perusal I 
 derive much help, much sympathy, and much comfort, 
 much profound response to what I cherish as the most 
 sacred treasure of my being. The Bible is the word of 
 life indeed. It seems as if the Bible was written for 
 me specially. In the Shastras of my own country, 
 in the Upanishads, in the Grita, and in the Bha- 
 gavat, I feel as if I am breathing my own natural 
 atmosphere. It is to me another home replete with 
 dear and hallowed associations of national antiquity, 
 full of the fragrance of a piety as original as it is true 
 and congenial to me. It is as impossible for me to 
 cease to be Hindu in spirit and aspiration, as it is im- 
 possible for me to change my skin. The Upani- 
 shads and the Bhagavat furnish the staple food of 
 my being. I may as soon cease to contemplate on 
 them as lose my spiritual existence. Buddhism is to 
 me also divine. The discipline and ordinances of 
 Sakya Siddartha have a strange authority and attrac- 
 tion for my nature. In meditativeness, in self-conge- 
 
64 BEAiniOISAT. 
 
 niality, in peacefulness, in mental illumination and inter- 
 nal peace, Gautama is my ideal, and from Buddhism I 
 sincerely declare I derive spiritual help which no other 
 religion can afford me. With some of the sentiments 
 of Hafez, Shekh Sadi, and Moulana Roum I have come 
 in contact ; and what is there to equal their beauty, 
 their depth, their tenderness, their intoxicated spiritu- 
 ality ? Therefore I say my glorious religion has 
 opened out to me the scriptures and the spiritual treas- 
 ures of all nations." (Theistic Quarterly Review for 
 1830, p. 17.) 
 
 We are bound to state that in his retrospect of the 
 varied moral forces by which his religious ideas have 
 been generated and matured, Mr. Sen has not been 
 thoroughly frank. He has omitted all mention of the 
 infidel authors of Europe by whose waitings he has 
 been inspired even more powerfully than by the frag- 
 ments of the sacred literature of the world he enumer- 
 ates. His jDublic utterances may be classed under two 
 heads, earlier and later, those with which he identified 
 himself during the first few years of Iris career as a re- 
 former, and those by wmich it has been characterized 
 during the last few years. In his earlier utterances 
 we clearly see the impress or the formative influence of 
 such writers as Theodore Parker and Francis William 
 Newman. From this influence even his later utter- 
 ances are not entirely free ; but these appear colored 
 to some extent by the ideahstic speculations of modern 
 Germany, the mysticism of such writers as Sweden- 
 borg, as well as the philosophic vagaries of ancient 
 India. It is an indisputable fact that Mr. Sen is a bor- 
 rower rather than an original thinker ; and no one can 
 read the almost innumerable pamphlets, to which his 
 own name or the imprimatur of his Association is 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ. 65 
 
 affixed ? without concluding that he borrowed more from 
 foreign than from indigenous sources. 
 
 Mr. Sen's best friends admit that his utterances, 
 
 though eloquent and even imposing, have been charac- 
 terized by a good deal of inconsistency, incoherence, 
 and wildness. But there are, we think, certain 
 lines of thought or characteristic ideas by which they 
 may as a body be, to a great extent, harmonized. To 
 these ideas, the salient features of the Brahmo creed, 
 special attention should be called. But before we do 
 so, Ave must briefly allude to the circumstances which 
 led to his secession from the Adi or Conservative Somaj. 
 
 Babu Keshub Chunder Sen, after what he calls his 
 ' ' conversion, " longed for what may be called the ' i com- 
 munion of saints," as well as for opportunities of 
 spreading truth among his educated countrymen. To 
 gratify this double longing of his soul, he established 
 a small club called the " Good- will Fraternity," the 
 members of which used to meet regularly to have relig- 
 ious conversation with him, as well as to listen to his 
 extempore discourses on topics fitted to stir up the best 
 aspirations of their souls. But while thus engaged he 
 thought of joining a church ; but till a Brahmo tract 
 fell accidentally into his hands he did not know that a 
 church exactly suited to his longings existed in his own 
 country and city. This pamphlet brought him to a de- 
 cision, and in 1858, when only twenty years old, Mr. 
 Sen joined the Somaj founded by Rajah Ram Mohun 
 Roy and reorganized by Babu Debendra Nath Tagore. 
 
 His accession to the moribund Somaj was in reality 
 the accession of life. A new life was infused into its 
 services, its missionary spirit, and its philanthropic ac- 
 tivity. Every department of the work in the associa- 
 tion was revolutionized, especially that having for its 
 
G6 BRAHM0IS3I. 
 
 object the propagation of its creed. The Somaj had, 
 properly speaking, no missionaries ; and the few who 
 did a trifling amount of proselyting work had secular 
 appointments, and could therefore devote to it their 
 hours of leisure and overwork only. Mr. Sen main- 
 tained the correct principle, that men of ability and 
 attainment should be set apart for missionary work ; 
 and with a view to set a good example he threw up his 
 own employment in the Bank of Bengal. He also es- 
 tablished a little association in his own house, called 
 the Sang at Sakha, and exerted such a powerful influ- 
 ence over the members that several of them followed his 
 example, and devoted themselves exclusively to the 
 work of propagating the new faith. In 1861 he him- 
 self visited Krishnaghar, and subsequently he created a 
 sensation among educated natives in Madras and Bom- 
 bay. In 1863 various towns in East Bengal were 
 visited by one of the missionaries thus separated, and 
 in 1866 the new doctrine was preached in the Punjab 
 by another. But Mr. Sen wished to see reform intro- 
 duced in another direction. All the members of the 
 Somaj were by no means men of an earnest type or 
 thoroughgoing reformers. Most of them were some- 
 what like the English reformers in the time of Eliza- 
 beth, who had quietly said mass during the reign of 
 "Bloody Mary," and who, if the reigning sovereign 
 had been supplanted by the unfortunate Queen of 
 Scots, would have quietly said mass again. They at- 
 tended the Brahmo services and Brahmo meetings, but 
 they observed strictly the rules of their respective 
 castes, and were in no way separated by any discernible 
 line of demarcation from their idolatrous countrymen. 
 His influence had a share in leading Babu Debendra 
 jSTath Tagore to cast away his sacred thread, to remove 
 
THE PROGKESSIVE SOMAJ. 07 
 
 the family idol from its sanctuary in his house, and to 
 celebrate his daughter's marriage according to a ritual 
 of theistic rather than idolatrous significance. 
 
 The activity of this enthusiastic champion of Brah- 
 moism was apparently boundless. He issued a series 
 of tracts in English to influence his educated country- 
 men in favor of the new faith, delivered a series of 
 Sunday lectures with the same object in view, and laid 
 the foundation of a Brahmo college which for want of 
 funds he had to give up not long after his secession 
 from the association he was now doing so much to vitalize. 
 
 In 1862 Mr. Sen's services were formally acknowl- 
 edged, and he was made an " Achargi" or Minister of 
 the Somaj. On this occasion he took a step which led 
 to his temporary banishment from his paternal abode. 
 He allowed his wife to dine with the inmates of Babu 
 Debendra Eath Tagore's house, and so deliberately in- 
 fringed the rules of his caste. But he and his wife 
 were not baptized, and consequently their separation 
 from their home was temporary, not final. For about 
 four years after Ins ordination the two leaders of the 
 Brahmo Somaj, Messrs. Tagoreand Sen, worked in har- 
 mony, though they differed from each other in temper- 
 ament and in religious views. Mr. Tagore, though a 
 noble example of fidelity and self-sacrifice, was inclined 
 to be conservative, and so unwilling to work in changes 
 of a violent character. Mr. Sen, on the contrary, was 
 of an ardent and impulsive temperament, and could not 
 put up with what he considered serious irregularities. 
 Particularly he was opposed to allowing persons who 
 had not shaken off their caste privileges and badges to 
 conduct divine service or to officiate as ministers of 
 the new creed. But though Mr. Tagore had himself 
 thrown aside his sacred thread, and opposed the caste 
 
68 BHAHMOISM. 
 
 system both theoretically and practically, he was not 
 prepared to go all lengths, even in this matter, with his 
 youthful and impulsive companion. The consequence 
 was a series of disagreements resulting in a disruption. 
 In 1865 Mr. Sen presented to his older and more con- 
 servative colleague an ultimatum, stating that if the 
 following propositions were not acceded to, both he 
 and some of his friends would be compelled to secede. 
 The propositions are stated below as presented in Dr. 
 Jardine's paper on the Brahmo Somaj in the volumin- 
 ous Report of the Allahabad Missionary Conference. 
 
 1 . That the external signs of caste distinctions — such 
 as the Brahmanical thread — should be no longer used. 
 
 2. That none but Brahmos of sufficient ability and 
 good moral character, who lived consistently with this 
 profession, should be allowed to conduct the services of 
 the Somaj. 
 
 3. That nothing should be said in the Somaj expres- 
 sive of hatred or contempt for other religions. 
 
 The ultimatum was rejected, and Babu Keshub 
 Chunder Sen seceded along with a few friends, and laid 
 the foundation of the Progressive Somaj or the Brahmo 
 Somaj of India. His secession was the departure of 
 life from the Somaj. It broke the heart of Mr. 
 Tagore, according to statements put forward by the 
 progressive party, and ultimately led to his retirement 
 to the Hills. The Somaj is somewhat like an en- 
 dowed but dead church — it has a name to live, but it 
 is dead ! 
 
 This schism will have to be referred to when another 
 of a more portentous nature and larger proportions is 
 treated of. It is not therefore necessary to enlarge 
 upon it here ; suffice it to say that among its causes we 
 see a tendency to a democratic form of government 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ. G9 
 
 occupying a prominent place, along with a desire to 
 push religious and social reforms with ardent by but no 
 means indiscreet zeal. 
 
 Since the organization of his church, Mr. Sen has 
 had one great object in view, and he may fairly be de- 
 scribed as a man of one idea. This is the fascinating 
 idea which took possession of the calmer intellect of 
 Rajah Ram Mohun Roy — the idea of a religious unifica- 
 tion. There are some truths which form the essence of 
 each and every one of the jarring religions of the 
 world. Within the narrow circle of these essential 
 truths, the varied systems of human faith, so prone to 
 wage an interminable war with one another, may meet 
 on terms of perfect amity and good- will. While we 
 hear nothing but the din and clamor of war beyond, 
 there may be eternal peace within. Here there is the 
 essence of all religions, the religion of religions, the 
 creed of creeds. Under the banner of this cream of 
 religious truths, all the religions of the world may 
 unite or coalesce into one faith. Let this creed be 
 adopted and proclaimed, and the world will witness a 
 church within which the conflicting religions of the 
 world will be unified. This religious unification is the 
 great object which Mr. Sen, in pursuance of the relig- 
 ious policy laid down by Rajah Ram Mohun Roy, 
 works night and day to realize. 
 
 But Mr. Sen is aware of the almost illimitable vast- 
 ness of the enterprise, and therefore for the time being 
 he wishes to limit his exertions to a fractional portion 
 of the work which appears to him so necessary and at 
 the same time so feasible. The unification of the 
 almost innumerable religions of the world may not be 
 an accomplished fact till some preliminary minor uni- 
 fications are realized. The unification of nations must 
 
70 BKAHMOISM; 
 
 pave the way to the unification of races, and that to 
 the unification of humanity in general. In the same 
 manner the unification of the varied religions of differ- 
 ent countries must precede the unification of all the 
 forms of faith prevalent on the surface of the globe. 
 Let the preliminary work be done in India, and when 
 that is accomplished a base of operations for its further 
 extension will be afforded. Mr. Sen is therefore at 
 present anxious to raise a national church in which the 
 three great religions of the country — Hinduism, Mo- 
 hammedanism, and Christianity — may be welded into 
 one homogeneous system. Mr. Sen's object is broader 
 than what ISTanak tried to see realized. While that 
 great reformer contemplated the amalgamation of Hin- 
 duism and Mohammedanism, Mr. Sen labors to see 
 these indigenous systems of religion united to each 
 other, and merged into a common creed along with an 
 exotic and a dominant faith. 
 
 To realize this great object a simple creed is needed, 
 and Mr. Sen's creed, stated in different terms in differ- 
 ent places and under different circumstances, is simple 
 enough. About a year before he left for England he 
 delivered a lecture in the Town Hall, Calcutta, entitled 
 "The Future Church of India," subsequently pub- 
 lished, as ah his Town Hall lectures have, from time to 
 time, been, in pamphlet form. In it, after having 
 shown how the popular idolatry of the country and its 
 philosophic pantheism may be merged into a national 
 theism, he proceeds " to evolve the harmony of doc- 
 trines. ' ' And this he does by simply reiterating the two 
 precepts into which the Lord Jesus Christ compresses 
 " the whole of the law and the prophets." " JSTever," 
 he adds, " has the scheme of true religion been so sim- 
 ply and exhaustively expounded. Yerily in these two 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMA.!. 71 
 
 precepts is to be found the substance of all the laws 
 and dispensations of God designed to guide us. " In 
 what he says in the paragraph from which these sen- 
 tences are transcribed he evidently confounds doctrines 
 with precepts, theoretical with practical religion. But 
 perhaps his object is to point to his creed as em- 
 bodied in what our Lord represents as the sum and 
 substance of the law, or as one to be enucleated there- 
 from. He recognizes, of course, the existence of sin, 
 and speaks of a " gospel," " the gospel of the Prodi- 
 gal Son," intending evidently to affirm that when the 
 sinner repents and returns to God his sins are forgiven, 
 his heart is changed, and he is enabled to love God and 
 love man. 
 
 In his numerous addresses in England, where he was 
 received with even greater honor than had been ac- 
 corded to Rajah Ram Mohun Roy, he adopts Theodore 
 Parker's phraseology, and calls his faith the " absolute 
 religion." But his absolute religion differs in some 
 respects from that of the American Unitarian, and 
 consists only of two doctrines — the fatherhood of God 
 and the brotherhood of Man. All ideas of practical 
 religion — repentance, faith, radical change of heart, 
 growth in grace, maturity of spiritual manhood here 
 and hereafter — are to be evolved out of these essential 
 principles. In these discourses he gives the greatest 
 prominence to the idea of the unity of the Godhead, 
 and deduces from that unity his characteristic idea of 
 the unity of the Church. He seems, however, to over- 
 look the fact that these two ideas, the watchwords of 
 his system, are preached in the Bible, in a sense some- 
 what different from what he attaches to them. 
 
 Again, in his Town Hall Lecture of 1876, 
 entitled " Our Faith and Experience," he presents 
 
TZ BRAHMOISM. 
 
 his creed in another form, and that borrowed from 
 Theodore Parker, who, as is well known, was in the 
 habit of preaching as great discoveries the three admis- 
 sions of Kant — God, Immortality, and Duty. After 
 identifying the Spirit- God of ancient India with the 
 Holy Spirit of the Bible, Mr. Sen says : u Simple 
 and short is the creed of the Theistic Church in India. 
 Its entire faith may be evolved out of this natural 
 consciousness of the living Spirit- God. Let us now 
 proceed to analyze the theist's creed. There are 
 only three essential doctrines in theism — the doctrine of 
 God, the doctrine of immortality, and the doctrine of 
 conscience. These three constitute the theist's creed. 
 And yet they are not three doctrines, but one doctrine. 
 They are the constituent elements of one idea, and must 
 be accepted or rejected together. Whoever believes in 
 the infinite and living Spirit -God must perforce accept, 
 as a necessary part of that doctrine, the immortality 
 and accountability of the soul." 
 
 Babu Keshub Chunder Sen's views of God and of the 
 relation in which he stands to nature and man have a 
 dash of pantheism about them, and a clear insight 
 into them must be secured ere his varied utterances and 
 actions can be properly understood, explained, and har- 
 monized. These are presented in his celebrated lect- 
 ures on " Jesus Christ, Europe and Asia," and on 
 i ' Great Men' ' — the lectures which raised him as if by 
 a magical power from obscurity to fame. These two 
 lectures, though apparently on two different and un- 
 connected topics, form one continuous discourse, the 
 latter being a supplement to or an explanation of the 
 former. Mr. Sen has always been in the habit of 
 speaking of Christ in terms to which a Christian would 
 gladly resort in his attempts to express his loyalty and 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ. 73 
 
 devotion to the Saviour. But the terms as emploj^ed 
 by Mr. Sen have a meaning very different indeed from 
 what they bear when uttered by a Christian. His lect- 
 ure on " Jesus Christ, Europe and Asia," taken by 
 itself, would lead, and actually did lead, to his being 
 recognized as one not far from the kingdom of Gocl ; 
 but as interpreted by the subsequently delivered dis- 
 course on 1 1 Great Men, ' ' it would only represent him 
 as a disciple of those rationalists of modern pantheistic 
 schools, who look upon all men as incarnations, and 
 Christ the crowning incarnation. In his lecture on 
 1 i Great Men' ' he represents God as immanent in nature 
 in these significant words : " Behold the Supreme 
 Creator and Kuler of the Universe — infinite in wisdom, 
 power, and goodness — immanent in matter. " "If the 
 world is real, it is real because of the divine power 
 which animates it, and constitutes its immanent vital- 
 ity. ' ' But God dwells in man more thoroughly and in 
 a larger measure than in nature or material objects. 
 " Certainly," says Mr. Sen in his famous lecture, 
 "every man is an incarnation." "True incarnation 
 is not, as popular theology defines it, the absolute per- 
 fection of the divine nature embodied in human form.' ' 
 " It means the Spirit of God manifest in human 
 flesh." He asks, "Are we not conscious, that, how- 
 ever sinful we may be, God dwells in each of us, inhe- 
 rent in our constitution V ' But great men ' ' are greater 
 miracles than ordinary men. " They are ' ' superhuman, 
 and, I may add, supernatural." " God puts into their 
 constitution something superhuman and divine. The 
 prophet is both God and man. He is God- man. He 
 is an incarnation of God." All this is Carlylish in 
 some respects, but the meaning is plain. All men are 
 miracles and incarnations, born to be driven as herds of 
 
74 BRAHMOISAI. 
 
 cattle by great men, who are greater miracles and in- 
 carnations, and among whom Mr. Sen, in his opinion, 
 occupies a by no means contemptible place. Christ is 
 the greatest among his chosen few men of genius, 
 guides of humanity ; and He is therefore the greatest 
 miracle and incarnation. There is, however, no essen- 
 tial or generic difference between Him and the hum- 
 blest man living ! 
 
 This is Mr. Sen's Christology developed in the earli- 
 est as well as the latest of his writings. But he speaks 
 of Christ as his Master, his Saviour, his Lord, and his 
 Life. Is he not then on a par with orthodox Chris- 
 tians in his conceptions of Christ ? But the Christ 
 whom he thus adores is not the historical Christ of the 
 Gospels. The historical Christ, though the greatest of 
 the great men he idolizes in a style characteristically 
 Carlylish, is not worthy of the homage he pays to his 
 idol Christ ; and Him, therefore, he disposes of in hur- 
 ried sentences like the following : " The Lord is my 
 light and my life ; He is my creed and my salvation ; 
 I need nothing else. I honor Christ as my Father's 
 beloved son, and I honor all other prophets and mar- 
 tyrs, but I love my God above all" (" English Yisit," 
 p. 40). " He never demanded worship or adoration — 
 that is due to God, the Creator of the Universe" 
 (" English Yisit," p. 240). " I believe that every dis- 
 ciple, every follower of Christ, must be a Unitarian" 
 ( ' ' English Yisit, " p. 310). The broad facts of His life, 
 His miracles, are all idealized, and the culminating 
 wonder of His life, His resurrection, is represented in 
 his lecture on " God-Yision,' ' delivered in 1880, that is, 
 in one of his latest utterances, as spiritual rather than 
 corporeal. " "When I say Christ is there, do I mean 
 the bodily Christ % No. Science tells me that the 
 
THE PEOGEESSIVE SOMA J. 75 
 
 body is altogether decomposed in a few days after 
 death. Surely the body cannot rise up ; yet my Christ 
 is there. Ah ! it is the Spirit Christ who is there re- 
 clining on the bosom of the Lord " (p. 14). Again, the 
 resurrection of Christ is said in this very lecture on 
 " God-Vision" to be characteristically similar to that of 
 Moses and other prophets. " Every prophet who came 
 down from heaven, as an emanation of spirit -force from 
 the Almighty, must go back to Him, as Christ did, 
 after fulfilling his mission. Where is Moses ? Dead 
 and gone ! The evangelists record a strange and won- 
 derful scene in the life of Christ. I mean his transfig- 
 uration. Marvellous vision indeed ! Moses and Elias 
 on either side of Jesus, as he stood on a high mountain, 
 and they were talking with him ! ' His raiment 
 became shining, exceeding white as snow. ' The soul 
 is lost in amazement as it looks upon this picture. It 
 is said that eye-witnesses saw the event. What does 
 all this mean ? Are we to believe that Moses, after so 
 many centuries, returned to this world ? . . . Xo 
 flesh, no bones do I see, but three spirits, side by side, 
 three noble souls holding communion with each other" 
 (p. 15). 
 
 A broad line of demarcation is drawn between the 
 historical Christ of the Gospels and the ideal Christ 
 whom Mr. Sen adores as his Master and Saviour. " I 
 thus draw a line of demarcation between the visible 
 and outward Christ and the invisible and inward Christ ; 
 between the Christ of images and pictures, and the 
 Christ that grows in the heart ; between dead Christ 
 and living Christ. Jesus is not a proposition to be 
 believed, nor one outward figure to be seen and adored, 
 but simply a spirit to be loved, a spirit of obedience to 
 God that must be incorporated into our spiritual being' ' 
 
76 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 (" English Visit, ' ' p. 244). < ' And what is Christ \ By 
 Christ I understand one who said, ' Thy will be done/ 
 and when I talk of Christ, I simply mean the spirit of 
 loyalty to God, the one spirit of absolute determined- 
 ness and preparedness to say at all times and in all cir- 
 cumstances, ' Thy will be done, not mine' " (" English 
 Visit," p. 248). One more quotation from the same 
 book will suffice : " There is something in the Bible 
 which has staggered many who stand outside the pale 
 of orthodox Christianity, and made them inimical to 
 Christ : I mean His sublime egotism and self-assertion. 
 It is true, Christ says, ' Love God and love man, and 
 ye shall inherit eternal life ; ' but does He not also say, 
 ' 1 am the way, I am the light of the world ; ' does 
 He not say, ' Come unto me all ye that are weary and 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest ' ? He who said 
 that the only way to eternal life is the love of God 
 and the love of man, also says, i I am the way. ' Jesus 
 Christ, then, truly analyzed, means love of God and love 
 of man" (p. 240). 
 
 But it may be said that his later utterances are in 
 greater sympathy with the conceptions of Christ en- 
 shrined in Christian belief. To these then let us go. 
 In 1878, or about four years ago, he delivered a lecture 
 in the Town Hall, Calcutta, under the imposing title, 
 " India asks, Who is Christ ?"■ — meaning by India, as 
 he always does on such occasions, half a dozen Brahmos. 
 The hero who figures in this discourse is his ideal 
 Christ, not the Christ of the Gospels. The doctrine or 
 fact of the pre- existence of Christ is thus explained : 
 ' Did not Christ say that He existed long before Abra- 
 ham lived ? Did He not say distinctly, ' Before Abra- 
 ham was, I am.' How then, and in what shape, did 
 He exist in heaven ? As an idea, as a plan of life, as 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ. 77 
 
 a predetermined dispensation yet to he realized, as 
 purity of character, not concrete hut ahstract, as light 
 not yet manifested" The doctrine of incarnation is 
 couched in these words : " There is an uncreated 
 Christ as .also the created Christ, the idea of Christ and 
 the incarnate Son drawing all his vitality and inspira- 
 tion from the Father." Christ's declarations relative 
 to His essential unity with His Father are of course 
 pantheistically explained, while His " religion' ' is 
 said to be " pure, natural, and perfect idealism. ' ' He 
 was not a materialist, but a true idealist. " He saw 
 His own Spirit, and He saw the Divine Spirit also, 
 and in deep communion He found the two identified. 
 He felt He was but a drop lost altogether in the vast 
 ocean of the Divinity. ' ' He seems brimful of devotion 
 to Christ. " My Christ, my sweet Christ, the neck- 
 lace of my soul, the brightest jewel of my heart. For 
 twenty years have I cherished Him in my inmost soul, 
 in my miserable heart. ' ' Can a Christian say more % 
 But the point of the declaration is blunted the moment 
 we " analyze" his " sweet Christ." " If you have in 
 you the Spirit of truth and filial devotion and self- 
 sacrifice, that is Christ." " He will come to you as 
 self-surrender, as asceticism, as yoga, as the life of God 
 in man, as obedient and humble sonship. For Christ is 
 nothing more. ' ' 
 
 This lecture proves to a demonstration, not merely 
 that the Christ to whom Mr. Sen's enthusiastic hom- 
 age is paid is only a series of ideas, but that his theism 
 is tinged with pantheism, notwithstanding his declara- 
 tions representing that system as " blasphemous" 
 and " detestable." The difference between his pan- 
 theism and that of the Upanishads and the Ved antic 
 school tends to establish our conclusion, that he derives 
 
78 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 his inspiration from foreign sources rather than from 
 those which he carefully enumerates. He believes in 
 dualism, in nature and in man ; but he is prone to rep- 
 resent God, not as nature and humanity in all their en- 
 tireness, but as " the immanent vitality" of nature 
 and humanity. There is something essentially divine 
 in man, and religious progress depends on its recogni- 
 tion and development. "Who needs to be told that this 
 is a foreign idea, not one derived from indigenous 
 sources 1 
 
 Again, when Mr. Sen represents all that is good in 
 Buddha and other reformers and prophets as the off- 
 shoot of the Spirit of Christ dwelling in them, the 
 Christian world need not dance or leap for joy. If 
 Christ analyzed means love to God and man, the spirit 
 of obedience and self-surrender, all that is good in 
 humanity cannot but be traced to His abiding presence 
 hi the heart. But how are we to reconcile the two 
 statements which make Him the brightest emanation 
 from God, and therefore a concrete element of divine 
 nature, and the abstract spirit of self- surrender ? On 
 some future occasion the reconciliation will be effected 
 by the admirably fertile imagination of the great 
 Indian Reformer. 
 
 Meanwhile let us speak of the bases of his creed. In 
 Brahmo statements of these, there has been, as has 
 been shown in a masterly manner in the second of Mr. 
 Dyson's very able tracts on "Brahmo Dogmas," a 
 great deal of vacillation and inconsistency. As has 
 been stated in a former paper, the Vedas were held up 
 in 1845 as the main if not the sole standard of theol- 
 ogy and morality. But in 1855 the infallibility of 
 these documents was abandoned, and the " volume of 
 nature" took their place. All the truths of the new 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ. 79 
 
 faith were derived, mediately and inferentially, or by 
 processes of induction and deduction, from the phe- 
 nomena of nature. But in 1860 Mr. Sen published a 
 series of tracts declaratory of the uselessness of reason- 
 ing processes in matters of religion, and indicatory of 
 a third source of religious knowledge, the ' ' Rock of 
 Intuition." It was assumed that religious truth was 
 made known immediately and instinctively to every 
 man by a faculty of moral perception in him, a faculty 
 which led him to cognize religious truth as naturally 
 as his eyes led him to see the light of the sun. This 
 faculty, however, was ignored in Mr. Sen's lecture on 
 " Great Men," delivered in 1866, and in it three exter- 
 nal sources of information were pointed out — viz. , na- 
 ture, the writings of great men, and inspiration. ' ' The 
 universe exhibits on all sides innumerable works of de- 
 sign and beauty, of adaptation and method, which man 
 cannot explain except by referring them to an intelli- 
 gent First Cause, the Creator of this vast universe." 
 ' - But is God manifested only in matter ? There is 
 another revelation : there is God in history. God 
 manifests Himself in history through great men." 
 " In inspiration the supreme soul is presented to us in 
 our finite souls, and his saving light falls directly upon 
 the eye of faith." 
 
 In his lecture on the " Future Church," delivered in 
 1863, or not long before his departure for England, he 
 speaks of the unity of God and a trinity of manifesta- 
 tions in these words : " The future church will uphold 
 the absolute infinity and unity of the Divine Creator, 
 and will suffer no created thing or being to usurp His 
 sovereignty. It will worship Him alone, and thor- 
 oughly set its face against every form of creature- 
 worship. But while admitting the unity of the Divin- 
 
80 BEAHMOISM. 
 
 ity, the Future Church will recognize a trinity of divine 
 manifestations. God manifests Himself to us through 
 external nature, through the inner spirit, and through 
 moral greatness impersonated in man." Here again 
 inspiration in the sense of direct communication of 
 truth by God is ignored. It is, however, clearly brought 
 out in his English addresses. " If we want knowl- 
 edge, to whom do we go ? Not to this book, not to 
 that book, but to the Lord directly and immediately, 
 and there is nothing that steps in between us and our 
 Father." Two of the other sources are also men- 
 tioned : " Abandoning the infallibility of the Yedas, 
 the Brahmos appealed to nature, to their own hearts, 
 to their own religious intuitions in order to establish 
 themselves upon a purely Theistic basis. ' ' The third 
 source, the writings of great men, or the religious lit- 
 erature of the world, and perhaps its secular literature 
 also, is implied, if not directly mentioned, in several of 
 his statements. 
 
 The four sources of religious knowledge mentioned 
 categorically are Nature, Intuition, the writings of 
 Great Men, and Inspiration. There is a short passage 
 in his " English Visit" which shows, along with a little 
 confusion of ideas, that the greatest stress is laid on the 
 last source. " They (Brahmos) then took a broader 
 and more unexceptionable basis ; they went into their 
 own hearts in order to hear the voice of Gocl, and they 
 went forth throughout the amplitudes of nature in 
 order to study in silence the direct revelation of God' s 
 Spirit." This sentence would at first sight lead one to 
 the conclusion that the human heart and nature, in- 
 stead of being sources of religious truth, are the 
 abodes, so to speak, wherein the voice of God is heard 
 distinctly. God does not speak through but in nature 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMA J. 81 
 
 and intuition, and so the revelation is immediate and 
 direct, not mediate and indirect. This, however, is the 
 apparent, but not the real meaning. The Brahmos 
 admit that religious truths may be evolved from nature 
 by processes of induction and deduction, and from 
 human consciousness by calm reflection, and from the 
 literature of the world by rigid scrutiny and analysis. 
 But the truths thus evolved must be verified before 
 adoption ; and this can be done by direct communica- 
 tions from God. Inspiration then is in particular cases 
 a source of direct revelation, and in all cases the source 
 of verification. Every truth, howsoever obtained or 
 arrived at, whether by processes of reasoning based on 
 natural phenomena, or by a careful analysis of the con- 
 tents of our moral consciousness, or by an examination 
 of the writings of the great prophets of the world, 
 must be recognized as such in the light of God's imme- 
 diate revelation before it can be made an article of 
 belief. And therefore inspiration or a series of direct 
 communications from God are, properly speaking, the 
 abiding basis of the Brahmo creed. This extraordinary 
 claim has been put forth with unhesitating confidence 
 by our Brahmo friends of Mr. Sen's school or persuasion 
 in behalf of their creed ; and if it only could be sub- 
 stantiated by proper evidence, its universal acceptabil- 
 ity would remain unchallenged. But a particle of 
 proof in favor of this stupendous claim has never been 
 advanced. 
 
 Let us conclude this paper with a brief reference to 
 what the Brahmo Somaj of India says about the tests 
 of Brahmo doctrine. In the Theistic Annual for 1872 
 there is an article entitled " The Claims of Theism," 
 and in it the tests and credentials of Brahmoism are 
 presented logically and categorically — that is, in a 
 
82 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 manner much less unconnected and rhapsodical than 
 that in which they are referred to and hinted at in the 
 writings of the great reformer. "We are tempted to 
 make one or two preliminary observations before allud- 
 ing to them. The article begins with these words : 
 ' ' It has sometimes been asked by thoughtful persons, 
 who are considerably interested in the progress of the 
 Brahmo Somaj, as to what the Brahmos consider, in 
 the light of claims, which their religion may assert 
 upon the faith of mankind. It is admitted by many 
 that the principles of that religion, as embodied in its 
 progressive development, are peculiarly new and spirit- 
 ual, but they lack the necessary evidence, the solid and 
 substantial basis of facts upon which men can safely 
 trust their religious future." "What are the " new and 
 spiritual principles" which Brahmoism has brought to 
 light ? The simple creed of Babu Keshub Chunder Sen 
 is as old almost as the world itself, and has not a single 
 feature of novelty about it. Mr. Sen imitates some of 
 the infidel writers of the day, and speaks of universal 
 progress as the rule of life in all its departments. Re- 
 ligion has been keeping pace with science in its devel- 
 opment ; and as new discoveries and inventions are the 
 trophies scattered in the path of secular knowledge, 
 new truths and principles are pointed to by the moral 
 nature of man as its recent triumphs. But people in 
 the habit of talking in this strain fail to explain why 
 no progress has been made in the sphere of religion and 
 morals during the last eighteen hundred years. While 
 science has been advancing with giant strides, religion 
 has continued stationary ; and not a single doctrinal 
 truth or preceptive principle has been added to the 
 stock of knowledge Christ and His apostles left behind 
 them. In the sphere of religion especially there is 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMA J. 83 
 
 nothing new under the sun, because nothing new is 
 needed. 
 
 Again the writer remarks : " The first great error 
 of which every system of religion is, without excep- 
 tion, guilty, and which the Theists congratulate them- 
 selves on having escaped, is the universal narrowness 
 which precludes the unreserved adoption of truth, irre- 
 spective of its origin or process of development. ' ' That 
 is, Christians, for instance, are not willing to recognize 
 and accept truth discovered outside the pale of their 
 religion. If this were a fact, the charge of narrow- 
 mindedness might justly be brought against them. 
 But we emphatically deny the assumed fact, and we 
 indignantly repel the charge. Nor do we in the slight- 
 est degree object to an adoption and appropriation 
 of Scripture truths by the Brahmos or by any other 
 class of people. What we object to is the vainglo- 
 rious spirit which, after having taken truths from our 
 religious books, parades them as its own discoveries ; 
 and the spirit of thoughtless, superficial criticism 
 which would trace to intuition truths which irrefraga- 
 ble evidence ascribes to supernatural revelation attested 
 by stupendous miracles. 
 
 The three tests of Brahmo doctrine, enumerated in 
 the article alluded to, are simplicity, spirituality, and 
 usefulness— different obviously from the three tests of 
 intuitive truths specified by Immanuel Kant — viz., 
 simplicity, universality, and necessity. By simplicity, 
 however, our Brahmo friends mean, not merely plain- 
 ness of expression and transparency of meaning, but 
 universal acceptability also. Hear what the writer 
 says : " The simplicity of theistic doctrines is, we 
 think, a great claim upon the faith of the candid in- 
 quirer. They are so plain, so unambiguous, and so 
 
84 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 fundamental, that they make direct entrance into every 
 heart, and strike a response upon the rudimentary 
 chord of the moral and spiritual nature." If simplic- 
 ity were of itself a great recommendation, the plain 
 and unambiguous statement, there is no God, ought to 
 be accepted by every candid inquirer ; but our friend's 
 meaning doubtless is, that the Brahmo doctrines are so 
 decidedly true, that the moment they are stated in in- 
 telligible terms they are instinctively accepted. And 
 therefore all the tests of intuitive truths mentioned by 
 Kant are included in his first test. Again, the word 
 " spirituality" is used by him in this connection in the 
 sense of inspiration, rather than in its ordinary sense. 
 "We humbly and repentantly enter into the folds of 
 our being, try to behold everything there by the light 
 which kind heaven kindles in the bosom of every ear- 
 nest worshipper. " " What we know, little indeed as 
 that may be, we know from the promptings of the 
 supreme Spirit in the heart, the Spirit whom we wor- 
 ship and humbly labor to find. ' ' The third test is set 
 forth in these words : " The practical importance of 
 theistic doctrines constitutes another and a very strong 
 claim. Our views being formed from fife produce 
 their reaction on life. Their spirituality, to which we 
 have alluded, would mean nothing if it did not produce 
 marked results upon the soul and upon the activities 
 of life." 
 
 Let it be observed that two of these tests are super- 
 fluous — the first and the third. The second, inspira- 
 tion, is enough to substantiate the claim of any truth 
 to acceptance and homage. If the Brahmo doctrines 
 have been revealed by God, or if they have been con- 
 firmed by the testimony of God, or, what is the same 
 thing, by divine revelation, they are universally obliga- 
 
THE PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ. 85 
 
 tory. But what proof do our Mends give for the 
 authority thus claimed for them ? All their arguments 
 under this head may be summarized in the following 
 syllogism : They that seek religious truth earnestly 
 cannot but find it ; we have sought truth earnestly, 
 ergo, we have found it. Granting the major premiss, 
 we have to be assured that our friends have sought 
 truth with sufficient earnestness, with perfect freedom 
 from prejudice, with a mind thoroughly unbiassed, an 
 intellect calm and dispassionate, and a heart entirely 
 loyal to truth. The man must be bold indeed who can 
 affirm that he has been seeking truth exactly in the 
 spirit in which it ought to be sought, and that if he 
 fails to attain it his failure is a reflection on the justice 
 and goodness of God. The third is a double test, and 
 points to the beneficent results of the system on the 
 soul and on the world. So far as the inward results 
 are concerned, the assertion of the Brahmos is the only 
 ground of conviction. It is after all a very weak 
 ground ; for, prone as we are to give them credit for 
 probity and veracity, we are led by the superficiality 
 of thought stamped on their creed, and the contradic- 
 tions into which they have allowed themselves to be 
 betrayed, to withhold perfect confidence from their 
 judgment. Again, as to external results, nothing as 
 yet accomplished by Brahmoism can bear the slightest 
 comparison with the fruits of the benevolent activity 
 and humanitarian enthusiasm with which Comtism was 
 associated not long since ! The first therefore is the 
 only test admissible, and, judged by it, the peculiar 
 features of Brahmoism are found wanting. This we 
 hope to show in our next discourse. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 
 
 It is time for us to show that the affirmations and 
 negations of Brahmoism, barring the fundamental 
 truths forming the creed of pure naturalism, are, judged 
 by the test to which they have a right to appeal, and 
 to which they do appeal oftener perhaps than to the 
 others, groundless. This test is intuition, or the moral 
 consciousness of man, and it is the only test which is 
 admissible in an argument with them — the two others, 
 inspiration and utility being, as has already been 
 shown, emphatically not so. 
 
 So long as our Brahmo friends confine themselves to 
 general beliefs and vague assertions, they speak the 
 language of intuition, and nothing can be said against 
 them. Mr. Sen's general creed is thoroughly unex- 
 ceptionable. No sensible man has anything to say 
 against him when he enlarges on the doctrines of the 
 Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man ; or 
 when he expresses his belief in God, immortality, and 
 human accountability ; or when he represents love to 
 God and man as the essence of practical religion. 
 These vague generalities are found imbedded in one 
 and all the religions of the world ; and we are only 
 tempted to laugh at people prone to state these truisms 
 with an air of consequence as if they were new discov- 
 eries. "We maintain that in proclaiming these funda- 
 mental truths Christianity has an advantage to which 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 87 
 
 Brahmoism cannot possibly lay claim. Our holy relig- 
 ion takes them for granted, and scarcely goes the 
 length of formally stating them. But what it says re- 
 garding them may be justly regarded as an authorita- 
 tive proclamation emanating from the very throne of 
 the Almighty. No room for doubt is left, no hesi- 
 tancy or vacillation of faith is possible. The scientific 
 man, prone to laugh at every item of knowledge that 
 comes from regions beyond the narrow horizon of the 
 senses — prone, moreover, to regard with distrust the 
 general beliefs called intuitions — is bound to accept the 
 fundamental truths of religion on the ground of objec- 
 tive revelations attested by an array of evidence which 
 even he cannot gainsay. And the man whom a long- 
 continued and almost irresistible habit of self-examina- 
 tion has led to a complete distrust of self and its utter- 
 ances, cannot but be too glad to find those convictions 
 of his heart, of which, though prone to regard them 
 with distrust, he cannot get rid, confirmed by declara- 
 tions the divine origin of which he is made to see and 
 admit by irrefragable evidence. Christianity obviates 
 all scepticism about the fundamental truths of religion 
 by calling down, so to speak, an attestation of heaven 
 in their behalf. While Brahmoism places them on the 
 basis of intuition — a basis on the whole weak, though 
 sound — Christianity sees them built up, so to speak, on 
 the rock of that Word which shall abide though heaven 
 and earth pass away. But as regards these general 
 truths let us have no quarrel with Brahmoism. Let us 
 accept them on the testimony of intuition, and without 
 such confirmation as the Bible brings to their aid. 
 
 But these truths form a religion which is not 
 obviously suited to the condition of fallen man, how- 
 ever well adapted it might be to the condition of those 
 
88 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 intelligences who have never fallen from their original 
 state of purity and righteousness. Something more is 
 needed — namely, a plan of salvation adequate to the 
 emergencies of his case to complete it. From generals, 
 therefore, Brahmoism must descend to particulars ; 
 and when it does so it declares war against the species 
 of proof on which it builds its superstructure of doc- 
 trine and precept — viz. , its vaunted ' ' rock of intuition. ' ' 
 To prove this, let us judge its varied affirmations and 
 negations by its own crucial test. 
 
 And the very first of its affirmations is that religion 
 is a science of human origin, and partakes of the pro- 
 gressive character of the other sciences. It is not 
 necessary to prove this position of the Somaj by quota- 
 tions from the writings of its champions. One of the 
 articles of the revised creed of the Adi Somaj, pub- 
 lished in 1866, in a tract called " Brief Survey," runs 
 thus : " The Brahmos believe that the religious condi- 
 tion of man is progressive, like the other parts of his 
 condition in this world. " In an article on the ' ' De- 
 velopment of the Brahmo Somaj," in the Theistic 
 Annual of 1875, "the progressiveness" of religion is 
 thus set forth : " The third and last requisite of a 
 creed ought to be its progressiveness. The great battle 
 between theology and science cannot terminate, unless 
 the religious beliefs of mankind are so constructed as to 
 include, embrace, and welcome the truths of all depart- 
 ments of human speculation and research. If religion 
 has not the elasticity, the capacity, the life, and the 
 strength to adapt itself to philosophy and science, phi- 
 losophy shall progress, and faith lag behind." The 
 theory propounded in these sentences is well known to 
 the public. Keligion is a science as decidedly human 
 as pyschology, and it has been making progress since 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 89 
 
 the beginning, from infancy to youth, from youth to 
 manhood, and from manhood to old age. But it has 
 not reached its limit of progression yet ; on the con- 
 trary, like other sciences, it is on the move, and its fu- 
 ture form may be as different from its present shape, 
 as that is different from the fetich type in which it 
 appeared in its infantine state. What Theodore 
 Parker says of his " Absolute Keligion " may be said 
 of the sciences in general, and is fitted to set forth its 
 human origin. 
 
 IsTow with reference to this specious theology we 
 may fearlessly affirm that intuition cannot possibly be 
 appealed to in its favor. It involves a question of 
 history rather than one of intuitional belief. And 
 history with its stubborn facts is marshalled against it. 
 The very fact alluded to in a foregoing paper, that 
 religion has continued stationary during the last eigh- 
 teen hundred years, while the sciences have been 
 making wonderful progress, tends to neutralize the 
 theory in question. Add to this the fact that history 
 draws a broad line of demarcation between the origin. 
 of true religion and that of science, and proves by an 
 array of stupendous but undeniable miracles ' ' that a 
 series of preparatory revelations culminated in Christ, 
 by whose immediate disciples the volume of inspira- 
 tion was closed and sealed." History then belies the 
 theory in question ; but whether its groundlessness is 
 disclosed by history or not, one thing is certain — viz. , 
 that intuition says nothing about it. If it is to be 
 sustained at all, it must have a basis different from the 
 rock of intuition. 
 
 Religion may in one sense be represented as a pro- 
 gressive science. The truths imbedded in the Bible 
 have no more been thoroughly mastered, either in a 
 
90 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 mass or in detail, than the truths contained in the vol- 
 ume of nature. And, therefore, as the science of exegesis 
 makes progress, clearer ideas of the truths revealed 
 will be carried out, and fresher and better classifications 
 will be attempted with success. But the volume of 
 inspiration will not have a word added to or taken 
 from it. Let our Brahmo friends point to a new 
 truth, or truth not discoverable in the Bible — truth, be 
 it observed, not theory — and we shall admit their view 
 of the progressiveness of religion. 
 
 2. Another of their affirmations, akin to the one al- 
 ready taken notice of, is that men in these days are in- 
 spired as Paul and Peter and John were. Babu Keshub 
 Chunder Sen's theory of great men, alluded to in a 
 former paper, may be cited as proof of the tenacity with 
 which this position is held ; and his recent utterances, 
 to which reference will have to be made in a subsequent 
 paper, make it evident that he represents himself as 
 inspired in the same sense in which the great founders 
 of the varied religions of the world were, in his opinion. 
 He does not call himself a prophet, but he represents 
 himself as " a singular man," and claims inspiration in 
 unmistakable terms. And as there is, in his opinion, no 
 generic difference between the inspiration with which 
 Paul, for instance, was favored and that which made 
 Shakespeare the extraordinary poet he was, his claim to 
 inspiration is equivalent to a claim to being inspired in 
 the same sense in which the ancient Jewish prophets 
 and their successors, the apostles, were. But it is to 
 be observed that these inspired writers did something 
 more than merely claim inspiration. They brought 
 forward in attestation of their claim such credentials as 
 their enemies could not gainsay. They revealed new 
 truths, and worked miracles to set forth the stamp of 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 91 
 
 heaven on their declarations and teachings. But the 
 inspired heroes of the day have nothing new, barring 
 their vagaries, to teach ; and they fail to bring forward 
 even a shadow of evidence in support of the extraor- 
 dinary claims they advance. Nor can this affirma- 
 tion on their part be substantiated by intuitive evi- 
 dence, involving as it does a question of fact, not an 
 intuition of the mind. 
 
 3. Another of the affirmations found wanting when 
 judged by their own standard is that sin punishes and 
 annihilates itself. In a paper on " Sin, its Origin, 
 Nature, and Punishment," in the Theistic Annual for 
 1873, we have such assertions as these : " The punish- 
 ment of sin is sin." " When sin becomes loathsome, 
 the mind that is sinful lives with perpetual loathsome- 
 ness ; the torments of hell are within it. Thus sin is its 
 own punishment." " Righteousness grows forever, and 
 triumphs in the end ; sin slowly kindles the fire, which 
 ultimately consumes it, and works its own destruc- 
 tion." " We consider punishment not to be vengeful, 
 but remedial. I have said sin consumes itself, and 
 works out its own cure." 
 
 It must be admitted that the Brahmo theory regard- 
 ing sin and salvation is involved in great confusion, and 
 statements can be brought out of their writings fitted 
 to oppose the sentiments expressed in these quotations. 
 But it is certain that the theory excludes the notion of 
 arbitrary punishment annexed to sin. Disease and 
 death, distress and calamity, indigence and disgrace are 
 scarcely represented as punishments attached to sin by 
 the justice of God. They are attributed to certain 
 immutable laws at work, and the punishment is con- 
 fined to its effects within the heart. It is expressly 
 said that " the punishment of sin then only commences 
 
92 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 when the soul learns to aspire after God." When the 
 soul sees the loathsome effects of sin in it, it is pained, 
 and led to repentance, faith, and prayer, and the ulti- 
 mate result is its deliverance from sin. In this way sin 
 punishes and annihilates itself. Both our instincts 
 and experience are marshalled against this idea. We 
 naturally and instinctively associate physical calamities 
 with sin. We of course do not look upon pain as an 
 unmixed evil, and we readily admit that in the dispen- 
 sations of Providence it perforins functions on the 
 whole beneficial. But we instinctively look upon it as 
 an important factor in that economy of a punitive char- 
 acter which was ushered in by sin, either in anticipation 
 of its appearance or subsequent to it. The existence 
 of pain is no more a necessity than the existence of 
 sin, and the mistakes into which rationalism, in and 
 out of India, has fallen are traceable to its unmistaka- 
 ble tendency to regard them both as such. 
 
 4. Another affirmation of Brahmoism is that repent- 
 ance is the only possible atonement for sin. This sen- 
 timent is the vital principle of its creed, and runs 
 through all the declarations with which it is associated. 
 On page 21 of the well-known tract, " The Brahmo 
 Somaj Vindicated," we have this statement : " True 
 atonement means to be at one with God ; true repent- 
 ance, by delivering us from sin, brings us back to God ; 
 hence our belief that repentance is atonement — yea, the 
 only atonement possible." Mr. Sen himself, in his 
 " Lectures and Tracts" (p. 114), thus speaks of repent- 
 ance : u True penitence humbles man to the dust, and 
 makes him put his entire trust in the Lord for the pur- 
 pose of salvation. As such, repentance is essential to 
 faith ; for not till man's proud head is humbled down 
 under an overpowering sense of his own unworthiness 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 93 
 
 would he cling to God's feet ; not till he distrusts him- 
 self would he trust the redeeming and all-sufficient 
 grace of God. Repentance begins the good work of con- 
 version, which faith and prayer carry on. By opening 
 the eyes of the sinner to his iniquities it fosters a long- 
 ing for deliverance ; faith and prayer act as guides, and 
 safely lead the penitent sinner into the kingdom of 
 heaven, where he is regenerated by divine grace ! " In 
 this declaration salvation is traced, as it should be, to 
 divine grace ; but what is to be taken special notice of 
 is the fact that no such intermediate link between re- 
 pentance and the grace of God, as is implied in the 
 Christian doctrine of the atonement or the universal 
 doctrine of sacrifice, is admitted. Repentance is repre- 
 sented to be the only atonement possible for sin. But 
 this assertion, as we showed in a foregoing paper, 
 militates against our instinctive beliefs or intuitions, 
 which, while representing repentance as absolutely 
 necessary, points out the necessity of something else — 
 the sacrifice of an innocent victim for sin. Buddha de- 
 clared a war of extermination against the universally 
 believed doctrine of sacrifice, but his followers all over 
 the world offer sacrifices in spite of his positive declar- 
 ations and injunctions to the contrary. Such is the 
 power of instinct ! 
 
 5. The last affirmation of Brahmoism of which we 
 shall take notice is that there is left in fallen man such 
 recuperative power as may enable him to work out his 
 own salvation, under, of course, the grace of God. 
 Hear what Mr. Sen says on the subject : " In the 
 religion of the world man is his own guide, and to a 
 great extent his own saviour. He depends upon his 
 own faculties and powers for the attainment of truth, 
 and for deliverance from sin" (" Lectures and Tracts," 
 
94 BRA.HMOIS^r. 
 
 p. 100). The reader ought once more to be reminded 
 that Mr. Sen's utterances under this head, like almost 
 all his utterances, are characterized by such inconsis- 
 tency and incoherence that passages may be culled out 
 of his writings fitted to upset our conclusion ; but as he 
 has always systematically opposed the supernatural in 
 the proper sense of the term, he is bound to posit some 
 such recuperative power to render salvation in the case 
 of fallen man a possibility. It must be admitted that 
 no Christian even speaks by the grace of God more grate- 
 fully than he does in every case of conversion or regen- 
 eration ; but his whole scheme of salvation would be 
 meaningless if this grace were for a moment supposed 
 capable of acting except through means, strictly speak- 
 ing, natural. We are therefore, on the whole, right in 
 concluding that according to the Brahmo creed man has 
 left in him some recuperative power, which, properly 
 utilized, might lead to his being saved. But man does 
 not instinctively look to his own faculties and powers 
 for the attainment of truth and for his deliverance from 
 sin. On the contrary, he looks up for supernatural 
 help, naturally and instinctively, and consequently his 
 moral consciousness is marshalled against the Brahmo 
 position. 
 
 All the affirmations of Brahmoism are, judged by their 
 own criterion, the rock of intuition, utterly groundless. 
 This may with equal justice be said of all the negations 
 which cut so grand a figure in its creed. In both its 
 aiiirmations and negations Brahmoism systematically 
 opposes the very principle which it loudly and osten- 
 tatiously represents as the fundamental basis of its 
 faith. 
 
 1. The foremost place among the negations of Brah- 
 moism is occupied by the statement : Miracles are not 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 95 
 
 possible. It is not necessary to bring forward proofs 
 in corroboration of this negative assertion, inasmuch 
 as it runs through the entire literature of Brahmoism 
 and underlies the entire superstructure of its doctrine 
 and precept. In view, however, of this statement we 
 are tempted to repeat what John Foster said about 
 rank atheism. The wonder turns upon the prodigious 
 amount of knowledge which has brought our Brahmo 
 friends to the conclusion that miracles are not possible. 
 Do these gentlemen pretend to a thorough knowledge 
 of the past history of the universe, such as may enable 
 them to feel warranted in affirming that no miracle 
 was ever wrought by God during the eternity that is 
 gone by % Is their knowledge of the future so complete 
 as to justify the affirmation on their part that no mira- 
 cle shall ever be wrought in the eternity that is to 
 come ? Is their knowledge of the universe, as it exists 
 now, so complete that the} 7 " can stand up and affirm 
 with oracular assurance that the immutable law of 
 nature is not being interfered with in any portion of 
 any of the innumerable worlds of which it is com- 
 posed, in any nook or corner of its hmitless and il- 
 limitable expanse ? Again, does the Brahmo profess to 
 have so thoroughly measured the power of the 
 Almighty as to be able to point out with sufficient 
 accuracy the circumstances under which it is converted 
 into utter impotency ? Has he so adequate an idea 
 of each of the elements which constitute divine wisdom, 
 or so adequate a knowledge of the principles by which 
 his administration of the universe is guided, or of the 
 laws and forces through which He acts, as might 
 make it philosophical on his part to put forward a 
 statement of such wonderful breadth and compass ? 
 He must indeed be himself a God in order to be able 
 
96 BRAHM0IS3J:. 
 
 to affirm the impossibility of the supernatural with 
 oracular assurance. 
 
 The inconsistency of this statement with the funda- 
 mental article of his creed — viz. , there is a God of bound- 
 less power and wisdom, as well as infinite holiness — is 
 too obvious to be formally mentioned. Even John 
 Stuart Mill affirms that if the existence of God were 
 admitted a miracle could not reasonably be represented 
 as impossible. Had the Brahmo been a materialist or a 
 pantheist, such an assertion on his part might have 
 had the shadow of a reason to justify it ; but spring- 
 ing from the lips of a theist it cannot but sound strange. 
 
 But let us judge this statement by the great test of 
 Brahmoism, intuition. That men instinctively believe 
 in the possibility of the supernatural is proved by 
 the fact that the belief is upheld by all the religions 
 of the world, and prevails in every country, and among 
 all classes of people, a few conceited persons excepted. 
 The universality of the belief tends to set forth its in- 
 stinctive character, while nothing has ever been 
 brought forward fitted to place it in antagonism to in- 
 tuition. 
 
 When the impossibility of the supernatural is insisted 
 upon, the idea of a supernatural revelation attested by 
 supernatural occurrences is of course precluded. But 
 belief in such a revelation is universal, and in accord 
 with the moral instincts of humanity. Judged by the 
 great criterion of the Somaj, its antagonism to what 
 is sneeringly called a book revelation, is misplaced. It 
 is not at all difficult to prove that such opposition is 
 incompatible with the claim to inspiration it has always 
 advanced, to a great extent of late. When a truth is 
 made manifest by inspiration, and put upon record, the 
 result is a paper revelation. The Brahmos have their 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 1)7 
 
 symbols and standards, all to be traced, according to 
 their assumptions, to divine inspiration, and therefore 
 to be accepted without hesitation. Their creeds are 
 paper creeds, and they, each of them separately and 
 all of them joined together, embody a book revelation, 
 the nightmare against which they have been fighting 
 with might and main. 
 
 2. Another of the negations of Brahmoism is that 
 God, while ready to hear and answer our petitions for 
 spiritual blessings, does not and cannot listen to our 
 prayers for temporal blessings. The reasoning we have 
 arrayed against the first negation may with great pro- 
 priety be marshalled against this. The Brahmo must 
 know a great deal indeed before he can feel justified in 
 affirming that God cannot hear and answer our prayers 
 for blessings appertaining to our physical life. He must 
 study and master the varied principles of the divine 
 administration, must have a complete insight into the 
 thoughts and purposes of God, as well as into the work- 
 ings of the varied forces of the universe, ere he is justi- 
 fied in venturing such an assertion. But let us judge it 
 by his own standard or criterion — by the " rock" on 
 which he builds his doctrinal and preceptive superstruct- 
 ure. Nothing is more certain than the fact that men in- 
 stinctively pray for temporal blessings as well as for those 
 of a spiritual character. When hungry or athirst, or 
 sick or in prison, man instinctively looks up to God for 
 help ; and so strong is this instinct that even those who 
 call themselves atheists, or plume themselves on their 
 deliverance from the superstitions of a theological age, 
 are overcome by it. Anecdotes are afloat fitted to 
 show that atheists, when faced by sudden danger, in- 
 stinctively cry to God for help. And if prayers for 
 temporal blessings are impertinent and useless, no 
 
98 BRAHMOISST. 
 
 dependence can possibly be placed on our moral in- 
 stinct, and the conclusion is irresistible that God is 
 tantalizing 1 us by implanting in our hearts longings 
 which are never to be gratified. The religious feeling 
 in man — his sense of dependence on a higher Being, 
 the basis of Brahmoism — irresistibly leads us to pray 
 for blessings pertaining to our physical life as well as 
 for those appertaining to our higher nature ; and the 
 system which taboos particular kinds of prayer and 
 allows others mocks universal instinct, which has been 
 represented as the groundwork of all religion. 
 
 It is moreover to be observed that the reasons 
 brought forward to support this position may be mar- 
 shalled against every species of prayer — for spiritual as 
 well as temporal blessings. These are stated in the 
 following quotation from Mr. Sen's works : " Men can- 
 not pray for physical blessings, because physical phe- 
 nomena happen according to immutable laws. They 
 can pray only for spiritual blessings. ' ' JSTo w, is Mr. Sen 
 ignorant of the well-known fact that spiritual phenom- 
 ena are, like physical phenomena, guided by immuta- 
 ble laws ? And if such guidance is an insuperable ob- 
 stacle in the way of prayer for physical blessings, 
 prayer for spiritual blessings must also be tabooed or 
 represented as both impertinent and useless. Laws in 
 the moral world are as fixed and immutable as laws in 
 the physical- world ; and if it is impossible for God to 
 interfere with their regular course, all talk of religion 
 is bosh. 
 
 3. Another well-known negation of the Somaj is that 
 God cannot pardon sin. God, its champions justly 
 affirm, is just, and as justice demands the adequate 
 punishment of sin, He cannot remit it without being, 
 in plain English, unjust. Again, punishment follows 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ COXTIKQED. 99 
 
 sin as an inevitable sequence, and therefore God can- 
 not remit it without interfering with the established 
 laws of causation — that is, without making a miracle, 
 the impossibility of which is loudly and emphatically 
 proclaimed. In the pamphlet entitled "The Brahmo 
 Somaj Vindicated " (p. 22) we have this emphatic 
 statement : " Repentance will save the sinner, says 
 Brahmoism. Save him from what ? Xot from the 
 punishment due to sins already committed, for divine 
 justice is immutable and its decrees irreversible, but 
 save him from sin. You may fabricate a convenient 
 theory of atonement, and do what you like ; . . . 
 nothing will save you from the punishment you deserve. 
 The moment you have sinned, justice will rise up and 
 say, ' Sinner, thou hast sinned, and must be ade- 
 quately punished. ' ' ' Mr. Dyson, in his able pamphlet 
 on the " Brahmic Dogma of Divine Forgiveness," pre- 
 sents the following extract from a tract entitled " Es- 
 sential Principles" : "Every sinner must suffer the 
 consequences of his own sins, sooner or later, in this 
 world or in the next. ' ' He presents other quotations 
 from Brahmo writings in corroboration of the Brahmo 
 theory of the unforgiveableness of sin, but these will 
 suffice. 
 
 This negation may be disposed of precisely in the 
 same way in which the others have .been. The 
 Brahmo must know a great deal more than he does to 
 feel warranted in proclaiming, as he is doing, the un- 
 forgiveableness of sin. He must have an adequate and 
 correct idea of the justice of God and a thorough 
 knowledge of the principles of the divine administration 
 before he can commit himself with logical consistency 
 or philosophic fairness to so bold a declaration. 
 Again, his assertion that God cannot interpose between 
 
100 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 sip and its punishment in consequence of the immuta- 
 bility of laws of nature is tantamount to the assertion 
 that God cannot work miracles — an assertion ludicrously 
 unphilosophical, though frequently made. 
 
 But this negation, judged by the standard of the 
 Somaj — the moral consciousness of man — appears utter- 
 ly groundless. Men instinctively believe in the for- 
 giveableness of sin, and instinctively pray for pardon. 
 To go no further, the religious literature of our own 
 country makes it evident that man naturally believes 
 both in the willingness and power of God to forgive, 
 and prays for pardon as well as purification. The 
 Bishis of the Rig Veda times did not believe in the 
 propriety of restricting prayer to spiritual blessings, for 
 they were never tired of praying for houses, wives, 
 children, cows, sheep, wealth, and prosperity. Nor 
 did they believe in the unforgiveableness of sin, inas- 
 much as they often prayed that the gods might pardon 
 their own and the sins of their forefathers. And their 
 example has been instinctively followed by all classes 
 of the people of our country at all times, in spite 
 of the doctrine of transmigration, which declares all 
 interposition, divine or human, between sin and its 
 merited punishment both improper and unavailing. 
 And men everywhere will be led by an irresistible in- 
 stinct to psay for pardon in spite of the Brahmo repro- 
 duction of the idea of unforgiveableness associated with 
 this exploded doctrine. The Brahmos in affirming the 
 impossibility of pardon are overturning the foundations 
 of their own creed — their moral intuitions — which are 
 one and all marshalled against an idea so obviously 
 strange and so cruelly disappointing. 
 
 Again, we may ask, with what words of comfort or 
 consolation do the Brahmos approach us ? If they 
 
PROGRESSIVE S03HAJ CONTINUED. 101 
 
 cannot assure us of pardon, what on earth or in heaven 
 have they to give us ? We are conscious of sin. Our 
 consciousness of sin is a complex rather than a simple 
 mental state, and it leads us to a recognition of its 
 malignity, guilt, and obnoxiousness to punishment. 
 Both from the punishment as well as from the malig- 
 nity, depravity, or impurity of sin we long for deliver- 
 ance. It may be easy to say that we ought to be will- 
 ing manfully to accept the punishment which our own 
 sins bring upon us, while naturally desirous to get rid 
 of their degrading consequences on the heart. But, 
 constituted as we are, we naturally shrink from and 
 deprecate the suffering as well as the depraving influence 
 associated with sin ; and it is the glory of Christianity 
 to regard us in its exhortations and denunciations ex- 
 actly as we are, not as we might be. The cry of our 
 heart is pardon, pardon, pardon. "Without pardon it 
 is agitated and restless, and nothing but pardon can 
 bring it peace. And if the Brahmo religion cannot 
 come to us with assurances of pardon it has not a word 
 of comfort or consolation to speak to us. According to 
 it the prospect before us is gloomy indeed ! We are 
 daily adding to the stock of our sins, and shall go on 
 adding to it to the last moment of our lives. We are 
 heaping up unto ourselves wrath against the day of 
 wrath, and the revelation of the righteous judgment of 
 God. We shall have then to leave this world with the 
 sure prospect of punishment before us. What a 
 gloomy prospect this ! But the Brahmo points to a 
 ray of light flickering through the deep gloom. The 
 punishment before us is, according to him, terminable, 
 and the night will end in a day of unclouded sunshine. 
 This assertion brings us to the last negation of Brahmo- 
 ism — the last, we mean, of which we shall take notice. 
 
102 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 Against no doctrine have the Brahmos inveighed 
 more energetically and more systematically than the 
 doctrine of eternal punishment. Numerous passages 
 can be quoted from Mr. Sen's writings and those of his 
 coadjutors fitted to set forth what may be called the 
 Brahmo antipathy to eternal punishment ; but the fol- 
 lowing from his " English Visit" (p. 175) will suffice : 
 " It would be an insult to the majesty of God's throne, 
 it would be a blasphemy against divine mercy, to say 
 that He will wrathfully condemn any sinner to eternal 
 punishment." Let us repeat what we have said under 
 so many heads. The Brahmo in decrying eternal pun- 
 ishment exposes himself to the charge of rashness, which 
 may properly be brought against the man who stands 
 up and affirms, ' ' There is no God. ' ' Our friend must 
 know a great deal more than he does — must, in short, 
 be omniscient — before he can assume such an attitude 
 with even philosophical fairness. He must have a 
 thorough knowledge of the demands of divine justice, 
 and so be in a position to pronounce an opinion as to 
 the congruity or incongruity of eternal punishment 
 therewith. He must have a thorough knowledge of 
 all the principles of the divine administration before he 
 can denounce such punishment as inconsistent with 
 them. He must be able to show by chapter and verse 
 that eternal punishment is not fitted to promote the 
 ends of God's government of the universe, or secure 
 the highest good of the largest number of God's ra- 
 tional creatures. In a word, he must be a God to be 
 able to denounce as he does eternal punishment as in- 
 consistent with the wisdom, goodness, and mercifulness 
 of God. Bat he says that his own feelings revolt from 
 such a doctrine. What then ? His feelings, guided 
 as they are by sin, revolt from many things that are 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMA J CONTINUED. 103 
 
 good. Are his feelings to be made the measure of 
 truth ? The feelings of the prisoner always revolt 
 from the sentence pronounced against him by the 
 judge, but these are never brought forward as an irre- 
 fragable argument against its wisdom or justice. 
 
 It is not our object now to stand up for eternal pun- 
 ishment : it may be a creation of superstitious fear. 
 But we do maintain that our friends cannot with philo- 
 sophical fairness denounce it as inconsistent with the 
 wisdom or the benevolence of God. They have no 
 right to say what the punishment of sin will be, how 
 long it will continue, or whether it must in every case 
 be remedial and nothing more. These are matters 
 that can be settled only by divine revelation. The 
 Word of God must be studied, and if eternal punish- 
 ment is clearly taught therein, it must be accepted ; 
 otherwise not. 
 
 It is not necessary for us to remark here that the 
 doctrinal platform of the Somaj, together with what 
 we have called its affirmations and negations, does not 
 present a single novel feature. In its adoption of the 
 principles we have set forth the incongruity of, accord- 
 ing to the criterion it has itself laid down, as well as 
 those of a more general character, it has shown inclis- 
 criminative imitativeness rather than originality or 
 breadth of thought. But its imitativeness reaches its 
 climax when it adopts Christian terminology in the 
 sense attached to it as a whole, and to its varied ele- 
 ments by infidel writers, whose writings, though unac- 
 knowledged, have done more to fashion its theology and 
 creed than the religious books from which it profes- 
 sedly derives its inspiration. Brahmoism has its Unity 
 in Trinity, its Incarnation, its Atonement, its Kedemp- 
 tion, its Kegeneration, its Gospel, its Eevelation, its 
 
104 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 Law and the Prophets, its Church and Sacraments. 
 But each of these important terms expresses in Brahmo 
 theology a sense very different from, if not contradic- 
 tory to, what is attached to it in the creed of the 
 Christian. Its Trinity, for instance, is not the Triune 
 Jehovah of the Christians, a Threefold Distinction in 
 the Godhead, hypostatic but not essential, but one God 
 appearing in a Trinity of manifestations, in nature, his- 
 tory, and the human soul. Its Incarnation is not Em- 
 manuel, God with us, but the typical Great Man with 
 a great deal more of divinity in him than falls to the 
 lot of ordinary mortals — a Shakespeare in the region of 
 poetry, a Bacon in the region of philosophy, a Newton 
 in the region of demonstrative science, or a Sen in the 
 region of religion and morals. And in this manner all 
 these terms are divested of their supernatural signifi- 
 cance, and made to shrink into truths which at first 
 sight commend themselves as rational to our sin-en- 
 feebled and sin-corrupted minds, but which neverthe- 
 less are incongruous with the deepest instincts of our 
 fallen nature. But if the transforming process had 
 been new or discovered by the Brahmos, some degree 
 of originality might legitimately have been claimed by 
 them. But they have been imitators from beginning 
 to end, have copied the terms and the meanings at- 
 tached to them by infidel writers, without study, 
 thought, or discrimination. 
 
 But their characteristic imitativeness is shown in 
 their devotional practices as well as in the doctrinal 
 platform they occupy. They call their temple the 
 Church of India ; and they present in their forms of 
 worship a mixture, somewhat odd, of the holy spiritu- 
 ality of Christian worship and the noisy demonstrative- 
 ness of Yaishnavism. Mr. Sen in his devotional inno- 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 105 
 
 vations has proved a chip of the old block as well as a 
 discerner of the times. He has not failed to appreciate 
 the practical usefulness as well as the dignity and holy 
 but not wild fervor of Christian worship ; and from 
 the beginning he has been anxious to utilize almost all 
 its elements in his temple — the sweet psalm, the impas- 
 sioned but at the same time properly restrained prayer, 
 and the religious discourse instinct with fervid elo- 
 quence, but neither drawn out into inappropriate length 
 nor marred by unbefitting coarseness. But he seems 
 to have been unable to divest himself of the devotional 
 influences brought to bear upon him when brought up 
 in a home of Vaishnavism, amid the din and clamor of 
 a form of worship as noisy and indecent as the Chris- 
 tian is calm and dignified. In effecting a union of these 
 two forms in his devotional innovations, he has, on the 
 whole, acted wisely, inasmuch as he is likely to attract 
 by either the one or the other form men of various 
 tempers and dispositions —men in whom the intellect 
 predominates as well as those under the guidance of 
 impulsive feeling more than of reason and thought. 
 But it is to be noted that in the forms of worship 
 which he has been utilizing, as well as in the doctrines 
 and principles which he has adopted as the watchwords 
 of his creed, he has been an imitator rather than an 
 originator. 
 
 It is not necessary to say that in instituting reform 
 associations, starting journals, publishing pamphlets, 
 opening schools, and organizing meetings of all de- 
 scriptions he has been treading a path unknown to 
 Indian reformers of a bygone age — a path new indeed, 
 but one marked out for him not by his own inventive 
 genius, but by what may be called the spirit of the 
 times. Even in the employment of the means he has 
 
10G BRAHMOISM. 
 
 had recourse to for the purpose of propagating the new 
 faith he has been an imitator, not an originator. His 
 literary labors are copies of those of the accredited 
 propagators of the Christian faith ; his meetings are 
 imitations of those held by Christian people ; and his 
 missionaries are editions, on the whole inferior, both in 
 mental calibre and in enlightened zeal, of the mission- 
 aries whom he occasionally takes the trouble of in- 
 structing in the first principles of the Christian faith. 
 In the employment of these means he has shown com- 
 mendable judiciousness, such as is never shown by those 
 missionaries who, ignorant of the fact that the age of 
 Fakirism and dirt-cultus is fast passing away, publicly 
 regret the absence from the native church of that aus- 
 tere and repulsive spirit of asceticism from which, if 
 properly developed, they would themselves shrink in 
 horror. We do not at all find fault with him for living 
 in a style above mediocrity in the country ; and if he 
 only gave up his groundless pretensions to asceticism, 
 even in the rather peculiar sense in which he uses the 
 term, nothing could be said against his habits of life, 
 Avhich, as those of a member of a very respectable 
 family in Calcutta, a man of superior education and 
 brilliant parts, and a friend and protege of men of ex- 
 alted position in society and in official circles, entitle 
 him to consideration and respect. 
 
 It must, however, be confessed that Mr. Sen's zeal in 
 this direction has not always been accompanied with 
 discretion. The history of the Somaj proves that its 
 benevolent schemes have on the whole been premature 
 and abortive. He instituted a society, under the name 
 of Indian Eef orm Association, with great eclat ; but the 
 society, according to the testimony of sensible observ- 
 ers like Pandit Siva Kath Sastri, lives by fits and 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMAJ CONTINUED. 107 
 
 starts — that is, continues as a rule dormant, though now 
 and then lashed into a sort of momentary feverish ex- 
 citement. A female normal school was opened under 
 its auspices, but it is now among the things that were. 
 Several institutions, such as industrial schools and night 
 schools, were started only to be given up, each after a 
 short season of trial. A temperance journal sprang 
 into life and died precisely in the same manner. The 
 Theistic Annual, started to keep the public informed of 
 the views and proceedings of the Somaj, was replaced 
 by a quarterly, of which nothing has been heard for 
 some time past. Almost all the practical schemes of 
 the Somaj have proved abortive, indicating a degree of 
 rashness on the part of the projectors which tends to 
 make them at best unreliable guides in matters of relig- 
 ion. 
 
 As to the numerical prosperity of the Somaj before 
 the second disruption, nothing can be said with any de- 
 gree of accuracy. Brahmo statements on the subject 
 are characterized by an exaggeration which makes them 
 altogether worthless. That which kills the Brahmo 
 Somaj, in the opinion of sensible observers, is the sen- 
 sational style in which everything connected with it is 
 reported. Brahmos speak of churches, which in many 
 cases mean individual worshippers rather than congre- 
 gations; theological colleges, which mean individual 
 pupils rather than associations of students of divinity ; 
 masses of literature, which mean small tracts and fly- 
 leaves ; and grand revival meetings, which mean meet- 
 ings not worth taking notice of. The sensationalism 
 to which Mr. Sen has recourse in his sayings and 
 doings withdraws public confidence from his statements 
 regarding the number of his followers and other im- 
 portant matters. We had a talk with a very worthy 
 
108 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 Brahmo missionary, now dead, during the high and 
 palmy days of the movement, and he unhesitatingly 
 stated his conviction that there were not three hundred 
 men in all India who might justly be called Brahmos. 
 The number has since gone down, and the fact that 
 the Brahmos, while they give the number of the 
 Somajes they have in India, never give the number of 
 enrolled members, proves their unwillingness to look at 
 and present the dark side of the picture. 
 
 Mr. Sen believes not only in the fulness of recupera- 
 tive power in man, but in the fulness of such power in 
 the Hindu nation. Hear what he says in his " Eng- 
 lish Yisit" (p. 300) : " There is still an inherent moral 
 force in India which will enable it to work out its own 
 redemption, not under the instruction of this man or 
 that man, but under the direct inspiration of the holy 
 and merciful God." It is not our object to contradict 
 this statement. We only content ourselves with the 
 remark that there is a diversity of opinion in his own 
 camp with reference to this assumed power. His own 
 emphatic allegations lead us to the conclusion that the 
 essence of the religion fitted to regenerate this country 
 lies in the doctrine of the fatherhood of God, and its 
 corollary the brotherhood of men. Whence has Mr. Sen 
 received these principles ? From an indigenous or 
 from a foreign source ? In an article in the Theistio 
 Annual for 1873, headed " Relation of the Brahmo 
 Somaj to Hinduism and Christianity," the writer, 
 evidently Mr. Sen's right hand-man, Babu Pratap Chun- 
 der Mazormdar, thus sets forth the source of one of these 
 ideas : " The idea of the brotherhood and equality of 
 all mankind before God, I am sorry to say, is not to be 
 found, because it is never recognized, in any of our an- 
 cient writings. The idea is decidedly foreign, Western, 
 
PROGRESSIVE SOMA J CONTINUED. 109 
 
 and I think I might say Christian." The same writer* 
 in the same article traces the doctrine, from which the 
 idea of universal brotherhood is a deduction, to Chris- 
 tianity : "I do not deny there are innumerable pas- 
 sages in Hindu books calling the Divine Being by all 
 manner of names, but such names and the sentiments 
 they embody are very different from the deep person- 
 ality of spiritual relation typically expressed when 
 Jesus exclaimed, ' Our Father in heaven. ' ' ' ISTo w if 
 these two ideas are " to work out the redemption" of 
 India, and if they have been imported from abroad, all 
 talk of " our inherent moral force in India" fitted to 
 effect its regeneration is bosh ! 
 
CHAPTEK Y. 
 
 THE NEW DISPENSATION.* 
 
 The example set by Mr. Sen, when he seceded from 
 the Adi Somaj with an intelligent party of recusants, 
 was pregnant with consequences which perhaps he did 
 not foresee or anticipate. The reasons which led to his 
 separation were destined to generate a disruption in the 
 church which he subsequently organized. These were, 
 as has already been indicated, protests against autocracy 
 or papacy, and a growing tendency to radical reform. 
 Or, to express the same thing in a simpler form, the 
 first schism in the Brahmo camp was brought about by 
 an irresistible tendency to democracy and radicalism. 
 This tendency manifested itself in Mr. Sen's church, 
 not long after its organization, and resulted in a crash 
 which had scarcely, though it might have surely been 
 anticipated from the very beginning. 
 
 In our account of the New Dispensation, and that of 
 the Sadharan Brahmo Somaj, we shall utilize the very 
 valuable material skilfully brought together in Babu 
 Siva Nath Sastri's very able pamphlet already referred 
 to. The chain of argument presented by the learned 
 champion of the Sadharan Somaj, every link of which 
 is based on unexceptionable documentary evidence, is 
 eminently fitted to support the conclusions to which he 
 tries to bring the public with reference to the erratic 
 
 * This, and all the chapters of this work, but the one which follows, 
 were written before the death of Babu Keshub Chunder Sen. 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. Ill 
 
 proceedings of the New Dispensationists, and the varied 
 questions in dispute between them and his own party. 
 "We are indebted to him for a masterly refutation of the 
 vital principles of the New Dispensation, and a mas- 
 terly exposition of those of the church he so worthily 
 represents. 
 
 As early as 1863, the year which witnessed the com- 
 pletion and formal consecration of the Mandir or temple 
 of the Progressive party, a great agitation was caused 
 by the reprehensible proceedings of some of its mem- 
 bers, and the apparent reluctance of the ' ' minister to 
 put them down with a high hand." These were noth- 
 ing less than the public ascription to Mr. Sen of some 
 of the names and titles and the homage due alone to 
 God and a Divine Intercessor. " Persons were seen," 
 says Mr. Sastri, "prostrating themselves at his feet, 
 praying to him for intercession with God on their be- 
 half, addressing him as Lord, Saviour, the Sinner's 
 Way, etc. , some besmearing their heads with the dust 
 of his feet, others applying it to their tongues. ' ' These 
 irregularities were the legitimate fruits of the impetu- 
 ous and undiscerning enthusiasm stirred up by the 
 Bhakti movement, or the introduction of Yaishnava 
 forms of devotion and Yaishnava hymns slightly 
 changed, such as could not retain their vitality except 
 as revolving around a central personality. 
 
 A large party of Brahmos were justly scandalized by 
 these irregular and idolatrous proceedings, and gath- 
 ered around the standard of revolt raised by the two 
 missionaries who had witnessed them, and construed 
 Mr. Sen's non-interference into approval. This agita- 
 tion, called in Brahmo literature the " Man- worship 
 Agitation," did not subside till Mr. Sen had in a public 
 letter disclaimed all sympathy with these practices and 
 
112 BRAHMOIStf. 
 
 stated his reasons for not putting them down. These 
 reasons, however, were regarded as both evasive and 
 unsatisfactory ; and therefore the cement by which the 
 jarring elements were once more united was something 
 like a patch- work reconciliation. 
 
 The peace thus brought about did not remain long 
 undisturbed. A party, whose views on social prob- 
 lems, as well as those of a religious character, were in 
 advance of those of Mr. Sen and his missionaries, was 
 organized ; and serious dissensions arose from the col- 
 lisions into which the conservative and radical elements 
 were brought, as question after question of religious 
 and social reform was raised. Once the secession of 
 the advanced party was only obviated by a timely con- 
 cession on the part of the conservatives. This occurred 
 when the question of female emancipation was on the 
 tapis. Mr. Sen and his missionaries were in favor of 
 the Purdah System, or of compelling all Brahmo ladies 
 without distinction to sit behind screens in the church 
 during service ; but the opposition demanded in a per- 
 emptory manner the total abolition of a system so emi- 
 nently fitted to perpetuate female seclusion. Their 
 demands were at first treated with contempt ; but as 
 they withdrew in a body from the communion, a com- 
 promise was effected, and the privilege of sitting with 
 their wives outside of screens, in corners assigned them, 
 was accorded to the recusant party, and peace was 
 restored for a time. 
 
 But the liberal party looked upon this victory as only 
 the first of a series, the result of which was to be the 
 complete emancipation of the infant church from au- 
 tocracy or papacy. They agitated for a constitution in 
 the Somaj, a democratic form of government, and the 
 transference of its property, the temple especially, from 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 113 
 
 a single trustee to the charge of a body of trustees. 
 They tried in short to frame a code of rules and regula- 
 tions to check the growth of that personal influence, 
 which they looked upon as inconsistent with the genius 
 of Brahmoism, and ruinous to its interests. But their 
 agitation only widened the breach between the parties 
 so decidedly that a permanent reconciliation between 
 them appeared hopeless. 
 
 ISTor were matters of a purely doctrinal character left 
 out of the range of debatable topics. A couple of 
 doctrines, by no means new to the Somaj, had special 
 attention called to them, and only resulted in intensify- 
 ing the agitation in progress within its precincts. 
 These were the doctrines of Adesh or Divine command, 
 and Biclhan or dispensation. The germs of these doc- 
 trines had appeared in Mr. Sen's famous discourse on 
 ' ' Great Men. ' ' The theory propounded in that lect- 
 ure, viz. , that in the religious history of the world God 
 raises up " great men," or men endowed with special 
 powers and charged with special revelations to intro- 
 duce new dispensations, demanded by moral exigencies 
 of a peculiar stamp, had been held in abeyance for 
 some time. But it was revived when the breach was 
 widening between the conservatives and the liberals in 
 the Somaj ; and the result was open recalcitration on 
 the part of the latter. They first of all tried milder 
 measures to lead Mr. Sen and his missionaries to an 
 open renunciation of these dangerous principles ; but 
 when these failed, they organized a regular opposition, 
 and started a monthly journal, called SomadarsJd or 
 The Liberal, to protest against them. 
 
 These facts will show that combustible elements 
 were being heaped up in the Somaj between the years 
 1872 and 1878, and all that was needed to produce a 
 
114 BEAHMOISiL 
 
 conflagration was a spark. This was applied by the 
 marriage of Mr. Sen's daughter to the young Mahara- 
 jah of Kuch Behar. This event was protested against 
 by the liberals as flagrantly inconsistent with the prin- 
 ciples which Mr. Sen had himself propounded and 
 fought for, and which, mainly in consequence of his 
 exertions, had entered into the very texture of the mar- 
 riage law of the Somaj. 
 
 One of the social reforms for which Mr. Sen had 
 agitated with heart and soul, and which he had been 
 mainly instrumental in bringing about, was Act III. of 
 1872, which fixes the minimum marriageable age of 
 native girls at fourteen, and that of native lads at 
 eighteen. The age limitations are among the promi- 
 nent reformatory features of the Act, and for them it 
 is mainly indebted to Mr. Sen. When it was passing 
 through its varied stages of development, Mr. Sen 
 issued a circular, elicited and published the opinions of 
 some of the highest medical authorities, and brought 
 these to bear upon the deliberations of the legislature. 
 And when the limitations were finally agreed to, he 
 looked upon and represented them as in reality below 
 the mark ; and he hailed them as only the small begin- 
 nings of a reform, which was to be matured in time by 
 further encroachments upon the pernicious custom of 
 early marriage prevalent in the country. The follow- 
 ing extract from one of his speeches on the subject, 
 presented in Pundit Siva Nath Sastri's pamphlet, 
 proves this to a demonstration : 
 
 ' ' Thirdly, we contemplate the abolition of early or premature mar- 
 riages. There has always been a large amount of uncertainty and 
 doubt in the public mind, as to the minimum marriageable age of 
 native girls. Eeference was therefore made to leading medical 
 authorities in Calcutta, and what is the result ? It has been what we 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 115 
 
 had anticipated. The medical authorities in Calcutta almost unani- 
 mously declare that sixteen is the minimum marriageable age of 
 native girls in this country. Dr. Charles makes a valuable sugges- 
 tion : he holds that fourteen, being the commencement of adoles- 
 cence, may for the present be regarded as the minimum age at which 
 native girls may be allowed to marry, and may serve as a starting 
 point for reform in this direction. In conformity with his sugges- 
 tion, and the opinion given by the other referees, we have come to 
 the conclusion that, for the present at least, it would be expedient 
 to follow the provision in the Bill, which makes fourteen the mini- 
 mum marriageable age of girls of this country, leaving it in the 
 hands of time to develop this reform slowly and gradually into 
 maturity and fulness." 
 
 The Kuch Behar marriage between a girl of thirteen 
 and a lad of sixteen was a flagrant departure from the 
 liberal principles embodied in this extract. The mar- 
 riage moreover had other objectionable features, accom- 
 panied as it admittedly was with idolatrous rites and 
 ceremonies. Mr. Sen published an able defence, giving 
 prominence to the following points : 1, The marriage 
 in question was a departure from the letter only, not 
 from the spirit of the Act ; 2, Mr. Sen was not respon- 
 sible for the idolatrous rites with which it was accom- 
 panied ; 3, it was eminently fitted to advance the inter- 
 ests of Brahmoism ; 4, Mr. Sen's consent was given in 
 consequence of an express command from heaven. 
 This statement of reasons reminds us of the lad who 
 offered to state nine reasons for his father's non-appear- 
 ance in a court of justice. " The first reason is that 
 my father was dead when the court was held ; the 
 second — " " Stop ! stop !" said the judge, " the first 
 is enough." The express command from God, if it 
 can be proved, is enough ; and the other reasons are 
 superfluous ! 
 
 But as the most potent of these reasons is not admis- 
 sible, it is desirable to weigh the others, and see how 
 
116 BEAHMOISAT. 
 
 far the j are fitted to uphold the cause, in behalf of 
 which they are arrayed. 
 
 Mr. Sen's first plea is that the marriage was incon- 
 sistent with the letter rather than with the spirit of the 
 Act he had been instrumental in getting passed. It is, 
 however, not at all difficult to show that the very 
 reverse of this is the truth. It is true that the mar- 
 riage solemnized before the young Maharajah's depart- 
 ure for Europe was in fact nominal, though legally 
 irrevocable. The parties were not to live as husband 
 and wife before either of them had attained the mar- 
 riageable age indicated in the Bill. But their consent 
 was obtained when they were minors in the sight, so to 
 speak, of the law, and when, in reality, they were not 
 in a position to enter intelligently into an engagement 
 of so serious a character. It was publicly alleged that 
 the marriage was hastened by the authorities because it 
 was feared that the youthful Maharajah might be 
 tempted in European countries to fix his affections upon 
 a person fairer, if not worthier, than Mr. Sen's amiable 
 daughter. The very fact that such an apprehension 
 was entertained is a proof that the young man's con- 
 sent was prematurely obtained, and that therefore the 
 marriage was celebrated in contravention both of the 
 spirit and of the letter of the Act. 
 
 !Nor can Mr. Sen be exonerated from all blame in the 
 matter of the idolatrous rites with which the marriage 
 was confessedly accompanied. Had he not literally 
 rushed into the tempting scheme, he might have saved 
 himself from the humiliation which was his punishment 
 for precipitancy. A little decision on his part before 
 his own consent was given, or when he was thrust out 
 of the scene as not fit on account of his visit to England 
 to play his part in the ceremony, or when idolatrous 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION". 117 
 
 rites stared him in the face, might, we think, have 
 obviated all unworthy compromises on his part, though 
 it might have made the marriage an impossibility at 
 the eleventh hour. So bent was he on seeing the mar- 
 riage solemnized that he neglected proper precautions, 
 and proved weak and vacillating when he should have 
 shown extraordinary firmness of character and strength 
 of principle. 
 
 It is but fair to admit that Mr. Sen was allured, as 
 he affirms in his defence, by glorious visions of pros- 
 perity as regards his church, as well as by domestic 
 considerations, He, however, failed to see that a pro- 
 ceeding involving a compromise of principle could never 
 permanently benefit a religious organization. The 
 author of " Ecce Homo" gives due prominence to an 
 event in Christ's life fitted to set forth His wisdom in 
 preferring principle to expediency on an occasion when 
 a great temptation was placed in His way. A great 
 man, a ruler of the Jews, sought admission into His 
 kingdom, but on terms which demanded a slight relaxa- 
 tion of its rules. The opportunity was grand, and the 
 offer tempting ; and if Christ had been only a states- 
 man, or a religious reformer, influenced by a regard to 
 expediency rather than inflexible principle, He would 
 have encouraged the illustrious applicant, and by a 
 stroke of policy raised his despised community to a 
 position of respectability and influence. But our Lord 
 saw things in a different light ; and His stern demand 
 of perfect, unconditional self- surrender obliged the 
 ruler to go away sorrowful, for he was very rich. The 
 result of Mr. Sen's temporizing policy is the present 
 moribund condition of the Somaj. 
 
 We have represented Mr. Sen's last reason as inad- 
 missible, except when bolstered up by proofs which he 
 
118 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 does not even dream of bringing forward. "We may, 
 however, be permitted to remark that he could not call 
 Adesh or special divine command to the rescue without 
 contradicting one of the fundamental principles of the 
 Somaj. That principle, in plain English, is that the 
 laws of nature being immutable, prayer for temporal 
 blessings is useless. G-od cannot interfere in the secular 
 concerns of this life ; and therefore prayer having for 
 its object the advancement of our temporal or domestic 
 interests of a temporal character, He cannot listen to or 
 encourage. The marriage of Mr. Sen's daughter with 
 a wealthy and titled nobleman is after all a temporal 
 affair, and therefore a special divine command relative 
 to it is precluded by the principles of the Somaj. If it 
 be said that the Brahmos look upon it as a great im- 
 petus to their cause, and therefore a spiritual blessing, 
 our reply is, every temporal blessing may be converted 
 into a spiritual blessing in this way. 
 
 Mr. Sen, in having the marriage celebrated in spite 
 of the counsels, entreaties, and protests of the most in- 
 telligent and independent portion of his church, com- 
 mitted spiritual suicide. The result was the second 
 great schism of Brahmoism, and the consequent estab- 
 lishment of a Somaj more progressive than his. Let us 
 transfer to our pages the short account of its organiza- 
 tion presented in Mr. Sastri's pamphlet : " At this 
 point, those who were seeking to vindicate the princi- 
 ples of the church, and to place it on a constitutional 
 basis, were obliged to appeal to the Brahmo body in 
 general, and to the provincial Somajes in particular. 
 Within the incredibly short period of a fortnight, as 
 many as twenty-one Somajes, and more than four hun- 
 dred individual Brahmos and Brahmicas, from all parts 
 of India, replied, strongly urging the necessity of leav- 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION". Ill) 
 
 ing Mr. Sen with the church, and organizing a new so- 
 ciety on a constitutional basis. Thus, in accordance 
 with the expressed wishes of so many brethren, and 
 the privately ascertained wishes of numerous others, 
 the Sadharan Brahmo Somaj was duly organized on the 
 15th of May, 1878." 
 
 The secession of the recusant party may be looked at 
 from two different standpoints — that occupied by Mr. 
 Sen himself, and that occupied by the intelligent 
 public. Judged by Mr. Sen's standard, it was a bless- 
 ing. It left him unfettered to realize his own great 
 idea of religious reform ; and he lost no time in avail- 
 ing himself of the opportunity thus thrown in his way. 
 But the blessing becomes a curse as soon as it is looked 
 at from the standpoint occupied by the public. The 
 most sensible among outsiders look upon the restraint 
 laid upon the development of his most cherished 
 schemes by the presence of the radical party as on the 
 whole salutary ; and they trace the vagaries into 
 which he has been betrayed since the schism as the sad 
 but inevitable consequences of its withdrawal. The 
 secession of the liberal party was in fact the secession 
 of intelligence, independence of thought, and, there- 
 fore, of life from his Somaj ; and whatever prominence 
 he subsequently enjoyed, being the result of blind 
 rather than intelligent adherence, cannot possibly be 
 of a permanent character. To set forth this we have 
 only to indicate the very strange turn his movement 
 has taken since the withdrawal of what contributed to 
 maintain the balance of his fine but weak intellect, and 
 check the aberrations of his enthusiastic, lofty, but im- 
 petuous and at times uncontrollable spirit. 
 
 Mr. Sen, however, seems to have breathed freely 
 when the secession was over. Left perfectly un- 
 
120 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 shackled, lie eagerly commenced the task of realizing 
 his great idea of a New Dispensation, clustering around 
 him as its central personality. The idea of such an 
 economy he had disclosed, as has been more than once 
 shown, in his famous lecture on " Great Men ;" but 
 the presence and disagreeable operation of a counter- 
 acting and controlling element had not only checked its 
 development, but led to its being thrown into the back- 
 ground. But now the long-sought opportunity was 
 afforded, not only of giving it clue prominence, but of 
 making it the vital element of his organization. He 
 began the work at once, though the flag of the New 
 Dispensation was not formally hoisted up till about a 
 couple of years afterward. 
 
 Our inquiries with reference to the New Dispensation 
 of Babu Keshub Chunder Sen may be presented in a 
 series of searching questions. 1. What is the New 
 Dispensation % 2. How is it related to Mr. Sen, its 
 author ? 3. What is its object ? 4. What its creed ? 
 5. And what the rites and ceremonies associated with 
 it ? These questions we shall try to answer one after 
 another categorically, as they occur, taking care to 
 verify our assertions by documentary evidence, such as 
 we find arrayed in a masterly manner in Pudit Siva 
 Nath Sastri's pamphlet, already alluded to. 
 
 1. What is the New Dispensation ? A Dispensa- 
 tion, according to Mr. Sen, is an embodiment in a per- 
 son, rather than in a creed, of special knowledge and 
 guidance vouchsafed by the Almighty to meet a press- 
 ing moral emergency. In the history of the world in 
 general, and of different nations in particular, seasons 
 of moral upheaving appear, demanding extraordinary 
 remedial measures or revolutionary changes. At such 
 times special manifestations of God are needed to stem 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION". 121 
 
 the rolling tide of corruption and bring in the era of 
 godliness and piety already foreshadowed by prevailing 
 restlessness, in conjunction with undefined yearnings 
 after a better state of things. Such manifestations are 
 granted when demanded by such emergencies, and each 
 of them, embodied in or revolving round a " Great 
 Man" or Prophet raised up, is a New Dispensation. 
 Mr. Sen in his lecture on " Great Men" says : " Great 
 men appear when they are needed. In the history of 
 nations there occur now and then crises of a very seri- 
 ous character, when the advancing tide of progress 
 shakes the very foundations of society ; at such times 
 certain great minds appear, being called forth by the 
 peculiar necessities of the age, who avert impending 
 perils, meet all existing wants, and remodel society on 
 an improved basis. ' ' With reference to these i ' great 
 men," Mr. Sen in the same lecture says : " In the 
 established economy of providence there are special dis- 
 pensations to meet the pressing wants of humanity. ' ' 
 
 The Sunday Mirror, Mr. Sen's own organ, speaks in 
 the same strain : " We believe that at special times 
 and under special circumstances, when the world does 
 need a revival or upheaving, and men do require the 
 guidance of God, a special manifestation of His will 
 takes place, and events happen which have a necessary 
 connection, and may be interpreted as the workings of 
 divine Providence." {Sunday Mirror, November 16, 
 1879.) " When men are hopelessly gone in the way to 
 misery and ruin, when a thick gloom of sin settles upon 
 society, when human eyesight is unable to discern the 
 right path, it is then that Providence sends to the 
 world one of those men whose life has been sold to His 
 Almighty will." (April 10,1881.) A New Dispen- 
 sation then is special knowledge of religion communi- 
 
122 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 cated through, or rather concentrated in, a " great 
 man" sent with a special commission to wind up an old 
 and usher in a new state of things. The New Dispen- 
 sation brought in by Mr. Sen is obviously demanded by 
 the moral condition of the world. True religion is ex- 
 tinct, and creeds mutually exclusive and conflicting 
 reign in its place. The self -constituted champions of 
 faith are wasting their energy in an unceasing inter- 
 necine warfare, and party strife is becoming fearfully 
 prevalent. Amid the din and turmoil of theological 
 controversies the first principles of right practice are 
 forgotten, and charity is cast overboard. Scepticism 
 in theory and immorality in practice are by the law of 
 reaction being brought about by the narrow-minded- 
 ness and bigotry associated with religion. Darkness 
 overspreads the world, and thick darkness the nations. 
 At a time of such general degeneracy, what is needed 
 but a New Dispensation, a flood of heavenly light flow- 
 ing into the world through the illuminated mind of a 
 great man ? Has the flag of the New Dispensation 
 been hoisted a moment too soon ? 
 
 2. How is the New Dispensation related to Mr. Sen ? 
 Is he the centre of it, the Great Man in whom it is 
 embodied or concentrated ? Mr. Sen does not assume 
 such an attitude in plain, unequivocal terms, but he 
 does so in a roundabout way. Mr. Sen places his Dis- 
 pensation in the same category with the foregoing Dis- 
 pensations. In his lecture on Ci "We, Apostles of the 
 Isew Dispensation," he thus indicates its position : " I 
 say it stands upon the same level with the Jewish Dis- 
 pensation, the Christian Dispensation, and the Yaish- 
 nava Dispensation through Chaitanya." Some of Mr. 
 Sen's utterances are fitted to give it a higher place, but 
 on this point we need not insist here. It is enough for 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 123 
 
 our argument that Mr. Sen places his Dispensation on 
 a par with foregoing ones without the slightest equivo- 
 cation. But he does not with equal emphasis place 
 himself on a par with the great founders of these suc- 
 cessive economies — with Moses, and Christ, and Mo- 
 hammed, and Chaitanya. He, however, does so very 
 adroitly under color of such humility as might shield 
 him from the unpleasant consequences of an open 
 assumption of prophetic authority and functions. 
 
 Mr. Sen peremptorily refuses, both in his lecture 
 " Am I an Inspired .Prophet ?" and in that on " We, 
 Apostles of the New Dispensation," to place himself on 
 a par with prophets like Moses and Christ. In the 
 latter he distinctly says : " If Christ was the centre of 
 His Dispensation, am I not the centre of this ?" 
 " Ungenerous and untruthful critics have insinuated 
 that, as Jesus claimed to be the King of the Jews, for 
 which offence His enemies crucified Him, so am I am- 
 bitious of being honored as the King of the Indians, of 
 the Bengalis, at any rate. Ah, it is certainly not fair 
 or kind of our critics to say so. Shall a sinner vie with 
 Christ for honors ? God forbid. Jesus was born a 
 saint, and I a great sinner. 1 ' In this passage Mr. Sen 
 ignores the point at issue, viz. , whether he does not, 
 notwithstanding his admitted inferiority to Christ, rep- 
 resent himself as the centre of a New Dispensation ? 
 In his lecture on " Am I an Inspired Prophet ?" while 
 emphatically renouncing all claim to prophetic honor, 
 he calls himself "a singular man." "If I am not a 
 prophet, ' ' he says, ' ' I am a singular man. I am not 
 as ordinary men are, and I say this deliberately." 
 Now in what does his singularity, the uniqueness of his 
 position, consist ? In his being the head of a New 
 Dispensation, the medium of communication between 
 
124 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 heaven and earth, the spokesman of God. Hear what 
 he says of his doings and sayings in the same lecture : 
 " But men have said that I have been guided by my 
 own imagination, reason, and intellect. Under this 
 conviction they have from time to time protested 
 against my proceedings. They should remember that 
 to protest against the cause I uphold is to protest 
 against the Dispensation of G-od Almighty. " "In 
 doing this work (the work of God) I am confident I 
 have not done anything that is wrong. Surely I am 
 not to blame for anything which I may have done 
 under Heaven's injunction. If any one is to blame, 
 the Lord God of Heaven is to blame for having taught 
 me and constrained me. ' ' 
 
 The little hesitation he shows in calling himself a 
 prophet is so obviously inconsistent with the attitude 
 he assumes, that his bosom friends and followers never 
 sympathize in it. They publicly proclaim him a 
 prophet, the Heaven-honored centre of his own Dis- 
 pensation. Hear what the Sunday Mirror says (No- 
 vember 16, 1873) : " The minister (Mr. Sen) is, as we 
 believe him to be, a part, a great part, a central part 
 of the Dispensation. It is he who has given life and 
 tone to the entire movement ; and he is completely 
 identified with it ; his preaching and precepts we 
 accept as the embodiment of the Dispensation itself. 
 Thus then we cannot do without this man, who is the 
 leader, the mouthpiece, the heaven-appointed mission- 
 ary of what we call the Brahmo Somaj." The follow- 
 ing dialogue between God and the In ew Dispensation- 
 ists, reported in the Sunday Mirror of December 7, 
 1879, sets forth the ground on which they rest his 
 claim to such dignity : 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 125 
 
 " Q. We desire to know thy intention clearly and fully regarding 
 our relations to our minister ? 
 
 " A. There is no minister appointed but by Me. Leaders of con- 
 gregations are ordained by Me. Therefore, treat your minister as 
 one who hath commission from Heaven. His words ye must hear 
 with faith and cherish with reverence. 
 
 ' ' Q. Has he no errors ? . . . 
 
 " A. With his unofficial position Heaven has nothing to do. If he 
 is a bad man at home, unprincipled, selfish, ambitious, angry, 
 deceitful, jealous, untruthful, you will not surely imitate his vices, 
 etc., etc. 
 
 " Q. How shall we then honor him? If we freely criticise his 
 opinions and doings, and condemn whatever is wrong in his tastes 
 and ideas and deeds, we must treat him as we treat other people, as 
 our equals and inferiors, praising the good and censuring the evil in 
 them ? 
 
 " A. As one of you while at home, but not when in his office. His 
 official position is different. When he ministers to your spiritual 
 wants and offers his prayers and directs his missionary movements, 
 and otherwise renders services for your spiritual improvement, then 
 bow to him as your minister, and let the whole congregation adopt 
 and follow his teachings. 
 
 " Q. In what things are we to take lessons from him ? 
 
 "A. In all matters appertaining to the development and success 
 of the present dispensation, etc. 
 
 " Q. So be it. But even in questions like these, shall we follow 
 blindly where we cannot comprehend ? 
 
 " A. Not blindly, but faithfully, hoping and believing that I will 
 in the fulness of time make all things plain and clear to you. No 
 man can fully explain the deep truths of the spirit-world unless the 
 Holy Spirit reveals them to each individual. Therefore, believe, and I 
 will add to your faith knowledge. 
 
 " Q. One question more, O Lord. If some one think him mis- 
 taken in these important matters connected with his official position, 
 shall we not try to convince him of his errors and dissuade him from 
 his path ? 
 
 "A. It may be you are mistaken, not he, in those particular in- 
 stances. Therefore by your remonstrances you may run the risk of 
 tempting your minister to disobey Me and transgress My will," etc., 
 etc. 
 
 No one can read this without being reminded of the 
 
126 BRAHM0IS3I. 
 
 well-known doctrine of papal infallibility, which, if the 
 Pope had professed to have derived it from heaven 
 direct, conld not have been expressed in terms more 
 emphatic. Do not men, who pretend to hold snch 
 conversation with God and at the same time langh at 
 supernatural or miraculous modes of communication 
 between heaven and earth, strain out a gnat and swal- 
 low a camel ? 
 
 In 1879 the Brahmo creed was embodied in thirty- 
 nine articles, in imitation doubtless of the arrangement 
 in the Prayer Book of the Anglican Church. The 
 twenty-fifth article runs thus : . " I believe in the inspi- 
 ration and truth -teaching power of some of the leaders 
 of the Brahmo Somaj, and eminently of Keshub 
 Chunder Sen. Some of the most cherished and glori- 
 ous truths respecting the nature of God and man we 
 have learned from him, and from them. But I do not 
 believe that any Brahmo teacher is or has been infalli- 
 bly inspired, or that any one of them has, at all times 
 and in equal measure, commanded the gift of inspira- 
 tion. " (The Theistic Quarterly Review for July, 1879.) 
 This passage presents a confusion of ideas not unfre- 
 quently met with in Brahmo writing. The Brahmo 
 teachers are inspired, and yet not infallibly inspired ! 
 If they are inspired by God, they cannot but be infalli- 
 bly inspired; and therefore, if they are not infalli- 
 bly inspired, their inspiration comes from some other 
 source. The article, however, makes it plain that, in- 
 stead of a solitary prophet inculcating truth in the 
 midst of a crooked and perverse generation, we have 
 around the standard of Brahmoism a number of minor 
 lights thoroughly eclipsed by one central sun ! ¥e 
 are anxious to inquire what " cherished and glorious 
 truths" our Brahmo friends have learned from this new 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 127 
 
 school of prophets over and above the legacy of divine 
 knowledge left behind them by their predecessors. 
 
 Mr. Sen's dogma of inspiration avowedly, if not 
 really, excludes supernaturalism. A pamphlet on the 
 " Brahmic Doctrine of Inspiration" was published with 
 the imprimatur of the Somaj, immediately after the 
 disruption. The writer, Babu Durgadass Ray, thus 
 speaks of Brahmo inspiration : " Inspiration with a 
 Brahmo means not ' an infusion of supernatural ideas, ' 
 as old Dr. Johnson and his school of thinkers would 
 have it, but the perception of the divine hand in every- 
 thing natural " (p. 15). Mr. Ray does not pause to 
 inquire how comes the perception, possessed by a few 
 solitary persons in different ages and different coun- 
 tries, and possessed by Mr. Sen in our own times in a 
 higher degree than by any other person. But he 
 enters upon a long, if not learned, disquisition to prove 
 the very dangerous position embodied in the following 
 sentence : "If we believe in inspiration, we must also 
 believe it to be quite independent of morality, or rather 
 the so-called ethical code of the moralist." From 
 what he says, under this head, it is plain that inspira- 
 tion should be our guide even if it contravened the 
 plain teaching of precedent revelation or conscience. It 
 is not our intention to call the principle in question, our 
 desire being simply to inquire how inspiration under the 
 circumstances is verified or proved. External evidence, 
 such as the prophets of Judea and Christ Himself offered 
 in attestation of their divine commission — evidence em- 
 bodied in miracles of wisdom and miracles of power — is 
 out of the question ; and internal evidence, the approval 
 of conscience or harmony with existing revelation, is 
 also abandoned. All proof then is done away with, and 
 inspiration has as little evidence as a whim or a chimera. 
 
128 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 3. What is the object of the New Dispensation ? To 
 reconcile all existing dispensations to one another, and 
 gather them into one focus. Eead the following ex- 
 tracts from Mr. Sen's lecture on " We, Apostles of the 
 New Dispensation:" 
 
 " Come then to the synthetic unity of the New Dispensation. You 
 will see how all other dispensations are harmonized and unified in 
 this, a whole host of churches resolved into a scientific unity. In 
 the midst of the multiplicity of dispensations in the world, there is 
 indubitably a concealed unity, and it is of the highest importance to 
 us all that we should discover it with the light of logic and science. 
 . . . All these dispensations are connected with each other in the 
 economy of Providence. They are connected in one continuous 
 chain which may be traced to the earliest age. They are a con- 
 catenated series of ideas, and when rationally apprehended, they 
 show a systematic evolution of thought, a development of religious 
 life. Popular opinion on this subject has always run in a different 
 line. Men have not seen, and therefore they have ignored and 
 denied the connecting link between the several dispensations. . . . 
 The New Dispensation has discovered the missing link. It has 
 found the secret thread which goes through these dispensations, and 
 keeps them together. Where others see only confusion and anomaly, 
 it sees order and continuity. Joyfully it exclaims, ' I have found 
 the science of dispensation at last, unity in multiplicity.' " 
 
 Now what do these smooth periods mean ? Do they 
 mean that each of the religions of the world has some 
 particles of truth, and that a religion presenting in one 
 focus all its sporadic elements scattered in the religious 
 literature of the world is destined to supersede all ? If 
 such is Mr. Sen's meaning, he must prove his ability to 
 discriminate between truth and falsehood with unerring 
 certainty, and build up a system of religion unmixed 
 with error before anything like a general rush toward 
 his dispensation can be realized in this world. Again, 
 do these statements mean that beneath masses of con- 
 flicting elements presented by the religions of the world 
 there are certain underlying doctrines by which they 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 129 
 
 may be unified ? If so, Mr. Sen must separate these, 
 and show that nothing more is needed to save men 
 from sin and uncleanness. But Mr. Sen's meaning- is 
 strange, if the following quotation from the Sunday 
 Mirror is made our guide : 
 
 " Our position is not that truths are to be found in all religions, 
 but that all the established religions of the world are true. There 
 is a great deal of difference between the two assertions. The glori- 
 ous mission of the New Dispensation is to harmonize all religions 
 and revelations, establish the truth of every particular dispensation, 
 and upon the basis of these particulars to establish the largest and 
 broadest induction of a general and glorious proposition." 
 
 This is a reaffirmation in " glorious" language of the 
 current notion of our countrymen, that all the religions 
 of the Avorld are true. 
 
 Let Mr. Sen perform the Herculean task of proving 
 the truth of each of the innumerable forms of faith, 
 rising in an ascending scale from gross fetichism to 
 refined monotheism, and attempting their reconcilia- 
 tion. And if he succeed, he will effect a greater revo- 
 lution in the sphere of human thought than has yet 
 been accomplished by the well-known champions of the 
 science of religion from whose writings he has derived 
 his inspiration. The fact that he contents himself with 
 only showing coherence and consistency in the teach- 
 ings of Moses, Christ, and Paul, and dexterously leaves 
 the larger task of reconciling all the religious books of 
 the world in the cold, may be looked upon as a con- 
 fession of inability. 
 
 4. ~Now let us come to the Creed of the Dispensa- 
 tion. Let it be observed that nothing in connection 
 with the notoriously inconstant Brahmoism is so change- 
 able as its creed. Who can state the number of the 
 creeds which have appeared and disappeared in rapid 
 
130 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 succession in connection with the Somaj during the 
 short period of its existence ? The New Dispensation 
 is not a lustrum old, and yet two formal creeds and 
 several informal ones have emanated from it. The 
 Thirty-nine Articles published in 1879 shrivelled in 
 1881 into the following brief creed : 
 
 1. One God, one Scripture, one Church. 
 
 2. Eternal Progress of the Soul. 
 
 3. Communion of Prophets and Saints. 
 
 4. Fatherhood and Motherhood of God, Brotherhood 
 of man, and Sisterhood of woman. 
 
 5. Harmony of Knowledge and Holiness, Love and 
 Work, Yoga and Asceticism, in their highest develop- 
 ment. 
 
 6. Loyalty to Sovereign. 
 
 It is not necessary to take formal notice of each of 
 these articles of faith. Two of them, the third and 
 fourth, need some explanation, having been proclaimed 
 with a flourish of trumpets, and with not a few ele- 
 ments of the ludicrous attached to them. 
 
 Mr. Sen in his lecture " We, Apostles of the New 
 Dispensation, ' ' thus explains the Communion of Proph- 
 ets and Saints : " You have no doubt heard of such a 
 thing as Communion of Saints. What is it ? Is it the 
 superficial doctrine of objectivity or is it the deeper 
 philosophy ? . . . The Christ of older theologies is 
 a barren outward fact, the dead Christ of history and 
 dogma. But the Christ of the New Dispensation is an 
 indwelling power, a living spirit, a fact of conscious- 
 ness. It is this philosophy of the subjectivity which 
 underlies the Pilgrimages of Saints as they are called. 
 ... As pilgrims we approach the great Saints, and 
 commune with them in spirit. We kill the distance of 
 time and space. We enter into them, and they into us. 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 131 
 
 111 our souls we cherish them, imbibe their character 
 and principles." Mr. Sen's ideal Christ appears here 
 at the head of his ideal school of prophets, including 
 representatives from one and all the religions of the 
 world, from the great teachers of primitive fetichism 
 down to Swedenborg, who gave utterance to a similar 
 idea, and from whose writings, presented to him in 
 England, Mr. Sen has derived much of the inspiration 
 which has surrounded his creed with a halo of mys- 
 ticism. 
 
 The doctrine thus elucidated did not remain a dead 
 letter. It was reduced to practice in right earnest, and 
 whole weeks were set apart for such holy communion — 
 one for communion with Socrates, one with Moses, one 
 with Mohammed, and so on. Each of these weeks 
 was followed by a Sunday of special consecration, when 
 " a room in Calcutta (Mr. Sen's house) was transformed 
 into an historical site in Palestine, Greece, Arabia, 
 Northern India ; conversation was carried on with the 
 prophet invoked, lessons were taught and learned, and 
 a vivid imagination brought the historical person before 
 the assembly, and his utterances of centuries ago were 
 applied more or less skilfully to the exigencies of the 
 present time, or the difficulties of existing -theological 
 speculation. ' ' This is an edition somewhat improved, 
 of a well-known practice of Comtists, and is perhaps 
 adopted to prove that in the New Dispensation a glori- 
 ous reconciliation is effected between agnosticism and 
 atheism on the one side and pure theism on the other. 
 
 The doctrine of the Motherhood of God was pro- 
 claimed with great eclat , and might be looked at as a 
 bid for popularity among the worshippers of Durga and 
 Kali. Processions heralded by flags with the word 
 " Mother" inscribed on them, and enlivened by songs 
 
132 BKAHM0IS3I. 
 
 in which the word " Mother" occupied the most prom- 
 inent place ; and ' ' missionary expeditions' ' into places 
 far and near, were the means utilized in giving pub- 
 licity to a doctrine, which, though stale, was paraded 
 as if it were a grand discovery of the Somaj. But the 
 most remarkable thing in connection with this phasis of 
 Brahmo development was a public proclamation said to 
 have been issued by God Himself as " India's Mother.' ' 
 This precious document is quoted by Mr. Sastri, with 
 some omission, from Miss Collet's Brahmo Year Book 
 for 1880. It runs as follows : 
 
 " Proclamation. 
 
 " To All my Soldiers in India. 
 
 " My affectionate greetings to all. Accept this Proclamation. Be- 
 lieve that it goeth forth from Heaven, in the name and with the 
 love of your Mother, and carry out its behests like loyal soldiers and 
 devoted children. 
 
 " Ye are my soldiers, my covenanted soldiers. Ye are bound to 
 fight valiantly and faithfully under my banner, and no other God 
 shall ye serve. I will give you victory, and glory eternal shall be 
 yours. I have chosen India to show unto all nations the workings 
 of my special providence in accomplishing national redemption. 
 The British Government is my government, and the Brahmo Somaj 
 is my Church. . . . My daughter, Queen Victoria, have I ordained 
 and set over the country to rule its people, and give them education, 
 material comfort, and protect their wealth and property. ... Be 
 loyal to her, for the warrant of her appointment bears my signature. 
 . . . Love her and honor her as my servant and representative, and 
 give her your loyal support and co-operation, so that she may carry 
 out my purposes unhindered, and give India political and material 
 prosperity. . . . Tell all the people to come direct to me, without a 
 mediator or intercessor, and accept me as their Mother. The influ- 
 ence of the earthly mother at home and of the Queen-mother at the 
 head of the Government will raise the hearts of my Indian children 
 to the Supreme Mother, and I will gather them in the kingdom of 
 heaven, and give them peace and salvation. Soldiers, fight bravely 
 and establish my dominion. 
 
 [Signed.] " India's Mothee." 
 
TTIH NEW DISPENSATION. 133 
 
 Miss Collet, once a great admirer of Mr. Sen, calls 
 this " an undisguised piece of blasphemy." Mr. Sen's 
 political utterances are behind the age, and it is to be 
 hoped that their object is not to enable him to be in 
 good odor with the authorities. 
 
 5. Let us conclude our sketch of the New Dispensa- 
 tion with delineations of the most prominent of its rites 
 and ceremonies in the words, as far as possible, of its 
 champions rather than in our own. 
 
 a. The most prominent place among these must be 
 given to the Flag Ceremony. Here is the account 
 given in the Sunday Mirror of January 30, 1881 : 
 " Every faithful Brahmo and member of the New Dis- 
 pensation was exhorted to vow his allegiance to this 
 banner of regenerated and saving Theism. Accord- 
 ingly, on the evening of the annual festival held on 
 Sunday last, the prominent object noticed by the Con- 
 gregation was a handsome silk banner, mounted upon a 
 silver pole, fixed on the open space of marble pavement 
 in front of the pulpit. After the sanhirtan (singing) 
 at sunset, began the ceremony announced before of un- 
 furling the flag of the New Dispensation. A new form 
 of evening worship called arati was gone through. . . . 
 The worshippers held each a lighted candle in his hand, 
 creating a brilliant and picturesque effect. Dozens of 
 musical instruments, from the English bugle and gong 
 to the traditional conch -shell, were loudly and simul- 
 taneously performed upon. The varied and deepening 
 peals issuing from these instruments, combined with the 
 voices of scores of men, who stood up and went round 
 in circles with burning tapers in their hands, heartily 
 chanting the arati hymn, produced upon the immense 
 crowd present an effect which must be felt to be de- 
 scribed." It is not necessary to say that the words 
 
134 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 "dozens," " scores, 5 ' and " immense" in this extract 
 are hyperbolical, and bear the same relation to realities 
 which the word " India," when used by Mr. Sen, bears 
 to the half dozen men to whom he gives that pompous 
 name. It is however necessary to say that a chamar 
 was, according to Mr. Sastri, waved by Mr. Sen before 
 the banner " in the orthodox idolatrous fashion." It 
 was moreover devoutly kissed by Mr. Sen and touched 
 and bowed to by his followers. 
 
 o. The ceremony of the Eucharist was performed on 
 the 6th of March, 1881. The following account ap- 
 peared in the New Dispensation , the paper started and 
 edited by Mr. Sen about the time when the flag cere- 
 mony was performed : 
 
 " On Sunday, the 6th of March, the ceremony of adapting the Sac- 
 rament to Hindu life was performed with due solemnity, in accordance 
 with the principles above set forth. The Hindu Apostles of Christ, 
 gathered after prayer in the dinner hall, sat upon the floor upon bare 
 ground. Upon a silver plate was rice, and in a small goblet was 
 water, and there were flowers and leaves around both. The minister 
 (Mr. Sen) read the following verses from Luke 22. 
 
 " ' And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it and gave unto 
 them saying, This is my body which is given for you. This do in 
 remembrance of me. 
 
 " ' Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the New 
 Testament in my blood which is shed for you.' 
 
 ' ' A prayer was then offered asking the Lord to bless the sacra- 
 mental rice and water : 
 
 ' ' Touch this rice and this water, O Holy Spirit, and turn their 
 grossly material substance into sanctifying spiritual forces, that they 
 may upon entering our system be assimilated to it as to flesh and 
 blood of all the saints in Christ Jesus. Satisfy the hunger and thirst 
 of our souls with the rich food and drink Thou hast placed before us. 
 Invigorate us with Christ-force, and nourish us with saintly life. 
 
 " The Lord blessed the rice, and He blessed the water. 
 
 "And these were then served in small quantities to those around, 
 and men ate and drank reverently, and women and children also ate 
 and drank, and they blessed God, the God of prophets and saints." 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 135 
 
 c. The Horn ceremony, a bid for popularity among 
 Hindus, was performed in the manner indicated in the 
 following extract from the New Dispensation : 
 
 " On Tuesday last the sanctuary (a room in Mr. Sen's house) 
 witnessed a new and imposing, and, we may add, an instructive 
 spectacle. There was a large iron fire-pan in front of the vedi (pul- 
 pit) ; in an earthen vessel was ghee or clarified butter, bundles of 
 sticks and pieces of firewood were gathered in one place and there 
 was a large' metallic spoon. Varieties of beautiful and fragrant 
 flowers and evergreens in abundance formed a semicircle skirting 
 the place where these things were arranged. No one was prepared 
 for such a sight, as none, even among the select few who were 
 present, knew what was going to happen. After the introductory 
 portion of the service was over, the minister invoked divine blessing 
 on the ceremony which was to be performed, and prayed that it 
 might become profitable unto the Church. He then lighted up the 
 pile before him, and pouring over it clarified butter produced a brisk 
 fire, which he thus addressed : 
 
 " ' O thou blazing Agni ! Great art thou, great among the forces 
 in creation. We shall honor thee and magnify thee because of thy 
 greatness and majesty. Thou art not God. We do not adore thee. 
 But in thee dwells the Lord, the eternal, inextinguishable Flame, the 
 Light of the Universe, the immanent Fire, the Fire of Fire, whom 
 fire doth reveal and glorify. thou brilliant Agni, in thee we be- 
 hold our resplendent Lord, ' and so on. 
 
 " Then followed a prayer to God, after which the minister cast the 
 six pieces of fuel into the burning fire, the congregation exclaiming 
 together, ' Victory to God, Victory to God, Victory to God. ' " 
 
 d. The account of the performance of the ceremony 
 of baptism given in the New Dispensation is long, but 
 worthy of reproduction, being fitted to give us an in- 
 sight into some of the peculiarities of Mr. Sen's system. 
 
 " After service in the Tabernacle the devotees congregated in the 
 family sanctuary. The minister took his seat on the vedi, and 
 offered a short prayer to the following effect : 
 
 " ' Eternal Spirit, we, Thy pilgrim servants, desire to go on a pil- 
 grimage to the Jordan, in the Holy Land, for our redemption's sake. 
 We desire to be where, eighteen centuries ago, Jesus, Thy son, was 
 
130 BRAHiTOIS^r. 
 
 baptized. Gratify, thou, our heart's longing, and guide us and cheer 
 us in our pilgrimage.' 
 
 " The devotees then formed a procession, and solemnly moved on, 
 singiDg a hymn with the accompaniment of the Mridang, the conch- 
 shell and cymbals, till they reached the bathing ghaut of the Komala 
 Barabar, the tank attached to the sanctuary. The place had been 
 decorated with flowers and evergreens, and the flag of the New Dis- 
 pensation was waving in the breeze. The devotees took their seat 
 upon the steps of the ghaut ; the minister sat upon a piece of tiger's- 
 skin, stretched upon a wooden vedi erected for the occagion. Deep 
 silence prevailed. It was midday, the torrid sun burning overhead, 
 when the minister addressed his people as follows : 
 
 "•' Beloved brethren, we have come into the land of the Jews, and 
 we are seated on the bank of the Jordan. Let them that have eyes 
 see. Verily, verily, here was the Lord Jesus baptized eighteen hun- 
 dred years ago. Behold the holy waters, wherein was the Son of 
 God immersed. See ye where the blessed Jesus and by his side 
 John the Baptist, administering the rite of baptism, and behold in 
 the sky above the descent of the Holy Ghost. All three are here 
 present — Father, Son, Holy Spirit — spiritually united. Pilgrim 
 brothers, mark their union to-day on this hallowed spot, and see how 
 the water shineth in celestial radiance.' 
 
 " ' O thou Great Varuna, Water of Life. 
 
 ' ' Sacred Water, mighty expanse of Seas and Oceans and Kivers, 
 we glorify thee. Thou art not God, but the Lord is in thee. Thou 
 art full of the beauty and glory of heaven ; each drop revealeth the 
 divine face. Thou art the Water of Life. A most helpful friend art 
 thou unto us.' . . . 
 
 " The minister then read the whole of Matthew, chapter iii. . . . 
 He explained the true secret of baptism thus : 
 
 " ' Why did Jesus plunge into the water of the river ? Because He 
 saw the water was full of God. The Omnipresent Spirit of God he 
 saw moving upon the face of the waters, and in every drop sparkled 
 divinity. In such holy water, in the Jordan of divine life, was Jesus 
 immersed. And as he dipped into Divinity, and straightway came 
 out of the water, full of new or divine life, and the Holy Spirit over- 
 head announced his acceptance by God as His ' Beloved Son.' Thus 
 in him was the Father glorified, and likewise the Inspiration of the 
 Holy Ghost. Behold, my brethren, the water before us is full of the 
 Lord, and blessed are they who are baptized in it as was Jesus of 
 Nazareth.' 
 
 " The minister anointed himself with flower-oil and went down 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 137 
 
 into the water. Standing with his head above the water and rever- 
 ently looking above, he thus prayed : ' May I behold Thy bright and 
 sweet face, God, my Father, in the water that encompasses me ! 
 Convert this water into the water of grace and holiness that I may be 
 immersed in life everlasting. May Thy beloved Son abide in my 
 soul ! May John the Baptist be here to administer unto me the 
 sacred rite, and may Thy Holy Spirit hover over my head and inspire 
 me ! ' 
 
 " Thus saying he thrice immersed himself, saying, ' Glory unto the 
 Father, glory unto the Son, glory unto the Holy Ghost.' To mag- 
 nify the Three-in-one, he dipped once more, saying, ' Blessed be 
 Sacchitananda, Truth, Wisdom, and Joy in One.' 
 
 " With the water he washed his eyes and ears, his hands and feet, 
 and prayed with clasped hands." 
 
 With reference to these rites we have a remark or 
 two to make. They are in the first place caricatures 
 and burlesques, and their result is the universal derision 
 in which the New Dispensation is held by our educated 
 countrymen in general. They moreover indicate a 
 policy not only flexible and compromising, but posi- 
 tively suicidal. Their object is to please everybody, 
 but their result is — nobody is pleased ! To reconcile, 
 not merely the doctrines embodied in the varied relig- 
 ions of the world, but the forms and symbols of wor- 
 ship associated with them, is the avowed object of the 
 new movement, but the result of such un discriminating 
 syncretism is, as it always has been, u confusion worse 
 confounded." It is worthy of special notice that there 
 was an attempt made in the manner in which these 
 rites were performed to rationalize and justify the 
 primitive beliefs of the country, the well-known tenden- 
 cy in Yedic times to worship the elements and annam 
 or rice, etc. The sages of ancient India took special 
 delight in calling water Brahma, lire Brahma, rice 
 Brahma, and almost every conceivable thing Brahma, 
 and Mr. Sen in praising these natural objects as full of 
 
138 BRAHMOIStt. 
 
 Divinity not merely effected a reconciliation of hetero- 
 geneous symbols of worship, but attempted in a very 
 effective manner to demonstrate the truth of the forms 
 of faith that prevailed in the country when the grand 
 old hymns of the Rig Yeda were chanted on the banks 
 of the Indus. An attempt was made by a single 
 stroke of policy to reconcile the Hindus and Christians ; 
 and it is only obtuseness on the part of the parties thus 
 favored that leads them peremptorily (not to make use 
 of the word indignantly) to repel his advances. It is 
 also to be remembered that only a very small number 
 of persons, about a dozen and a half, including boys, 
 went all lengths with Mr. Sen in these demonstrations, 
 and that the present moribund condition of the new 
 movement is mainly attributable to them. A state- 
 ment made the other day in a newspaper, viz., that 
 Mr. Sen has in all India no more than fifty-three disci- 
 ples, may be a little below the mark, but there are not 
 more than a hundred persons in all India who have 
 accepted all the vagaries of the New Dispensation, and 
 who may justly be called Babu Keshub Chunder Sen's 
 followers ! And the bulk of these are evidently not 
 intelligent and thoughtful men ; as, if they had been 
 such, they would have taken part in that reasonable 
 rebellion (against the most obviously irrational princi- 
 ples promulgated by Mr. Sen) under the banner of 
 rationalism, which is embodied in the Sadharan Brahmo 
 Somaj. 
 
 Note on the Trinity. —Mr. Sen, bent on pleasing all parties, has 
 been, in his treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity, a little more 
 politic than Bajah Bam Mohun Roy, who could not conceal his an- 
 tipathy to it. In his lecture on ' ' That Marvellous Mystery, the 
 Trinity," he tries to reconcile Hinduism with Christianity by reviv- 
 ing the triad of Vedantism embodied in the well-known word 
 Sacchitananda, and squeezing it into a sort of verbal if not real ac- 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION. 139 
 
 cordance with our views of the holy mystery. He forgets that, ac- 
 cording to Vedantism, Brahma is improperly called by that name, in- 
 asmuch as he is sat, existence, not " Truth," as Mr. Sen translates 
 wrongly, and nothing more ; his knowledge involving no distinction 
 between subject and object, and his happiness being without feelhvj 
 or consciousness of happiness ! Mr. Sen in speaking of the Trinity 
 employs at times language which a Christian might adopt, but he 
 veers about, as if afraid of losing thereby the sympathy of the large 
 class of Unitarians from whose writings he has often derived his in- 
 spiration. He seems to adopt finally, if any sentiment in his Pro- 
 teus-like system can be called a finality, what theologians call the 
 modal view of the doctrine in question. Hear what he says : " You 
 have three conditions, three manifestations of divinity. Yet there is 
 one God, one substance amid these phenomena. Not three gods, 
 but one God. Whether alone, or manifest in the Son, or quickening 
 humanity as the Holy Spirit, it is the same God, the same identical 
 deity, whose unity continues divisible amid multiplicity of manifes- 
 tations." Again : " But remember the Trinity is not three persons, 
 but three functions of the same Person." Mr. Sen descants upon this 
 old theory, in his rambling but by no means unattractive way, as if 
 it were a discovery of his own. Nay, he goes so far as to affirm that 
 this view, so often upheld and so often exploded in the church, has 
 been revealed to his " God-consciousness," and that of hundreds of 
 men in Calcutta, as a new feature of his novel Dispensation ! 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 
 
 The leading spirit of the New Dispensation has 
 passed away since the foregoing papers were written. 
 Babu Keshub Chunder Sen's premature death was 
 regarded as a public calamity by all classes of people in 
 India, the ruling and the ruled. Meetings were held in 
 almost all its great cities to give suitable expression to 
 the sense of loss and the profound grief with which the 
 disappearance, though not unexpected, of a great and 
 good man from the stage of public life could not but be 
 regarded. A grand meeting was held in the Calcutta 
 Town Hall, not only in honor of his memory, but with 
 the avowed object of raising funds and doing something 
 handsome to perpetuate it among Ins sorrowing coun- 
 trymen. Several of the papers edited by native gentle- 
 men appeared with black borders and commendatory 
 notices of his labors, and all Indian journals, both Euro- 
 pean and native, united in bearing collective testimony 
 to the extraordinary ability and goodness of the Re- 
 former, who, if a mausoleum like the "Westminster 
 Abbey had existed in the country, could not but have 
 been enshrined among its illustrious dead in a promi- 
 nent, if not the most prominent, niche. His disciples 
 went into mourning for a stated number of days, and 
 they were directed by proclamation to spend these in 
 intense meditation on God as the Mother of the world 
 with the beloved child, Keshub Chunder, in Pier arms. 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 141 
 
 The highest place was accorded to him among the living, 
 and the highest among the dead. In the first gush of 
 feeling it was impossible to form a proper estimate of 
 the character and career of a man who, in spite of 
 temporary fluctuations, occupied a very high place in 
 public regard ; but now that the universal and vehe- 
 ment sorrow has subsided, a calm review of his life and 
 the individuality which runs like a vein of gold through 
 it is possible. 
 
 The illustrious lecturer, Joseph Cook, represented the 
 Indian Reformer, on his return from his voyage round 
 the world, as Cj man of a religious genius. This phrase 
 is, we beg to affirm, with due deference to him, both 
 unhappy and ambiguous. Genius implies not merely 
 an extraordinary power of recombination or reconstruc- 
 tion, but the power of discovery and invention. But 
 discovery in religion is an impossibility. That man 
 cannot by reason search out God is an axiom of Chris- 
 tian philosophy, and the difference between the relig- 
 ions of the world and Christianity is that, while they 
 embody or represent a series of fruitless efforts on the 
 part of man to find God, Christianity points to a series 
 of loving efforts on the part of God to enlighten and 
 save man. God must bring Himself down to the level 
 of human comprehension, either by visions and revela- 
 tions, or by providential dealings of a miraculous 
 nature, or by theophanies and incarnations, or knowl- 
 edge of God no amount of genius on the part of man 
 can enable him to attain. Genius again is often used 
 as convertible with creative power ; but in the region 
 of religious truth creation is even a wilder and more 
 hopeless effort than discovery. Again, if by genius is 
 meant an instinctive perception of truth, how can a 
 man, who, with the New Testament open before him, 
 
142 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 wandered very far away from the vital truths of Chris- 
 tianity, be represented as especially gifted with it ? 
 
 But perhaps Mr. Cook means by the phrase nothing 
 more than a religious temperament. That he was 
 characterized from his youth by a strong and irresistible 
 proclivity to a religious life is undeniable. In this 
 respect he was, when very young, separated by a broad 
 iine of demarcation from the youth of his country. 
 While they manifested a lamentable proneness to frivol- 
 ity and even viciousness, he chose the better part, and 
 earnestly endeavored to initiate among them a reform 
 which their condition and that of the whole land per- 
 emptorily demanded. To universal apathy to the con- 
 cerns of religion he opposed a singularly grand earnest- 
 ness ; and the zeal with which he held meetings and 
 delivered lectures for the benefit of those whose heed- 
 less progress toward destruction he deplored cannot be 
 sufficiently praised. But his religious temperament 
 was unhappily not guided by a sound judgment and a 
 well-balanced intellect. In one respect his intellect 
 was doubtless of a very high order. He had a resplen- 
 dent imagination — an imagination that could not merely 
 present ordinary thoughts in an attractive garb, but 
 infuse warmth and vitality into the coldest of ideas and 
 the wildest of theories. An abstraction ceased to be 
 cold and unattractive the moment it passed through the 
 blazing furnace of his mind, and even a vagary received 
 from it a fascination which truth with its innate charms 
 seems to lack when passing through the cold intellect 
 of a man prone to philosophize but destitute of poetic 
 fervor. But his brilliant imagination was at once his 
 strength and his weakness. It checked the proper de- 
 velopment of the other faculties of his mind, suppressed 
 his reason and judgment, and ultimately led to his 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 143 
 
 being victimized by vagaries and chimeras of the wild- 
 est stamp. 
 
 As an orator he was certainly without a rival in his 
 own country, and without many in the world. His 
 style was attractive if not chaste ; his utterances were 
 impassioned and fervid ; and the tropes and metaphors 
 in which he indulged, though obviously incompatible 
 with the approved rules of rhetoric, exercised a weird 
 influence over audiences neither very intelligent nor 
 very appreciative. His discourses, however, lacked the 
 most prominent elements of genuine eloquence — direct- 
 ness of purpose, coherence of thought, and accuracy of 
 reasoning ; and they were, moreover, marred by an 
 egotism which, in spite of his oft-repeated confessions 
 of sin and unworthiness, could not but be extremely 
 repulsive. A greater mistake could not be made by a 
 human being than what led some of his admirers to 
 place him as an orator on a par with Gladstone and 
 Bright. Barring such excellences as the classical 
 purity of their style, the breadth of their scholarship, 
 and the range of their thought, there is a gulf impassa- 
 ble between what may be called the structure of their 
 minds and that of his. His mind, on the whole, was 
 weak, theirs is strong. His intellect was ill-regulated, 
 ill-balanced, with one faculty disproportionately de- 
 veloped, and others scarcely unfolded if not thoroughly 
 enslaved. The intellect of these really great men is on 
 the whole harmoniously developed, each faculty prop- 
 erly cultivated and thereby fitted to contribute its quota 
 to the wealth and grandeur of the whole. He was 
 thoroughly incapable of doing what they are daily 
 doing. He could not take up a subject, sit down and 
 master the body of literature associated with it, study 
 details, analyze figures, examine all sides, carefully 
 
144 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 weigh the pros and cons, and calmly deduce the conclu- 
 sions borne out by facts and statistics. The process of 
 reasoning he followed is the antipodes of that followed 
 by these great statesmen and orators. His was the 
 deductive, while theirs has always been the inductive 
 method of reasoning. Sensible men do by no means 
 sympathize in the contempt poured upon the deductive 
 process by John Stuart Mill. When the general prin- 
 ciples from which particular conclusions are deduced 
 are sound, and the intervening process is without a 
 flaw, the reasoning cannot but be pronounced unexcep- 
 tionable, and its results classed among the facts proven. 
 But when general principles are heedlessly postulated, 
 and some of the intervening steps skipped over, the 
 conclusions arrived at cannot but be fallacious, and 
 therefore unworthy of acceptance. While men like 
 Gladstone study facts and details and rise through the 
 varied steps of an accurate process of reasoning from 
 particulars to generals, he was plunged into the abyss 
 of error by generalizations, gorgeous indeed, but hastily 
 assumed, and obstinately maintained in the teeth of 
 facts substantiated and deductions sustained by the 
 approved canons of correct reasoning. 
 
 To give an example or two : Mr. Sen believed, and 
 was never tired of expressing the conviction in his 
 fervid style, that the sages of ancient India, especially 
 of the age of the Upanishads, professed and elaborated 
 a sublime form of Theism — the form, in short, which it 
 was his work to revive and promulgate afresh. Upon 
 what was this belief on his part based ? Not on his- 
 torical or documentary evidence. The Yedas unfold a 
 system of polytheism as complicated as that which 
 curses our country to-day, and by no means so much 
 less degraded as is generally represented by sentimen- 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 145 
 
 talists. The earliest and the purest of them, the Rig 
 Veda, develops in its heart-stirring hymns a form of 
 nature-worship which even Max Miiller discriminates 
 from monotheism by such terms as Kathenotheism or 
 Henotheism — terms which, if they mean anything at 
 all, indicate a system of polytheism of a refined type. 
 And as to sublimity of thought and purity of practice, 
 another great scholar, Monier Williams, sees in this 
 Yeda, along with some sporadic jewels of truth, " pre- 
 cepts implying a social condition scarcely compatible 
 with the lowest grade of culture and civilization." 
 Again, the teaching of the Upanishads may be justly 
 represented as vibrating in its earlier stages between 
 nihilism and pantheism, and ultimately settling down 
 into the latter form of what may be called transcen- 
 dental materialism or atheism. Neither the earlier nor 
 the later portions of the Vedas present the slightest in- 
 dication of an era of theistic belief or theistic devotion. 
 Mr. Sen saw such an age of pure faith and practice 
 through the lenses of his brilliant imagination, and 
 drew even a broader conclusion from it — viz., that a 
 sublime type of theism, elaborated by human reason 
 with the help of such inspiration as is common to relig- 
 ious teachers, philosophers, and poets, was the primitive 
 faith of every nation on the surface of the globe. And 
 after having allowed himself to be victimized by a gen- 
 eralization, gorgeous though false, he had no alternative 
 but to set himself to the task of misconstruing texts 
 and distorting facts. 
 
 Mr. Sen formed a theory of the Person of Christ and 
 His work essentially different from what has been 
 received as orthodox in the Church from its foundation 
 in the days of the apostles down to the present mo- 
 ment. How did he form it ? Not certainly by care- 
 
146 BKAHM0IS3I. 
 
 fully studying and analyzing the received theology of 
 the Church with its standards and symbols ; not even 
 by a calm study of the Bible and an analysis of the 
 almost innumerable texts referring to the subject ; but 
 by hastily snatching a sentiment from one school of 
 ancient philosophers, another from heretical writings, 
 a third from the tomes of mysticism, and a fourth from 
 "the speculations of rationalism. This composite theory 
 was matured in Mr. Sen's fertile mind ; it appeared hi 
 glowing colors in his public utterances, and it had to 
 be upheld as the primitive faith of the Church buried 
 under its dogmatic lore, and disinterred by him. And 
 texts were misconstrued and facts distorted with an 
 audacity which, but for the example set by Paulus, 
 Schenkel, and Strauss, would be pronounced unparal- 
 leled, lie himself confessed, in one of his Town Hall 
 lectures, that he was not in the habit of reading, and 
 that all the truths he proclaimed regarding bygone ages 
 and historical characters were communicated to him by 
 a series of direct but not supernatural inspirations. 
 And he was right, if by inspirations we understand the 
 ebullitions of a fervid but ill-regulated imagination. 
 
 Again, while the minds of these statesmen are of a 
 practical order and averse to Quixotic schemes and 
 projects, Mr. Sen was a visionary and a dreamer. The 
 idea of a religious syncretism, which had assumed a 
 vivid form in the mind of Rajah Ram Mohun Roy, 
 became in him a deep conviction and an all-absorbing 
 passion. By him it was not merely entertained amid 
 sanguine hopes of immediate realization, but expanded 
 to an obviously preposterous extent. He not merely 
 believed in the existence of sporadic elements of truth 
 in one and all the religions of the world, and in the 
 possibility of their being brought into one focus, and 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 147 
 
 thus made to constitute one comprehensive scheme of 
 faith and practice ; but he maintained that they were 
 all true, and that all that was needed to effect their 
 unification was the discovery of what he was pleased to 
 call a string of union. Every religion, from fetichism 
 up to pure monotheism, represents, according to his 
 belief, a dispensation of God ; and consequently a union 
 of all the conflicting systems of belief is not merely a 
 possibility, but sure to be a realized certainty under the 
 banner of the New Dispensation. An idea more wild 
 could scarcely be entertained by a human mind, and 
 the bare fact that he allowed it to be the master passion 
 of his soul is a proof of an ill-regulated and ill-balanced 
 intellect. Had he studied history and weighed calmly 
 the results of the syncretistic efforts put forth by men 
 greater than himself, the philosophical and theosophical 
 union attempted by Ammonius Saccas and others in 
 the West, and by the authors of Swetaswatara Upan- 
 ishad and Bhagavada Gita in the East, the theological 
 syncretism attempted in modern Germany, his sanguine 
 hopes would have given place to cold despair. But he 
 was averse to reading and calm thought, and prone to 
 allow his brilliant mind to be completely enslaved by 
 visionary schemes and grand but dreamy generaliza- 
 tions. 
 
 The impossibility of the " synthesis" Mr. Sen worked 
 hard to realize will become apparent if one of the fun- 
 damental principles of the New Dispensation is taken 
 into consideration. That principle is, in Mr. Sen's 
 phraseology, immediacy ', or direct intercourse with God, 
 and a denial of the doctrine of mediation. Mr. Sen 
 evidently believed that this doctrine was a non-essential 
 feature of the positive religions of the world — a feature 
 of so little importance that he had only to unfurl the 
 
148 , BRAHMOISM. 
 
 flag of his Dispensation, with the word immediacy 
 inscribed in characters of gold, to effect its immediate 
 extinction. He held to the diverse religions of the 
 world what was pompously represented as the language 
 of peace and amity, but he lacked penetration to see 
 that he was, by a denial of mediation, simply declaring 
 a war of extermination against the systems he wished 
 to reconcile with one another, and with his own 
 theory. Christianity, for instance, could not be called 
 upon to abandon the doctrine of mediation without 
 pouring out its very life-blood ; and the invitation 
 extended to her by the Indian Reformer to give up 
 mediacy and accept immediacy may remind one of the 
 wholesale union proposed when the lamb was invited to 
 make peace with the tiger by lying in the bloodthirsty 
 animal ! 
 
 Mr. Sen, moreover, was not only a visionary but a 
 fanatic of the first water. His imagination predomi- 
 nated over the nobler faculties of his mind so com- 
 pletely that during especially the last few years of his 
 life he believed, and did not hesitate to proclaim, 
 that he was the chosen medium of communication 
 between God, the Father of peace, and the world, so 
 obviously torn and lacerated by theological disputes 
 and ecclesiastical dissensions. His theory of inspiration 
 was at first the natural one, which, for instance, led the 
 disciples of Plato to represent him as " God-enlight- 
 ened." But it gradually assumed a form which can 
 scarcely be differentiated from that theory of supernat- 
 ural revelation which forms a prominent feature of 
 Christian orthodoxy. He made use of the old prophetic 
 formula, " thus saith the Lord,' ' with an emphasis from 
 which devotees of natural inspiration would recoil in 
 horror. He issued proclamations and manifestoes in the 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 140 
 
 name of God, and published dialogues said to have 
 been held between the Creator and His disciples with 
 reference to the claim of infallibility he advanced as 
 the centre of a new dispensation. Nay, he professed 
 to be immediately guided by God, not only in his official 
 capacity, but as a private person ; not only in matters 
 of doctrinal belief and ritualistic practice, but even in 
 those affecting the interests of his domestic life. He 
 traced the marriage of his first daughter to an Indian 
 prince to a direct revelation, as well as his deter- 
 mination to set up the banner of the New Dispensa- 
 tion ! What shall we say with reference to these pre- 
 posterous pretensions ? Was he sincere, or was he not, 
 in advancing them ? We believe he was sincere, simply 
 because he advanced them with the consciousness that 
 they were fitted to alienate from him the educated 
 community, of which he was a distinguished member, 
 and diminish the respect entertained for him by the 
 most sensible of his foreign friends and supporters. If 
 the theory that he was a pretender cannot under the 
 circumstances be entertained, the conclusion is inevi- 
 table that he was a fanatic and a dupe. 
 
 That Mr. Sen was a man of unparalleled popularity 
 both among the ruling and the ruled classes is a patent 
 fact ; and the phenomenon can be easily explained. 
 He was a man of extraordinary ability, a born orator, 
 and an earnest social reformer. But these excellences, 
 however commendable, cannot of themselves account 
 for the conspicuous place he occupied in public venera- 
 tion. To these must be added the circumstance that 
 he very worthily occupied an intermediate position be- 
 tween Christianity and the religions of the country. 
 There are in the official circles in India many so-called 
 Christians and pronounced infidels who believe that the 
 
150 BEAHMOISM. 
 
 religion of Christ is after all not suited to the genius of 
 the Hindu people, and that consequently all attempts 
 to propagate it within the boundary lines of their coun- 
 try must end in failure. Nor can these people with 
 open eyes fail to see that the grovelling superstitions 
 prevalent among them cannot maintain their degrading 
 sway in the teeth of the moral forces brought to bear 
 on the country by Western civilization and Western 
 culture. These being doomed, something must be sub- 
 stituted, and Mr. Sen's scheme has appeared to them 
 as the scheme best fitted to check the progress of the 
 one and take the place of the others. To them, there- 
 fore, Mr. Sen appeared a champion worthy of support 
 and encouragement, and they lavished their patronage 
 on him. Again, the educated natives long for an inter- 
 mediate halting stage between the prevalent Hinduism, 
 of which they are thoroughly ashamed, and Christian- 
 ity, the peculiar doctrines of which they regard with 
 repugnance. They therefore eagerly gathered around 
 the Indian reformer, who not merely supplied the halt- 
 ing-stage they had been in quest of, but flattered their 
 national vanity by professing to have derived the best 
 principles of his new faith from the literature of the 
 country, and discovering an esoteric meaning even in 
 the superstitions they were prone to look upon with 
 disfavor. Mr. Sen's popularity waned during the last 
 few years of his life, in consequence of the vagaries he 
 indulged in, and his following dwindled down to a 
 handful of persons of not very superior education, bar- 
 ring, of course, his own brother and the present unrec- 
 ognized leader of his movement, Mr. Protap Chunder 
 Mazoomdar, and a man here and there. As an orator 
 and a social reformer he retained his influence intact 
 up to the last moment of his life. 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 151 
 
 Mr. Sen did not live as an ascetic. He lived amid 
 the attractions and endearments of domestic life, in a 
 commodious and well-furnished house, with a fruitful 
 vine by its sides, olive plants round about his table, 
 numerous relations and friends, and a retinue of retainers 
 and servants. He appeared neatly and respectably 
 dressed, travelled first class, figured away in private 
 parlors and public draw r ing-rooms, attended vice-regal 
 levees and receptions, introduced his daughters by mar- 
 riage into the wealthiest of families, married his son to 
 an accomplished lady amid aristocratic pomp, and led, 
 on the wmole, the life of a metropolitan magnate rather 
 than that of a religious recluse. He was avowedly a 
 warm advocate of Yoga philosophy, and he at times 
 affected or burlesqued a few of the least painful sacri- 
 fices of the life of extraordinary austerity associated 
 with it ; but between his style of living and that of a 
 Ybgee properly so called, there is a gulf impassable. 
 JSTor was Mr. Sen obviously dead to those imperious 
 calls of secular ambition, the tempations of which men 
 of ability find it so hard to resist. He blew his own 
 trumpet, and never scrupled to raise himself by varie- 
 ties of means, on the wdiole fair, to the pinnacle of 
 fame on which he shone alone among his countrymen. 
 
 An important question ought to be disposed of before 
 an attempt is made to show" how far his standpoint is 
 from that of the Church of Christ. Was Mr. Sen thor- 
 oughly sincere ? In the beginning of his career he was 
 doubtless more sincere than he was when crowned with 
 world-wide fame, and blessed with the plenitude of 
 patronage and applause. But it is questionable whether 
 he ever was thoroughly and unreservedly sincere. Had 
 he been so, or had a thorough-paced sincerity been in 
 his case associated with complete self-abnegation, genu- 
 
152 BRAHM0IS1I. 
 
 ine humility, and pure love of truth, he would not have 
 been allowed by a Merciful Father to go so far astray as 
 to believe in his prophetic vocation, and claim to be 
 the heaven-appointed and God-enlightened centre of 
 the last and best of divine dispensations. The extrava- 
 gances and vagaries in which he indulged, especially 
 during the closing period of his career of reform, are a 
 proof, like those into which Mohammed was betrayed, 
 or by which the founder of Mormonism was victimized, 
 of some degree of insincerity and falsity. Like some 
 great leaders of religious schism and heresy, as well as 
 of wild, infidel factions, he allowed intellectual pride 
 and worldly ambition to mar the degree of sincerity 
 with which he began his career as an inquirer, and the 
 consequence was that he was hurried by a weak judg- 
 ment and uncontrollable feelings to conceits and 
 chimeras which have rarely been paralleled, never sur- 
 passed, even in the history of wild enthusiasm. What 
 a power he would have been if he had been thoroughly 
 sincere in the beginning of his career, and if his extra- 
 ordinary abilities had been guided by a more genuine 
 love of truth, a calmer intellect, a sounder judgment, 
 and a less domineering individualism ! 
 
 From Mr. Sen's individuality we now pass on to his 
 creed, if a series of shifting beliefs can be called a 
 creed. And the first question we raise is, What 
 thinks he of Christ ? Does he believe in the Supreme 
 Divinity of Christ in the sense in which the Church in 
 all its sections holds the doctrine as life % JSTo. His 
 utterances are ambiguous, as his object seems many- 
 sided, to conciliate all classes of people — Christians, 
 infidels, Hindus, and Mussulmans. But if they are 
 thoroughly sifted and analyzed, as they were in a 
 preceding paper, they will be found to constitute an 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 153 
 
 emphatic denial of this cardinal truth of the Christian 
 scheme. His followers are more outspoken than he 
 was for obvious reasons, and the following extract from 
 a pamphlet recently handed to the writer in the Punjab 
 says distinctly and without equivocation what he says 
 under a cloud of pompous but misleading phraseology : 
 ' ' It will thus be clear to you that we are not for a sec- 
 tarian Christ. We neither believe ourselves, nor do we 
 ask any one to believe in the divinity of Christ, that is, 
 the Godhead of Christ. When we ask you to accept 
 Christ, we do not mean by Christ the man-made God, 
 because we have had enough of man-worship ; nay, 
 worse than that, the stone-worship ; and I say worse 
 than these two, the brute worship also. We do not 
 mean by Christ, man-God. Was not Jesus the son of 
 man ? How can the son of man be the Almighty 
 God ? You, my Christian brethren, may say that 
 Christ was the son of God. Exactly so ; but His 
 being the son of God disproves rather than proves any 
 claim for him to Godhead. It clearly shows that He 
 was the ' created, ' and not the Creator. How can 
 } r ou confound the 'sent' with the ' sender,' the 
 4 messenger ' with the King of kings ? How can you 
 exalt the son to the rank and dignity of the Father, 
 who is All-Perfection ?" The pamphlet from which 
 the above is quoted and other extracts are to be pre- 
 sented, was published in 1882 under the auspices of the 
 " JBrahmo Mandir, Lahore" at the Tribune Press. Its 
 author calls himself " a Punjabi Brahmo of the New 
 Dispensation," and, though its style is not character- 
 ized by much purity and elegance, it is an unexception- 
 ably correct index to the views entertained by Mr. Sen 
 and his followers. 
 
 Mr. Sen's Christology, like the other articles of his 
 
154 BRAHMOISir. 
 
 shifting creed, passed through varied phases of develop- 
 ment, and rose from one degree of perfection to an- 
 other ; but in its completed form it fell far short of the 
 belief of the Church. Latterly he allowed his views 
 on the Person of Christ to be shaped by wild specula- 
 tions similar to those indulged in by the champions of 
 the varied phases of Gnosticism which prevailed in the 
 first and second centuries of the Christian era, and 
 which attempted a heterogeneous mixture of Christian 
 truth with the form of philosophy called ISTeo-Platonism. 
 For instance, when he affirms that Christ dwelt as an 
 idea in the Father before the creation of the world, the 
 mind is called back to the theory of ideas elaborated by 
 Plato, and the modifications it underwent in the hands 
 of Philo and some champions of the Gnostic heresy. 
 The archetypal ideas of the Greek philosopher were 
 transformed by the Jewish thinker into potencies or 
 forces, and these were all united into an aeon, called the 
 Power of powers, the Idea of ideas. This aggregate 
 potency was subsequently personified by some Gnostic 
 philosophers into what they were pleased to call the 
 seon Christ. This personified idea, the first of a series 
 of aeons the genealogy of which was set forth with 
 minuteness of detail, descended, according to Cerinthus, 
 and entered into the substance of Jesus at the time of 
 His baptism, and left Him before His arrest and cruci- 
 fixion, staying with but not partaking of His passion. 
 As the Gnostics attempted to bring into the Church 
 many of the conceits and fancies of Greek philosophy as 
 modified by Philo, Mr. Sen incorporated or tried to 
 incorporate a little of Hindu philosophy with Christian 
 truth. In Vedic times God was called Sachchitananda, 
 and represented as a trinitarian essence consisting of 
 Sat, or Existence, Chit, or Intelligence, and Ananda, 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION" CONTINUED. 155 
 
 or Joy. The second element of this trinity, Chit, was 
 somewhat like the Logos or Reason or Thought of 
 Platonic philosophy, and the Power of Philo. Mr. Sen 
 pressed this element into service, and represented it as 
 the Christ who had dwelt as an Idea in the bosom of 
 God, a Thought or a Potency. The Spirit of the 
 Christ, or the brightest effluence from Him, descended 
 and took possession of the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, 
 and made Him a bright example of purity, love, self- 
 surrender, and martyr-like devotion. But the Christ 
 did not confine Himself to this Prince of Reformers, or 
 make Him the sole depository of His spirit. He 
 favored the other great reformers that cluster around 
 Him, Socrates, Confucius, Buddha, Nanak, Theo- 
 dore Parker, and Emerson, and many others too nu- 
 merous to be named, with bright effluences, which 
 made them also examples of the excellences which 
 shone in Jesus a little more brightly. And when the 
 world was brought to the verge of moral ruin by relig- 
 ious disputes and theological wrangling, the last bright 
 effluence descended and took possession of the person of 
 Keshub Chunder Sen, and made him the centre of a 
 dispensation of peace and concord ! The Christ of 
 Babu Keshub Chunder Sen is an Imaginary Christ, an 
 Ideal Christ, a Force, an Intelligence, an Abstraction 
 with potentialities entombed in it. His Christ was not 
 the historical Christ worshipped in the Church. 
 
 But it must be added that the Potency is all-embrac- 
 ing, not by any means confined to the roll of reformers 
 and devotees. A particle of it is to be found in every 
 human being, if not in every unit of the animal creation 
 and every object of the material world. The Christ 
 has diffused Himself by self-diremption through the 
 three kingdoms of nature, and the various orders of 
 
15G BEAHMOISir. 
 
 beings which inhabit ethereal regions, and which may 
 be represented as aeons proceeding from the Universal 
 Father through Him. Mr. Sen's utterances on the 
 Person of our Lord are characterized, as all his utter- 
 ances are, by incoherence, ambiguity, and mysterious- 
 ness ; and they cannot possibly be made the basis of a 
 consistent Christology. But if all his utterances, earlier 
 and later, were carefully sifted, they would tend to 
 bring one to the conclusions at which we have arrived, 
 not only after careful study, but after a long conversa- 
 tion with him, and many an interesting talk with many 
 of his leading followers. 
 
 The personal experiences to which Mr. Protap Chun- 
 cler Mazoomdar called attention in a grand meeting held 
 in Boston are fitted to uphold these conclusions regard- 
 ing Mr. Sen's Christology. That much must be deducted 
 from Mr. Mazoomdar' s statement is apparent from the 
 rhetorical embellishments with which it abounds. The 
 man cannot be credited with much earnestness or prac- 
 tical good sense who in a narrative of personal conver- 
 sion cannot rise above the rhetoric displayed in the fol- 
 lowing sentences : " The gloomy and haunted shades 
 of the summer evening had suddenly thickened into 
 darkness, and all things far and near had assumed an 
 unearthly mysteriousness. I sat near the large lake in 
 the Hindu College compound. Above me rose in a 
 sombre mass the giant, grim old seesum-tree, under the 
 far- spreading foliage of which I had played so often, 
 and my father played before me. A sobbing, gusty 
 wind swam over the water's surface, the ripples 
 sounded on the grassy bank, the breeze rustled in the 
 highest regions of the great tree. " In the narrative 
 spun out in this pompous style Mr. Mazoomdar ex- 
 presses the peace he experienced after a period of relig- 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 157 
 
 ious struggle in consequence of a blessing he received 
 from Christ in these words : " Jesus lay discovered in 
 my heart as a strange human kindred love, as a repose, 
 a sympathetic consolation, an unpurchased treasure to 
 which I was freely invited." Again : ," It was not a 
 bodily Christ then ; it is much less a bodily emanation 
 now. A character, spirit, a holy, sacrificed, exalted 
 self, whom I recognize as the true Son of God. ' ' A 
 Christian may speak of the presence of Christ in his 
 heart in these words, but as he believes that Christ in 
 heaven has a human body, though spiritualized and 
 glorified, he cannot possibly describe Him as only a 
 ' ' character, " a " spirit, " a " self, " a " love, ' ' a 
 "repose," a "consolation ;" and his creed makes it 
 impossible for him to draw a sharp line of demarcation 
 between His " bodily" and His spiritual presence in 
 the soul. Mr. Mazoomdar attributes to Christ a kind 
 of ' ' personality, ' ' a personality with which the aeons 
 of Philo and the Gnostics were invested, a personality 
 which Plato gave to his ideas, and between which and 
 impersonality there is scarcely a shade of difference. 
 The presence of this tiny, intangible, mysterious per- 
 sonality in his soul — that is, of the love, repose, and 
 consolation he experienced — has to be accounted for ; 
 and Mr. Mazoomdar traces it to" the indwelling pres- 
 ence of God alone." Christ, therefore, is the effect not 
 the cause of his conversion, and sanctification ! 
 
 The views of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and 
 Atonement of Christ presented in the pamphlet already 
 referred to and laid under contribution confirm what 
 has been said regarding Mr. Sen's Christology. Re- 
 garding the Incarnation, the writer says : " Who will 
 accept the Sacred Word of God, or what effect can this 
 Word have upon the unbelieving world, until it is 
 
158 BRAH310ISM. 
 
 transformed into a living character in the lives of the 
 believers themselves ? Hence religion is character. 
 Nineteen centuries ago a rare phenomenon was wit. 
 nessed by the world. Keligion was brought down from 
 its Himalayan heights to the plain level of humanity. 
 The Word of God which is often on men's lips was 
 eaten and digested by Jesus. Being thus assimilated, 
 i the "Word was made flesh. ' " This writer does not seem 
 to have made as much progress in theosophical specula- 
 tion as the leader whom he implicitly follows, and he 
 veers about in his statements about the Word of God, 
 inclining on the whole to the view which represents it 
 as identical with revealed truth. But it is worthy of 
 notice that if we identify the Word of God with the 
 Eeason of Platonic philosophy, or the all-embracing 
 Potency of Philo, or the Logos of Gnosticism, we have 
 here almost the same view of the incarnation which 
 was propounded by Cerinthus and his followers. 
 
 On the crucifixion of Christ we have these utter- 
 ances : " What is meant by Cross ? Cross is the 
 symbol of crucifixion. But crucifixion of what ? Of 
 the body of Christ ? What ! Christ came and lived 
 and died to this end in the world — to commit suicide — 
 for is it not written in the Gospels that Jesus surren- 
 dered Himself into the hands of His enemies of His 
 own accord ? What a monstrous view then of the 
 crucifixion of Christ ! No, not the crucifixion of the 
 body of Christ. Then of what ? Of the soul of 
 Christ ? Never ; that is simply impossible. The soul 
 of Christ is immortal, and hence cannot be crucified. 
 At least you Christians who believe in the resurrection 
 of Christ can never say so. Of the good works and 
 holy life of Christ \ Even this cannot be, since char- 
 acter never dies. If then it is not the crucifixion of 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION" CONTINUED. 159 
 
 the body of Christ, of the soul of Christ, of the divine 
 life of Christ, what is it then that bleeds on the cross ? 
 The crucifixion of Christ is not a dream that Christ 
 dreamt. It is a fact in the religious world. It is the 
 fact in the life of every God-fearing Christian man or 
 woman. Something was crucified in which the whole 
 Christendom seeks atonement. Yiewed in the light of 
 the New Dispensation, it was the self-sacrifice, the 
 crucifixion of the lower or the human self of Christ. 
 Jesus, you vow, was the Son of man as well as the Son 
 of God. The Son of God was not crucified, can never 
 be crucified. While on the earth this heaven-born Son 
 was at one with the Father, and now He sits on the 
 right hand of God. But the Son of man was cruci- 
 fied." Barring the ludicrous mistake into which the 
 writer falls when he represents Christians as believing 
 in the resurrection of the soul of Christ, after having 
 pointed out the impossibility of its death, here we see 
 a broad fine of distinction drawn between Christ as 
 human and Christ as divine, which Christians repudiate 
 and which nothing but the theory of an ason entering 
 into and enlivening the humanity of Jesus can justify. 
 And the crucifixion of Christ is distinctly represented 
 as indicating the death of His lower self, and as 
 repeated in every man of God on the surface of the 
 globe. The writer elsewhere calls Christ God-man, 
 and to protect poor Christians from misapprehension, 
 thus explains the phrase : " Christ was not simply 
 good man, but Gocl-man, which means godly-man." 
 Every godly man therefore has a bit of that aaon which 
 remained in Him, but did not partake either of His 
 frailties or of His sufferings ! 
 
 The writer's notion of the atonement cannot but be 
 of a piece with what he says about the crucifixion of 
 
160 BRAHiJOISM. 
 
 Christ. The atonement is that act of spiritual self- 
 sacrifice in Christ which is repeated in every godly 
 man,- and without which complete devotion to the 
 service of God is an impossibility. The writer after 
 having confounded divine grace with the law of God, 
 nay, after having represented it as " the law itself," 
 says : ' ' Now the law of God is nothing but the Holy 
 Word of God. Hence to believe in God's Word is to 
 receive His grace. God's Word is full of grace and 
 justice, and in the fulfilment of that Word is the salva- 
 tion of the sinner. But a real belief in the Word of 
 God necessitates, as I have already stated, the sacrifice 
 in the interests of humanity of all that is dearest to the 
 believer in this world, nay, his very life, if need be. 
 Therefore God's grace comes through kurbani (sacrifice). 
 Nay, it is kurbani itself. The idea of kurbani is as 
 universal as the Word itself, but as the Word is made 
 flesh in very rare instances, so in like manner genuine 
 cases of kurbani are very few and far between." The 
 confusion of ideas presented in this passage is perhaps 
 to be found nowhere except in Mr. Sen's discourses, 
 and those of others whom he has taught to dream and 
 rhapsodize as he did to his heart's content. The 
 words grace, law, and sacrifice are used as synonymous 
 or thoroughly identical in meaning, and salvation is 
 made dependent on our reception of what is meant 
 by them. Attach the meanings these words ordinarily 
 explain, and you have in the passage confusion worse 
 confounded ; but apply the seon theory, and it ceases 
 to be meaningless. If the Word of God alias grace, 
 alias sacrifice were regarded as a potency its reception 
 into the heart could not but result in complete self -sur- 
 render and self-immolation. 
 
 The aeon theory is wrought out even more promi- 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION - CONTINUED. 1G1 
 
 nently in what the writer says on regeneration : u Re- 
 generation is only possible through faith in self-sacri- 
 fice. So long as the self in us lives, we should not for 
 a moment believe that we are saved. It is when the 
 self is mercilessly cut into pieces and is dead that we 
 truly believe and are in reality saved. I do not mean 
 by self the self that comes from above, but the unbe- 
 lieving self in man, the root of all worldliness. ' ' Here 
 we have a double self, the human and the divine, as in 
 Christ. Let it be remembered that in the scheme of 
 salvation thus developed, Christ is the subject of con- 
 version, regeneration, and sancti fixation , not the author 
 thereof. 
 
 We do not for a moment affirm that the ambiguous 
 expressions in these passages cannot be made by a par- 
 donable stretch of charity to conform to Christian 
 ideas ; but we do maintain that nobody can carefully 
 study the literature of the ISew Dispensation without 
 coming to the conclusion that they are intended to 
 degrade rather than properly represent the Lord Jesus 
 Christ and His great salvation. Mr. Sen may justly 
 be represented as a Gnostic of the Hindu school, and as 
 the author of a heresy opposed to the vital truths of 
 Christianity. Tradition assures us that the beloved 
 Apostle John peremptorily declined to enter the same 
 baths with Cerinthus because he was afraid the struct- 
 ures might come down to crush his damnable heresy ; 
 while Marcion, a follower of the heresiarch, when he 
 requested Polycarp to own him as a brother, had this 
 sharp reply : " I own thee as the firstborn of Satan." 
 In the teeth of such facts, why should we allow our- 
 selves to be impelled by morbid sentimentalism to re- 
 ceive as a champion of Christianity a man who system- 
 atically lowered the Person and work of Christ by dis- 
 
162 BKAHMOISM. 
 
 torting facts, misconstruing texts, and presenting the 
 creations of a diseased imagination as revelations from 
 God ? 
 
 Let it be added that our Lord is not even named in the 
 creed of the New Dispensation. To enable the reader 
 to see this, let the creed be once more presented : 
 
 i ' One God, one Scripture, one Church. 
 
 • ' Eternal Progress of the Soul. 
 
 ' ' Communion of Prophets and Saints. 
 
 ' ' Fatherhood and Motherhood of God, Brotherhood 
 of man and Sisterhood of woman. 
 
 "Harmony of Knowledge and Holiness, Love and 
 Work, Yoga and Asceticism in their highest develop- 
 ment. 
 
 " Loyalty to Sovereign." 
 
 Christ is not mentioned even by name, but He doubt- 
 less occupies a place, perhaps the chief place, among 
 the Prophets and Saints with whose disembodied spirits 
 communion is to be maintained, and He shares the 
 veneration of mankind with Mohammed, who brought 
 down a text from heaven to justify his illicit inter- 
 course with the wife of his adopted son ; Narad, the 
 notorious makebate among the Hindu gods ; Chai- 
 tanya, who revived in Bengal the worship of the god 
 of licentiousness, justly called the Bacchus of India ; 
 Nanak, who cherished the wild idea of effecting a union 
 between Hinduism and Mohammedanism ; Buddha and 
 his modern imitator, Comte, who tabooed theology and 
 divorced morality from religion ; Theodore Parker, 
 who lived by abusing Christian orthodoxy and wavered 
 between monotheism and pantheism ; Emerson, who 
 believed in nothing but self ! The Christian's blood 
 must be cold indeed who can see the crucified Nazarene, 
 the Captain of his salvation, the Author and Finisher of 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 163 
 
 his faith, degraded to such association without being 
 filled with indignation ! 
 
 Mr. Sen's One Scripture is a direct attack on the in- 
 fallibility of those records which we Christians look up 
 to as the standard of our theology and religion. The 
 Church of Christ is divided into almost innumerable 
 denominations, and it is unhappily the scene of theo- 
 logical disputes and ecclesiastical broils, now certainly 
 bloodless, but once by no means so. But all its con- 
 flicting sections have vied with one another in regard- 
 ing the Bible as the Word of God, the rule of faith and 
 practice, and the last court of appeal in all controver- 
 sies, theological and ecclesiastical. An attack on this 
 palladium of truth is an attack on the foundations of 
 Christianity. What treatment does this Book of books 
 receive at the hands of the Brahmo reformer ? It is 
 placed on a par with the Yedas, the Koran, and even 
 the Purans. The writer of the pamphlet alluded to 
 says : " But the question here "arises, What is it in 
 which the sinner is required to have his faith % It is 
 essentially necessary to settle this important question 
 first of all. Are we to believe in the Yedas, or the 
 Koran, the Bible or the Purans ? Are we to believe 
 the Christian or the Mohammedan, the Hindu or the 
 Buddhist, or are we to depend solely upon our own in- 
 tellects for guidance in such a solemn question as that 
 of everlasting life or death ? The Christians believe 
 that their Bible contains the whole truth, and nothing 
 but the truth ; and so do the Mohammedans, the 
 Hindus, and others say in regard to their respective 
 scriptures." Again : " In whose word then are we to 
 believe ? You are already aware that we, Brahmos, 
 recognize the sublime truths contained in the scriptures 
 of different nations, and give due credit to all those who 
 
164 BRAHM0IS3I. 
 
 sincerely preach and teach according to them. Because 
 the New Dispensation, to which we belong, has come 
 not ' to destroy ' but to e fulfil,' not to separate but to 
 collect all the scattered fragments of Divine Revelation, 
 and to unite them into a homogeneous whole. ' ' Need 
 we say that the Christians, who show a culpable prone- 
 ness to patronize the New Dispensation, encourage 
 that the issue of which is the degradation of their Lord 
 to the level of human beings, and of their Holy Script- 
 ures to the level of human writings ? 
 
 Here it should be remarked that Mr. Sen, in calling 
 upon men to recognize his ability to construct out of 
 the varied scriptures, in which truth is in his opinion 
 sadly intermixed with and buried under error, a script- 
 ure containing the truth and nothing but the truth, not 
 only forgets but contradicts himself. Mr. Sen calls 
 himself a sinner, and goes so far as to affirm that he 
 has, like Judas Iscariot, betrayed his Master. He 
 cannot but admit that as a sinner his heart is depraved, 
 his judgment is warped, and his native perception of 
 truth is made obtuse. If so, how is it possible for him 
 to separate with intuitional or unerring certainty the 
 wheat from the chaff in the varied scriptures, and 
 gather the one into his garner and burn the other with 
 fire unquenchable ? If in reply he affirms he has what 
 appears to him true in these scriptures attested by 
 divine revelations, how is he sure that he does not mis- 
 take, for them his own fancies, especially when subjec- 
 tive evidence is the only evidence utilized, and that of 
 an objective character thrown out of calculation ? But 
 what Mr. Sen cannot do Christ could. He was, accord- 
 ing even to Mr. Sen, sinless, and consequently His 
 moral nature was not vitiated, and its percipient facul- 
 ties paralyzed. He could instinctively perceive truth 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION CONTINUED. 1G5 
 
 wherever it might be found, separate it from error with 
 unerring certainty, and build up a system to which no 
 exception can possibly be taken by minds free from the 
 incubus of sin. And when Mr. Sen raises up the stand- 
 ard of a dispensation higher than that of Christ, he 
 simply contradicts and stultifies himself. He may, 
 however, say that he is only reviving the defunct econ- 
 omy of Christ ; if so, what right has he to characterize 
 his dispensation as new ? 
 
 His One Church represents not only a heterogeneous, 
 nondescript compound of conflicting beliefs, but an 
 agglomeration of the varied symbols of worship and 
 sacraments of religion associated with the varied 
 systems of faith prevalent in the world. We Christians 
 have no business to object to his having a "sacred 
 dance," a " sacred jugglery," or meetings — shall we 
 say seances f — held to hold communion with the spirit 
 of Socrates or the shade of Menu. But we cannot but 
 object to the audacity with which he was pleased to 
 desecrate the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist 
 under the banner of his new dispensation. The holy 
 sacraments have, we maintain, been always adminis- 
 tered in the church by men appointed for the purpose, 
 and in a manner calculated to set forth their impor- 
 tance as means of grace, if not sources of spiritual life ; 
 and to-day, as forms instituted by Christ Himself, they 
 are regarded by all classes of Christians with peculiar 
 reverence, not certainly with superstitious veneration. 
 And certainly they cannot with indifference or apathy 
 behold these holy rites parodied, or converted into 
 farces by men who never take the trouble of looking 
 into their intrinsic meaning or the purposes they are 
 intended to subserve. Why should Christian patronage 
 be lavished on a Church in which Christ is brought 
 
166 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 clown to the level of human beings, the Bible is repre- 
 sented as a piece of human composition, the God of the 
 Old Testament is facetiously described as " a bearded 
 Jew," and the holy sacraments of baptism and the 
 Lord's Supper are burlesqued ? 
 
 Again the exaggerated importance Mr. Sen attaches 
 in his creed to Yoga and asceticism discriminates it 
 from the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ was 
 the man of the people, and His religion is the religion 
 of the people. Christianity sanctifies the varied rela- 
 tions and occupations of life, dignifies labor, hallows 
 matrimony, elevates society, purifies trade and com- 
 merce, consecrates the varieties of industries and activi- 
 ties of which the world is the theatre, the trophies of 
 human ingenuity, the triumphs of civilization, and the 
 products of mental toil. And it nowhere represents 
 asceticism as a stepping-stone to extraordinary knowl- 
 edge and insight and high-toned piety. Asceticism 
 was doubtless incorporated with it, as well as the wild 
 speculations of heathen philosophy by philosophizing 
 Christians ; and it is a fact that it has not yet been 
 wholly emancipated from its influence. But it forms 
 no part of our religion, and it is only an excrescence to 
 be lopped off. But in Mr. Sen's creed asceticism is the 
 most prominent element, and high attainments in spirit- 
 ual knowledge and piety are unattainable excepting 
 through the path of mortification and penance pointed 
 out by it. In this respect, therefore, his system and 
 Christianity are at war with each other. 
 
 We have, we think, succeeded in demonstrating that 
 there is a gulf impassable between the creed of the 
 New Dispensation and our holy religion, and that noth- 
 ing short of morbid sentimentalism can induce a person 
 to represent its author as a champion of Christianity. 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION" CONTINUED. 1GT 
 
 Mr. Sen's religion cannot be characterized by a better 
 word than one of his own invention. It is a piece of 
 " sacred jugglery," fitted to deceive superficial think- 
 ers, but not those whose views of religion are based on 
 a deep insight into the necessities, longings, and yearn- 
 ings of the human soul. That he believed that it was 
 destined to supersede the religions of the world, and be 
 universal in its influence and paramount in its sway is 
 certain, and may "be advanced as an additional proof of 
 his fanaticism. But that this belief is shared in by 
 men, who, like Mr. Protap Chunder Mazoomdar and 
 Mr. Kisto Behari Sen, his brother, have calmer minds 
 and feelings more controllable, would be an inexpli- 
 cable phenomenon, if the existence of sincere Comtists 
 and Mormons did not convince us of the possibility of 
 human minds being victimized by any theory, however 
 wild and ludicrous ! 
 
CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 SADHARAN BEAHMO SOMAJ. 
 
 The Sadharan Brahmo Somaj may be looked upon 
 both as a revival of genuine Brahmoism and as a pro- 
 test against the errors with which it is interlarded by 
 the champions of the ISTew Dispensation. It seems to 
 have had in the elaboration of its creed and constitu- 
 tion the double purpose of resuscitating the Brahmo 
 religion as it stood when, freed from the fetters of 
 primitive pantheism, it proclaimed the supremacy of 
 reason in matters of faith and religious consciousness, 
 and of declaring a war against the innovations in doc- 
 trine and practice grafted upon it by Mr. Sen. And 
 in all that it has done since the beginning of its corpo- 
 rate life about four }^ears ago, it seems to have been 
 influenced by this twofold motive. 
 
 This fact it will be our business to set forth by a 
 reference to (1) its Creed, (2) its Constitution, and (3) its 
 Practical Achievements. But before we do so we must 
 present a brief sketch of its very short history. 
 
 Its origin is to be traced, as has already been shown, 
 to the zeal and exertions of the intelligent party the 
 members of which protested against the innovations 
 ushered in by Mr. Sen and his missionaries. By meas- 
 ures more or less violent they extorted a series of con- 
 cessions from their opponents ; but when in the case of 
 the Kuch Behar marriage all reconciliation was impos- 
 sible, they separated in a body, held a meeting, and 
 
SADHARAK BRAHMO SOMAJ. 1G9 
 
 formally deposed the minister, Mr. Sen. They then 
 endeavored to take possession of the Brahmo Temple as 
 the property of the Somaj they represented ; but Mr. 
 Sen, as the sole trustee, had the sinews of war in his 
 hands, and they were foiled. They then held a public 
 meeting and formally organized the New Somaj. This 
 was done on the loth of May, 1878. 
 
 They then began the work of recasting with un- 
 wonted enthusiasm. Within an incredibly short time 
 a thorough revolution was effected in almost every 
 feature of its social life. The creed was recast, the 
 constitution was recast, and the varied branches of 
 practical work were recast. Extraordinary sacrifices 
 were made, donations and subscriptions were secured, 
 and a new Temple or Prayer Hall fitted to seat about 
 a thousand persons was erected. This temple was con- 
 secrated within less than three years after the disrup- 
 tion, and the following *' declaration" was read on the 
 grand occasion of its formal dedication : 
 
 " This day, the 10th day of March, 1287, according to the Bengalee 
 era, and the 22d of January, 1881, according to the Christian era, in 
 the fifty-first year of the Brahmo Somaj, we dedicate this hall to the 
 worship of the one true God. From this day its doors shall be open 
 to all classes of people without distinction of caste or social position. 
 Men or women, old or young, wise or ignorant, rich or poor, all 
 classes will meet here as brethren to worship Him who is the 
 Author of our salvation. Excepting this most Holy Being, no created 
 being or thing shall be worshipped here ; nor shall divine honors be 
 paid to any man or woman as God, or equal to God, or an incarnation 
 of God, or as specially appointed by God. It shall be ever borne in 
 mind in this hall that the great mission of Brahmoism is to promote 
 spiritual freedom among men and to enable them to establish direct 
 relationship with God, and the sermons, discourses, and prayers of 
 this place shall be so moulded as to help that spirit. It shall ever 
 be its aim and endeavor to enable all who hunger after righteousness 
 to know God, who is life of our life, and to worship Him direct. 
 
 " The catholicity of Brahmoism shall also be preserved here. No 
 
170 BRAHMOISM, 
 
 book or man shall ever be acknowledged as. infallible and the only 
 way of salvation ; but nevertheless due respect shall be paid to all 
 scriptures and the good and great of all ages and all countries. In 
 the sermons, discourses, and prayers used in this hall, no scripture, 
 or sect, or founder of a sect shall ever be ridiculed, reviled, or spoken 
 of contemptuously. With due respect untruth shall be exposed, and 
 truth vindicated. No man or class of men shall be here regarded as 
 the elect or favorite of God, and the rest of mankind as lost to that 
 favor. Anything calculated to compromise this catholic spirit shall 
 never be countenanced. 
 
 " The spirituality of our doctrine shall be carefully maintained. 
 Flowers, spices, burnt offerings, candles, and other material accom- 
 paniments of worship shall never be used, and care shall be taken to 
 avoid everything tending to reduce religion to mere parade and life- 
 less forms. It shall be the object of all our preachings and discourses 
 in this place to teach men and women to love God, to seek piety, to 
 hate sin, to grow in devotion and spirituality, to promote purity 
 among men and women, to uproot all social evils, and to encourage 
 virtuous deeds. Anything that will directly or indirectly encourage 
 idolatry, engender superstition, rob spiritual freedom, lower con- 
 science, or corrupt morals, shall never be countenanced. May this 
 hall ever remain a refuge and resting-place for all the weary 
 sojourners of this world ! May the sinner find consolation and hope 
 in this hall ; may the weak be strengthened, and may all who hunger 
 and thirst find food and drink for their souls ! "With this hope and 
 prayer we dedicate this hall in the name of the one true God. May 
 He help and guide us ! Amen." 
 
 The document is admirable, barring one gross verbal 
 inaccuracy which represents God as a " created Being ;" 
 and it embodies the spirit of the Sadharan Brahmo 
 Somaj, in. conjunction with its double purpose of revival 
 and protest. The worship of one true God is revived, 
 together with the spirituality, catholicity, and tolerance 
 of Brahmoism ; but a firm and bold protest is put 
 upon record against the innovations of the once pro- 
 gressive, but now retrogressive party. The infalli- 
 bility of a book or a prophet is emphatically denied, 
 and all tendency to man- worship, such as led to extrav- 
 agances and superstitions in the Somaj, is discouraged 
 
SADHARAN- BRAIIMO SOMA J. 171 
 
 and browbeaten. The spirit of ritualism, which is an 
 important element of the New Dispensation, and which 
 manifests itself in sensational demonstrations, receives 
 in the- document the potent check it deserves ; while 
 spiritual freedom, compromised so sadly -in Mr. Sen's 
 church, is reasserted with due emphasis. This docu- 
 ment, therefore, offers a clue to or rather embodies the 
 genius and tendency of the new movement. 
 
 Let us in the first place give the reader an insight 
 into the Creed of the Sadharan Brahmo Somaj. It 
 consists of four general principles and twenty -three 
 articles of faith. The general principles are these : 
 
 (1) Belief in the existence of an infinite Creator. 
 
 (2) Belief in the immortality of the soul. 
 
 (3) Belief in the duty and necessity of spiritual wor- 
 ship of God. 
 
 (4) Disbelief in any infallible book or man, as the 
 means of salvation. 
 
 These general principles jDresent a reaffirmation of 
 the general creed upheld by Mr. Sen himself before the 
 unfettered development of his peculiar notions, and a 
 protest against these. God, Duty, and Immortality — 
 these are the constituent elements of the creed preached 
 in America by Theodore Parker and in India and Eng- 
 land by his disciple Mr. Sen. And these are one and 
 all embodied in this statement of general principles. 
 But Babu Keshub Chunder Sen has, of late especially, 
 pointed to himself as an infallible medium of communi- 
 cation between heaven and earth, and represented doc- 
 uments written by him as proclamations issued by God 
 Himself. He has, in short, assumed the position of an 
 infallible book and man ; and the last of these princi- 
 ples is levelled against such extravagant pretensions on 
 his part. Even in its enunciation of general principles 
 
172 BKAHMOISM. 
 
 the Sadharan party has been guided by its double pur- 
 pose of revival and protest. 
 
 The Articles of Faith may also be divided into two 
 classes — those which embody a revival of genuine 
 Brahmoism, and those which lift up a protest against 
 the innovations so often referred to. The first class 
 give some insight into the glorious attributes of God, 
 into the nature of the worship and obedience due to 
 Him, into the constitution and destiny of man, into the 
 nature of sin, salvation, and regeneration, and into the 
 life of reward or punishment ahead of human beings 
 living in this world. The Ninth Article presents a 
 definition of sin better than any that have emanated 
 from Brahmoism : " By sin we understand the con- 
 scious and wilful commission or indulgence of a deed, 
 thought, or desire which leads the soul away from the 
 Divine Will, and also the conscious and wilful omission 
 of any deed, thought, or desire which leads toward the 
 Divine Will." This is certainly precise and philo- 
 sophical language, not merely one of those rhapsodies 
 in which Mr. Sen is so decidedly prone to indulge, but 
 the definition suggests a question of great importance, 
 viz. , what is the Divine Will ? 
 
 To this question an answer, philosophical in diction 
 and on the whole accurate in thought, is given in the 
 following article: "By Divine Will we understand 
 that universal, eternal, and constant action of the 
 Divine Spirit which, under given conditions, is mani- 
 fested in different shapes and proportions, through our 
 reason, conscience, affections, and will. When it 
 breathes through reason it is wisdom , enabling us to 
 perceive the true ; when flowing through the con- 
 science it is virtue, giving a sense and knowledge of the 
 right ; when operating through the affections it is love, 
 
SADHARAN BRAHMO SOMAJ. 173 
 
 leading us to seek the good of others ; and when influ- 
 encing the will it is courage, giving firmness to stand 
 upon duty. The conditions of the action of this will 
 axe love and self -surrender. ..." 
 
 Now we may accept this phraseology and the senti- 
 ment or theory couched in it. But all difficulty is not 
 removed. The question stares us in the face — how are 
 the conditions to be realized in us sinful beings ? How 
 is the dominant selfishness of our hearts to be extin- 
 guished ? How is the spirit of love and self -surrender 
 to be generated and matured in a heart depraved to the 
 very core ? The history of the world in general, and 
 of individual souls in particular, proves to a demonstra- 
 tion the unfittedness of the revelation of God embodied 
 in nature and human consciousness to effect the revolu- 
 tion needed in the human heart. A revelation higher 
 than that is a desideratum ; and as Brahmoism in its 
 Protean phases cannot supply the want, all attempt on 
 its part to re-establish the harmony between the Divine 
 Will and the stubborn and perverse will of man must 
 end in egregious failure. 
 
 But will not repentance and prayer solve the diffi- 
 culty ? The Twelfth Article runs thus : "We believe 
 that sincere repentance and earnest prayer are the 
 means of his (man's) reconciliation with the Father. 
 Repentance is the awakening of love, faith is the matu- 
 rity thereof, and regeneration is the result. ' ' To pro- 
 duce genuine repentance and lead to earnest, believing 
 prayer, a revelation of God's love, more overpowering 
 than that which Brahmoism can point to, is needed. 
 The conditions cannot be realized by Brahmoism ; and 
 all its talk of salvation and regeneration is like the 
 well-known saying of Archimedes, that if he could find 
 a place to fix his lever on he could raise the world. 
 
174 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 Our Sadharan Brahmo friends have been lamentably 
 deficient in their philosophical insight into the dire con- 
 sequences of sin. They emphatically oppose the doc- 
 trine of original sin, though even the sceptical scientists 
 of the day have been led by their own line of investiga- 
 tion, and in spite of their concealed or open antagonism 
 to Christianity, to recognize it as a fact of science, and 
 to rear their theories of evolution on it as a stable 
 basis. But they carry their temerity up to the highest 
 pitch of development when they represent the world as 
 in a natural condition. Their Sixteenth Article runs 
 thus : " We do not look upon the world as a delusion, 
 like the pantheist, nor as a place of bondage, like the 
 believer in transmigration, nor as the heritage of fallen 
 humanity and consequently an abode of sin and suffer- 
 ing, like the orthodox Christian ; but we believe that the 
 world is a nursery for the soul, beautifully adapted for 
 its growth and development, and for the exercise and 
 culture of its moral and spiritual powers during the first 
 stage of its existence, and that all the spiritual and 
 moral ties that bind man to his family and to his kind 
 are sacred and divinely ordained." 
 
 In this statement we see embodied the beautiful but 
 thoroughly groundless theory of the optimists. Sin is 
 virtue in the making, and suffering is essential to prog- 
 ress. The incalculable amount of sin and suffering we 
 see in the world is one of the natural conditions of its 
 existence and progress ; and it is absurd to represent 
 it, as the Bible does, as an unnatural phenomenon real- 
 ized by the perverse will of man, in contravention of 
 the Divine Will, though in accordance with the Divine 
 Decrees, or God's plan of administration. But optim- 
 ism is based on the paradox that obedience proceeds 
 from disobedience, virtue from vice, light from dark- 
 
SADHARAST BRA HMO SOMA J. 175 
 
 ness, death from life ! No proof of human degradation 
 is stronger than the fact that man would sooner swallow 
 this monstrous conclusion than admit the inherent 
 malignity of sin and the perniciousness of its results, 
 not the less disastrous and direful because overruled for 
 good by grace divine. Brahmoism and all the isms of 
 the world would vanish into thin air if adequate views 
 of the intense blackness of sin and of the inflexibility 
 of the antagonism which subsists between it and the 
 intense holiness of God could be naturalized in the 
 world. 
 
 Let us now advert to the second class of the articles 
 in question — viz., those which lift up a vigorous protest 
 against the innovations associated with the New Dis- 
 pensation. The Twenty-first Article is a protest 
 against Mr. Sen's claim to infallibility, put forth cau- 
 tiously by him, but most unequivocally by his follow- 
 ers : " We do not believe in any divinely revealed 
 book, nor in any infallible guide or pope ; but we 
 regard all perceptions of the really true, good, and holy 
 in any book or man as revelations of God, and reveren- 
 tially bow before them. " The Twentieth Article sets 
 forth the necessity of democracy in the Brahmo Church 
 as contradistinguished from the autocracy of the New 
 Dispensation : " In accordance with the above spirit, 
 we look upon the Church as essentially a family of 
 brothers and sisters, and as such a commonwealth in 
 the strictest sense of the term ; where the abuse or 
 misappropriation of power by one or a few is unfair, 
 ungodly, and condemnable. ' ' 
 
 The utility of this last declaration may be seen when 
 it is placed in juxtaposition with the following dictum 
 of the Sunday Mirror (November 13, 1881) : " Relig- 
 ious leaders are expected to speak with authority — an 
 
176 BRAHM0IS3I. 
 
 authority received from heaven. The very ring of 
 earnestness and sincerity which characterizes their 
 utterances proves that the voice with which they speak 
 is not theirs. It follows, therefore, that ignorance of 
 God gives no title to vote ; and such ignorance is the 
 distinguishing trait of the majority of a community. 
 To talk of democracy in matters transcendental is to 
 attain the height of the ludicrous. Our opinion is that 
 a church should be eminently aristocratic and not dem- 
 ocratic. We use the word ' aristocratic ' in its literal 
 sense, meaning the best." The " ring" of the passage 
 is Carlylish : the majority of mankind are brutes, and 
 must be ruled despotically by the few, who are Princes 
 of Men. The difference lies in the literal sense in 
 which the word " aristocratic" is used. The question, 
 however, arises, Who is to separate the good from the 
 bad ? The party looked upon as the good in the 
 Church of the K"ew Dispensation are looked upon as the 
 bad by the champions of the Sadharan Somaj, and vice 
 versa ! 
 
 The tendency of Mr. Sen's utterances to pantheism 
 is so obvious, in spite of his occasional and unequivocal 
 protest against it, that the creed of the Sadharan Somaj 
 would be incomplete as a counterpoise if it did not 
 embody a declaration against it. Again, his parade of 
 asceticism needs a counter-demonstration ; and we 
 have both these forms of error denounced in more than 
 one of these articles. It is enough to quote Article 
 Fifth : ' ' We believe that the way to this salvation is 
 not through pantheism, which regards sin and misery 
 as delusions, nor through asceticism, which aspires to 
 uproot the desires and subjugate the body, but through 
 love, which teaches the soul to seek the will of the 
 Father as the highest good. It does not snatch the 
 
SADHARAN BRAHM0 SOMAJ. 177 
 
 soul away from temptations, nor violently uproot the 
 desires, but places it above them and beyond them by 
 making them matters of indifference to its purpose or 
 aim." 
 
 And lastly, Mr. Sen seems to uphold the popular 
 belief in a material heaven and a material hell, or a 
 heaven and hell not only as states of the mind, but as 
 places of abode. We say seems deliberately, as pas- 
 sages may be culled from his notoriously incoherent, 
 rhapsodical deliverances fitted to uphold the very 
 opposite conclusion. In his lecture on " Our Faith and 
 Our Experiences" he points most emphatically to a 
 home in the next world ' c as the most glittering of the 
 prizes in reserve for the believer." " In natural the- 
 ology, in pure theism, there can be no divinity without 
 a future world, no immortality without a divinity. 
 The intuitive eye raised above beholds God ; directed 
 forward, it sees its future home in the next world. A 
 Father without a home, a home without a father — that 
 is an anomaly against which nature rebels." There is 
 a protest against this doctrine in the creed of the Sad- 
 haran Brahmo Somaj, and it is embodied in Article 
 Seventh : " But we do not imagine any material 
 Heaven or Hell. There may be worlds or spheres, 
 where human souls find themselves placed during the 
 several stages of their progress and development after 
 death, but Heaven and Hell with us are not places but 
 states. By heaven we mean the joy consequent upon 
 knowing and loving the Father, and upon being 
 allowed to hold unclouded intercourse with Him — this 
 being the highest reward of virtue ; and by hell we 
 mean that miserable state where the soul is made un- 
 worthy of intercourse with God and finds delight in un- 
 worthiness — which also is the worst punishment of sin, " 
 
178 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 We do not know whether or how far our Brahmo 
 friends are influenced by certain misrepresentations 
 afloat relative to the Christian ideas of heaven and hell. 
 We Christians are sometimes represented as being 
 exclusively materialistic in our views of the future state 
 of rewards and punishments, in which mankind instinc- 
 tively believe ; heaven and hell are to us places, and 
 nothing more — places of corporeal enjoyment and cor- 
 poreal torment. But such representation is grossly 
 when ignorantly, and maliciously when knowingly, 
 made. Our ideas are both materialistic and spiritual- 
 istic. Heaven and hell are, according to our belief, 
 both places and states. We believe that the conditions 
 of our present life, associated as it is inseparably with 
 bodily infirmities and the punitive element in the econ- 
 omies of nature and dispensations of Providence so 
 prominently brought to our notice, must be essentially 
 altered ere all obstacles to our perfect development and 
 perfect enjoyment can possibly be removed. A world 
 therefore free from the disastrous consequences of sin 
 noticeable in this, or this world thoroughly liberated 
 from these consequences, can alone be a fit abode for 
 blessed souls prepared for the fulness of hallowed 
 activity and ethereal f elicity of which they are capable. 
 Hence the idea of a material heaven, or a world with 
 material and moral conditions different from those notice- 
 able in this world ! For the same or a similar reason, a 
 material hell, or a place of punishment where suffering is 
 not mitigated by the innumerable vestiges of benevo- 
 lence which are among the characteristic elements of the 
 present economy, or of the economy of this world, is 
 also needed to punish souls unalterably determined to 
 turn a deaf ear to all exhortations to repentance and 
 faith, as well as to prevent them from doing further 
 
SADHARAN" BRAHMO SOMAJ. 179 
 
 mischief. But Christianity maintains that a man must 
 be heaven before he is sent to heaven, or be hell before 
 he is sent to hell. Heaven and hell are, according to 
 its teachings, both states and places. 
 
 1. Now let us turn to the Constitution of the Sacl- 
 haran Brahmo Somaj. The Somaj is a democracy in 
 the proper sense of the term, and its great source of 
 power is the General Meeting of its members, and rep- 
 resentatives and delegates from the Somajes affiliated 
 to it, held annually, " and oftener if there be need." 
 The business of this Imperial Assembly is both legisla- 
 tive and executive, like that of the General Conference 
 of the Methodists. As a legislative body it hears and 
 approves the annual report of the Somaj, modifies 
 existing laws or frames new rules when necessary, and 
 discusses questions fitted to promote the welfare of the 
 Church. As an executive assembly it elects a General 
 Committee of forty members, to meet every quarter 
 and conduct the general business of the Church. To 
 secure despatch and efficiency in the conduct of business 
 this somewhat huge body delegates its power to a small 
 Executive Committee of a dozen members, chosen by it 
 annually, reserving to itself the power of supervision, 
 which it exercises through its quarterly meetings. The 
 Executive Committee is assisted by a body of office- 
 bearers, four in number, elected annually by the Gen- 
 eral Meeting of the members and delegates. It is not 
 necessary to repeat that this constitution is a standing 
 protest against the autocracy embodied in Mr. Sen's 
 organization. Mr. Sen has a ' ' Missionary Conference, ' ' 
 but it is somewhat like the ministry of an irresponsible 
 despot who appoints its members, retains them so long 
 as they are found obsequious and compliant, but casts 
 them adrift the moment they are found guilty of cher- 
 
180 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 ishing an independent thought. Mr. Sen's missionaries 
 are on all questions, important or non-important, 
 brought up "to " the level" of Mr. Sen's thought by 
 some influence unknown to the outside world. Mr. 
 Sastri's remarks on the organization of his Somaj are 
 both accurate and pungent : " However, let that pass ; 
 the reader cannot have any doubt now that the New 
 Dispensation is not a constitutional church properly so 
 called. The whole thing rests • upon the ' inspired 
 authority ' of one man. Perhaps I will be doing 
 injustice if I do not notice Mr. Sen's ' Missionary Con- 
 ference.' It is a self -elected council, which is said to 
 deliberate on Church matters — and many and pro- 
 longed are its discussions carried on, I am told ; but 
 there is this peculiarity about it, that all voices at last 
 find an easy solution in one ' inspired ' voice — for not a 
 single voice of dissent has been up to this time recorded 
 against any of Mr. Sen's proceedings. So I leave the 
 reader to ponder over this mockery of a constitutional 
 council. ' ' 
 
 The conditions to eligibility to membership are four. 
 Let them be presented in Mr. Sastri's own words : 
 " First, the applicant for membership must be above 
 eighteen years of age ; secondly, he must agree to sign 
 the covenant of the Somaj containing the four princi- 
 ples mentioned before ; thirdly, his private character 
 must be pure and moral, for breach of morality in 
 private life makes a member liable to forfeiture of 
 membership ; fourthly, he must agree to pay at least 
 eight annas in the year toward carrying on the work 
 of the Somaj. " It is worthy of notice that a public 
 renunciation of caste or badges of idolatry is not made 
 a condition of membership, and therefore the Sadharan 
 Brahmos, as well as those under the banner of Mr. 
 
SADHARAN BRAHMO SOMA J. 181 
 
 Sen's Somaj, are divided into two classes— viz., Anus- 
 thanic, or those who have discarded caste and idola- 
 trous badges, and those who have not done so. The 
 number of the former is very small indeed, in connec- 
 tion either with this or with the once Progressive but 
 now Retrogressive movement — so small that at Lahore, 
 where the Brahmos have a temple of their own and 
 varied organizations, there was, when the writer visited 
 it, only one Anusthanic Brahmo. 
 
 The Anusthanic Brahmos have one great privilege 
 denied to those who lack the moral courage they have 
 shown in discarding caste. The members of the 
 Executive Committee, office-bearers, ministers, and 
 missionaries must be chosen only from their ranks. 
 The method in which missionaries are appointed and 
 supported is worthy of commendation. The candidate 
 for the post of a missionary has to apply formally to 
 the Executive Committee, who, if he does not appear 
 properly qualified, transfer him to the charge of a 
 committee called the Missionary Committee. By the 
 members of this committee the books he has to study 
 are prescribed, the lectures he has to attend are got 
 up, the examinations he has to pass are held, and his 
 conduct and progress during what may be called his 
 academic life are watched. When he is furnished with 
 a pass certificate by them, he has to go out and preach 
 for one whole year as a probationer ; and ultimately, 
 when he has proved his ability both in the school of 
 drilling and in the field of action, his name is published 
 for two months as that of an applicant for missionary 
 work, and members of the Somaj are requested to state 
 if they have any serious objections to his appointment. 
 When this season of concluding trial is over, " a day is 
 appointed when special divine service is held, and he is 
 
182 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 duly ordained. " Mr. Sastri, from whom all our infor- 
 mation regarding the Sadharan Somaj is derived, does 
 not state whether this is done by the solemn imposition 
 of hands, or whether some other mode of ordination is 
 resorted to. He assures us, however, that " the plan 
 sketched out in the above account is yet in a state of 
 design, for the first missionaries being men of long- 
 standing reputation, no such process was felt necessary 
 in their case. ' ' 
 
 The missionaries are not salaried men in the proper 
 sense of the term, but they have all their wants sup- 
 plied by the Executive Committee, who look after their 
 families when they are absent on duty, sanction allow- 
 ances, according to an estimate made in each individual 
 case of the probable cost of maintenance, and meet 
 emergencies arising from " disease, accident, or death" 
 by special grants. On the whole, missionaries are 
 maintained " in comfort" in or out of the metropolis ; 
 and Fakirism, or the system which sends missionaries 
 out begging, and which is ostensibly but not really in 
 vogue in the Progressive Somaj, is held at a discount. 
 
 3. It is time for us to advert to the development of 
 the practical work of the Somaj. Its "mission" is 
 grand, and is unfolded as follows : 
 
 " First, To preach and propagate the idea of a personal God — the 
 Parama Purush, as in Sanscrit He is called — of a God who loves 
 righteousness and hates sin. 
 
 " Secondly, To preach and propagate, and also to teach by personal 
 example, the idea of true spiritual worship, consisting of communion 
 and prayer, as distinguished from the outward observance of idola- 
 trous rites ; which idea if once properly grasped will inevitably give 
 rise to spiritual struggles. 
 
 " Thirdly, To divest conceptions of piety of the errors of sentimen- 
 talise and mysticism on the one hand, and asceticism and ritualism 
 on the other, and thereby to direct the religious enthusiasm of the 
 
SADHARAN BRAHMO SOMAJ. 183 
 
 people to channels of practical usefulness, to fields of active philan- 
 thropy, and to the elevation of individual and social life. 
 
 il Fourthly, To seek and establish the grand but often forgotten 
 truth of the brotherhood of man, by the overthrow of caste and 
 every other form of tyranny of class over class ; the elevation and 
 emancipation of woman being an important step in this direction. 
 
 " Fifthly, To promote freedom of conscience, to kindle the sense of 
 individual independence ; thereby sowing the seeds of domestic, so- 
 cial, political, and spiritual liberty. 
 
 " Sixthly, To communicate to the body of the people, through the 
 means of individual lives, a living and conquering moral energy, 
 born of faith and earnest work, which will impart strength and vigor 
 to the exhausted moral and spiritual nerves of the race, and will help 
 them to be morally and spiritually regenerated. " 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to pause here and notice that 
 the mission of the Sadharan Somaj is a practical, as its 
 creed is a theoretical, protest against the prominent 
 errors of Mr. Sen's Somaj. Mysticism and pantheism 
 are certainly imparting their color, if not their vital 
 substance, to the creed of the Progressive Somaj, and 
 its recent proceedings are eminently fitted to rivet the 
 chains under which the country has been groaning for 
 ages untold. A protest against these aberrations of 
 thought followed by a practical warfare against them 
 is a felt want, and the Sadharan Somaj bids fair to 
 supply it, if it be not within a short time led astray by 
 aberrations thought even more reprehensible. Again, 
 an attempt to uphold independence of thought and 
 assert the rights of reason seems peremptorily demanded 
 by the tendency of the Progressive Somaj to place the 
 collective will of a community under the guidance of 
 one imperious will. 
 
 Let us now turn to what the Sadharan Somaj has 
 done to carry out its splendid programme. It has, as 
 we have already intimated, had a commodious hall 
 erected and consecrated for regular worship, and for 
 
184 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 giving effect to what may be called both ordinary and 
 extraordinary methods of inculcating religious truth , 
 nurturing religious life, and spreading the blessings of 
 religious growth. The foundation of this hall was laid 
 within eight months after the schism, and it was 
 formally consecrated in January, 1881. During the 
 brief interval the Sadharan Brahmos raised about 
 30,000 rupees, a very large sum considering their cir- 
 cumstances, for the purpose of erecting this hall and 
 meeting other expenses. 
 
 It has established a library in Calcutta for the diffu- 
 sion of useful knowledge in general, and religious 
 knowledge in particular. This library has a good 
 assortment of books, many of which seem to have been 
 generously presented to it by European and native 
 gentlemen, who, though not Brahmos in any sense of 
 the term, look upon the movement as worthy of 
 encouragement. The library is in working order, and 
 the number of those who avail themselves of it is on 
 the increase. 
 
 It has, moreover, organized a benevolent association 
 called the Hita-Sadhini-Sobha, with the avowed objects 
 of aiding indigent pupils and raising the working 
 classes. The association is in an embryonic state, but 
 yet its members have opened a night-school for the 
 working classes, have visited not a few of the homes of 
 poverty in the metropolis, and have helped a small 
 number of poor students. 
 
 It has been instrumental in communicating an extra- 
 ordinary impetus to the cause of female education. 
 Following in the wake of some philanthropic mission- 
 aries, they have had a boarding-school organized in 
 connection with the Government Girl School in Cal- 
 cutta, and a girl belonging to their community having 
 
SADnARAJT BRAHMO SOMAJ. 185 
 
 passed the F.A. examination is now preparing herself 
 for the B.A. degree, along with the Christian girl 
 who had the honor of being the first to pass the 
 Entrance Examination, or of having by her success the 
 doors of the University Examinations thrown open for 
 female candidates. 
 
 It has, moreover, organized an Association of Ladies, 
 " with a view to draw the ladies gradually into society, 
 and to teach them to sympathize with topics of general 
 and national interest. Evening parties and social 
 gatherings are frequently held under the auspices of 
 this association, where both the sexes freely meet — a 
 thing quite unknown in the present state of Hindu 
 society — but the want of which, I am strongly of opin- 
 ion, is one of the principal causes, if not the cause, of 
 the widespread social impurity which has become a 
 stigma to our national life. " 
 
 It has opened a college in the city of Calcutta which 
 takes rank among its first-class educational institutions. 
 Let us give its history in Mr. Sastri's words : 
 
 " It was started in the beginning of the year 1873 by Mr. A. M. 
 Bose, lately the president of the Sadharan Brahmo Somaj, and a few 
 other leading members. It was formerly a higher class English 
 school, but has within the period of two years risen into a college 
 for training rip boys for the higher examinations of the university. 
 This educational institution has served to keep together a number 
 of Brahmo teachers, all of whom are earnest members of the Brahmo 
 Somaj, and most of whom are zealous co-workers in its cause. It also 
 promises to give us a band of earnest-minded young men trained up 
 to habits of honesty and piety." 
 
 Mr. Sastri concludes his thick pamphlet with an 
 " appeal," from which we shall present an extract 
 fitted to set forth the growing popularity of the Sad- 
 haran Somaj, and the growing unpopularity of that 
 from which its champions seceded about four years 
 
186 BRAKMOIStf. 
 
 ago : " In conclusion, I have to appeal to our friends of 
 the ~New Dispensation for treating us with greater for- 
 bearance, for giving up the cruel practice of calling us 
 'infidels,' ' sceptics,' 'rationalists,' and far worse 
 names, and for shunning the far more painful tactics of 
 stabbing us in the dark. Certainly the fault is not 
 ours if they find themselves deserted and forsaken, and 
 feel their power crumbling away ; for that seems to be 
 the inevitable fate which is sure to overtake all enemies 
 of human freedom in these days of enlightenment and 
 progress. Let them see that they have embraced 
 error, and consequently are spurned by truth. They 
 know it well, and let me confess it candidly, we have 
 as yet very little to attract people to our fold. If then 
 they find our cause prospering and gaining ground, it is 
 not because of any virtue or excellence in us, but owing 
 to the soundness of the principles we profess. ' ' 
 
 It is our decided opinion that, looked at from what 
 may be called the Brahmo point of view, the principles 
 of the Saclharan Brahmo Somaj are much more rational 
 and defensible than those of the party against which it 
 is a standing and a very successful protest. Mr. Sen's 
 creed is a heap of contradiction. There is no such 
 thing as paper revelation, and yet not only are truths 
 preached in the name of God, but proclamations issued 
 with the signature, or what is represented as the signa- 
 ture, of God affixed to them ; while dialogues said to 
 have been held between God and Mr. Sen's disciples 
 are reported verbatim/ There is no mediation, and 
 yet important religious truths invariably reach the 
 Somaj through a person who, though unable to muster 
 up courage to assume publicly the dignity and functions 
 of a prophet, calls himself " a singular man," and rep- 
 resents himself as commissioned to usher in a dispensa- 
 
SADHARAK BRAHMO SOMAJ. 187 
 
 tion higher than those brought in by Moses or Christ ! 
 God is personal, and yet impersonal ; men are vile, and 
 yet furnished with bright portions of the divine sub- 
 stance ; Christ is a historical character, and yet nothing 
 more than a series of ideas ; worship spiritual, and yet 
 deriving its merit from a series of sensational demon- 
 strations ; the varied religions of the world true, and 
 yet false ! Such are the oddities and monstrosities to 
 which Mr. Sen's utterances may legitimately be 
 reduced ! Compared with this heap of contradiction, 
 the creed of the Sadharan Somaj is rationality itself. 
 
 Mr. Sen's practices, moreover, are of a piece with his 
 theories. One day Mr. Sen goes through the farce of 
 drinking the water in which the feet of his missionaries 
 are washed, and the very next day he sees persons 
 prostrating themselves before him and calling him their 
 Lord and Master with tacit approbation. One day he 
 goes out in the garb of a mendicant with a wallet in 
 his hand, and the next day he celebrates his son's mar- 
 riage with a pomp of which the most pretentious of 
 swells would be proud. One day he lives upon the 
 savory food sent to him as alms by one of his devotees, 
 and the very next he entertains half the respectable 
 people of Calcutta in -a style in every respect worthy of 
 the very respectable family to which he belongs. 
 Compared with these obviously meaningless proceed- 
 ings, those of the Sadharan Somaj are sense itself. 
 
 Let us add that the view of Christ maintained by the 
 Sadharan Somaj is decidedly lower and therefore less 
 irrational than that presented in Mr. Sen's utterances. 
 Mr. Sen is guilty of giving publicity to a gross calumny 
 when he represents its champions as ready to call Christ 
 "a cut-throat ;" but he would have been justified in 
 representing them as holding up a picture of by no 
 
188 ERAHMOISM. 
 
 means unalloyed perfection. The view they present is 
 the lower of the two views presented in the writings of 
 Theodore Parker. Christ was a very good man, but 
 He was not thoroughly sinless, and His character was 
 marred by certain very gross errors of the head. He 
 certainly believed in His Messiahship, and too precipi- 
 tately assumed the dignity and functions associated 
 with it. He believed in the existence of spirits, both 
 good and evil, and their dominance over the world, and 
 He believed in His Second Coming. Serious errors of 
 judgment, breeding a little pride and self -exaltation, 
 marred a character which otherwise would have been a 
 model of perfection. Now this view is more rational 
 than that of persons who, while denying His Divinity, 
 represent Him as perfectly sinless, or as a perfect model 
 of virtue. The Christ to whom Mr. Sen's homage is 
 paid is ideal, not the historical Christ of the Gospels? 
 as we have shown. But he would speak of the his- 
 torical Christ in terms of praise adopted by those who, 
 in denying His Divinity and representing Him as a 
 perfect model of virtue in one and the same breath, 
 plunge themselves into an inconsistency of the most 
 glaring nature. 
 
 Barring its vigorous protest against the odd innova- 
 tions of the New Dispensationists, the great achieve- 
 ment of the Sadharan Somaj is the resuscitation of the 
 simple creed of Brahmoism — the creed adopted by the 
 Adi Somaj after it had been liberated from the tram- 
 mels of pantheism, and preached by Babu Keshub 
 Chunder Sen before he had been demoralized by ful- 
 some adulation. This creed may be represented as 
 correct as far as it goes ; but its insufficiency is as 
 obvious as its accuracy is apparent. It fails to commu- 
 nicate to us such knowledge of God as is calculated to 
 
SADHAKAH BBAHMO SOMAJ. 189 
 
 effectively discourage sin and encourage truth, and it 
 fails to point to us God's appointed remedy for sin. 
 
 Man in his present state of corruption cannot do two 
 things— separate himself either from his sins or from 
 God. The love of sin, generated by the law of heredity 
 and invigorated by long-continued indulgence, is in him 
 too strong to be extinguished, and he lives in sin, un- 
 willing and unable to save himself from its bondage. 
 The sublime instinct in him which draws him toward 
 God is equally irrepressible, being, like his love of sin, 
 original and innate. He therefore looks for a reli- 
 gion which is fitted to gratify at one and the same 
 time his sinful propensities as well as his aspirations 
 after the infinite. Xor can he be delivered from the 
 meshes of this error except by such views of divine 
 holiness and mercy as are calculated to beget at one 
 and the same time a dread of sin and a trust in God. 
 The simple creed of the Brahmo Somaj does not present 
 such views of God, and cannot therefore detach man 
 from his sins or save him from the fatal mistake of 
 trying to effect a reconciliation between God and sin. 
 It is not enough to dwell upon the unity of God, His 
 Fatherhood, His holiness, forbearance, and love. It is 
 not enough to exhibit the glorious attributes of God in 
 a series of syllogisms, propositions, oracular statements, 
 or ambiguous assertions. Eight knowledge about God 
 must be embodied in a series of tangible facts ere it can 
 possibly be^an effective warning against sin and a 
 powerful attraction to Him. And the great beauty of 
 Christianity is that it exhibits God, not in a series of 
 abstract propositions, not in poetry and romance, but 
 in a series of palpable and eloquent facts. It presents 
 a history of God's dealings with fallen man, and in 
 each link of this chain of narrative, extending over ages, 
 
190 BRAmioisai. 
 
 we see the intense holiness of Gocl coupled with His 
 infinite mercy. We stand aghast before the frightful 
 punishments inflicted upon the degenerate Canaanitish 
 races, upon the Jews themselves, and upon their 
 oppressors, as before the awful calamities, such as 
 cyclones, famines, and pestilences, occurring under our 
 own eyes ! "We do not pretend to be able to explain 
 them. But in one and all of them we see God's hatred 
 of sin and His determination to wipe it out at any 
 cost. But hanging over the clouds and darkness sur- 
 rounding these catastrophes we see the rainbow of 
 divine mercy in bright dispensations of Providence, in 
 glorious promises, as well as in those pathetic declara- 
 tions which melt the hardest heart and bring tears out 
 of the driest eye. In the series of revelations and 
 providential dispensations which culminated in Christ, 
 we see embodied that knowledge of God which is not 
 presented by the religions of the world, and without 
 which all attempts to call men away from sin back to 
 piety and godliness must needs fail. 
 
 Again, Christianity sets forth the intense holiness of 
 God and His infinite love embodied, not merely in a 
 series of telling facts, but in a mysterious but tangible 
 Personality. Christ is the brightness of God's glory 
 and the express image of His Person. While studying 
 His life we stand aghast before the dreadful denuncia- 
 tions He hurled against the Scribes and Pharisees, 
 and we find it hard at first sight to reconcile them to 
 the even tenor of His life. But in these we see break- 
 ing out in another form that intense hatred of sin 
 which in Old Testament times was seen in frightful 
 calamities and physical plagues ; while in the milder 
 aspects of Christ's character and career we see that 
 love of God which endureth forever. Besides, the in- 
 
SADHARAK BRAHMO SOMAJ. 191 
 
 tense holiness of God and His boundless lore are both 
 brought into the greatest prominence in the sacrificial 
 death of Christ. Who can contemplate that death 
 and think it possible to effect a reconciliation between 
 sin and godliness ? Who can properly consider it 
 without being instinctively led to forsake sin and flee 
 to the mercy-seat for complete salvation from its pun- 
 ishment and power ? 
 
 Eor does the simple creed of Brahmoism give us 
 adequate and reliable knowledge of what we, as sin- 
 ners, ought to do to obtain mercy to pardon and grace 
 to help us in every time of need. It is not enough to 
 repeat the decalogue, and point it out as the common 
 heritage of all the religions of the world. The deca- 
 logue we have trampled under our feet, its laws we 
 have transgressed times without number and in the 
 most presumptuous manner conceivable, and the por- 
 tion we have in it is only its threatened punishment. 
 The great question we have to settle is, How is sinful 
 man to be reconciled to God ? Human replies to this 
 all-important question cannot satisfy us. The instinct 
 of humanity has always led it to look up to heaven for 
 God's own solution of this perplexing problem. A 
 great writer in a recently published book has brought 
 forward three classes of what may be called moral 
 phenomena as proofs of man's determination to be 
 guided especially in religious matters by God Himself, 
 not by human theories and speculations. The omens, 
 divinations, and oracles to which man has been led in- 
 stinctively to resort whenever troubled by perplexing 
 questions or faced by appalling difficulties, are proofs 
 of his irresistible tendency to look up to heaven for 
 teaching and guidance. This tendency, moreover, is 
 exhibited in the revelations he has believed in, and the 
 
192 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 varied forms of incarnation to which his homage has 
 been paid. And therefore the all-important practical 
 question with him is, What is God's solution of the 
 great problem we have as sinful creatures to solve — the 
 problem of pardon and reconciliation ? Christianity 
 embodies this solution, and it therefore is calculated to 
 satisfy man. When the Brahmo says, Eepent, and 
 look up to the grace of God for pardon and deliverance 
 immediately, or not through the medium of an alleged 
 atonement, we cannot help making inquiries as to the 
 source of this piece of information or this dictum. 
 Where have you got this truth ? If you have got it 
 from God Himself, prove its divine origin. If not, 
 your opinion, dignified though it is in your writings by 
 the appellation of intuition, cannot be allowed to guide 
 us except when it accords, as it does not in the present 
 case, with our own. The Christian preacher says : 
 Repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou 
 shalt be saved, and all thy house. This is not his opin- 
 ion, or his intuition, or his primary belief, or one of the 
 ultimate principles of faith. This is the Word of God, 
 and it rests on the only kind of evidence by which a 
 revelation from heaven can be attested. The Christian 
 preacher takes you back through a chain of indisput- 
 able facts to the time when once and again the silence 
 of heaven was broken, and the voice was heard like 
 that of thunder : "This is my beloved Son, hear ye 
 Him !' ' And after having called your attention to what 
 may be called Heaven's unmistakable attestation of 
 Christ's mission, the Christian preacher asks you in the 
 name of God to hear the Redeemer as in accents of love 
 He extends to you and to all mankind the invitation : 
 " Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, 
 and I will give you rest !" 
 
CHAPTER Till. 
 
 BAJAH RAM MOHUIT ROY AS A IIYMNOLOGIST. 
 
 The reform inaugurated by Eajah Ram Mohun Roy 
 has nearly perished. The system of philosophy he 
 revived, with a view to cut out an acceptable religion 
 for those whom a superior education had liberated from 
 the trammels of prevailing idolatry, has so far deviated 
 from its original principles that it may properly be 
 said to have ceased to exist. The pamphlets he pub- 
 lished from time to time in support of his views can 
 with difficulty be exhumed out of the mass of waste 
 paper under which they have long remained buried. 
 His very name is rarely mentioned but with comments 
 such as lead us to the conclusion that though much 
 credit was due to the bold spirit which led him to shake 
 off the fetters of a religion of which as an enlightened 
 man he could not but be ashamed, he was, as a philoso- 
 pher and reformer, egregiously mistaken. Nothing is 
 so well calculated to set forth the utter fruitlessness of 
 those religious reforms, which have for their basis 
 other foundation than that which is laid by God Him- 
 self, as the complete collapse which has overtaken the 
 grand movement he set on foot. 
 
 But while every vestige of Rajah Ram Mohun Roy's 
 philosophical achievements has been swept away, the 
 devotional hymns he composed have defied the influ- 
 ences of malignant stars. These hymns exist, and are 
 sung with zest by educated Bengalis of all varieties and 
 
194: BRAHMOIS^I. 
 
 shades of opinion, from one end of the country to the 
 other. Eminent critics are of opinion that, while the 
 literary works of Dr. Johnson, called the monarch of 
 literature by the wits of the brilliant club of which he 
 was the Hon, are likely to be forgotten, his happy say- 
 ings and smart repartees, as embodied in his biography 
 by Boswell, are destined to immortalize his name. 
 Johnson the literary giant, Johnson the poet, the 
 moralist, the philosopher, is likely to be thrust into the 
 hmbo of forgetfulness ; but Johnson the hero of table- 
 talk, with his sallies of wit and flashes of fancy, is sure 
 to have an abiding place in the temple of fame. Such 
 precisely is likely to be the case with Rajah Ram 
 Mohun Roy. Ram Mohun Roy the philosopher has 
 long since vanished out of sight, but Ram Mohun Roy 
 the hymnologist lives, and will live for years if not 
 ages to come, to touch the lyre, to raise the voice of 
 song, and to move, if not regulate, devotional feelings. 
 There is a feature in these hymns fitted to cause their 
 being readily accepted and properly appreciated by the 
 educated classes of the population of Bengal. They 
 are intensely national. They revive truths which in 
 various forms have invariably commanded universal 
 respect in the country, which form the basis of popular 
 idolatry, and which are deeply imbedded, as it were, 
 in the national mind. The Hindu is practically a 
 polytheist, but theoretically a pantheist. Though 
 buried in idolatry such as slides down in a descending 
 scale from the worship of the heavenly bodies to the 
 most grovelhng types of fetichism, all his higher 
 thoughts and aspirations assume a pantheistic form. 
 He quietly and unmurmuringly goes round a circle of 
 rites and ceremonies, performs a number of appointed 
 ablutions, practises rigid rules of abstinence, and occa- 
 
RAJAH HAM MOHUN IiOT AS A HYMKOLOGIST. 195 
 
 sionally goes so far as to lacerate his body by penances 
 and mortifications. Bnt these observances can no more 
 quiet his conscience and pacify his jarring feelings and 
 thoughts than the absolution granted by a Popish 
 priest can produce mental tranquillity and repose. But 
 the conviction that he is a portion of the Godhead, an 
 atom of His infinitely extended and all-embracing 
 substance, separated from it by immutable and uncon- 
 trollable laws of development, yet destined finally to be 
 merged and absorbed in it, cheers and consoles him 
 amid the disappointments and mortifications of life. 
 To this deep esoteric conviction the hymns of Rajah 
 Earn Mohun Eoy give tangible expression. And 
 though originally composed by a man denounced 
 as a heresiarch, they have become the favorite 
 hymns of Hindu orthodoxy. They are, moreover, 
 susceptible of a purely cleistic interpretation, and may 
 be looked upon as connecting links between the 
 ancient civilization of the country and those forms of 
 modern thought which are being naturalized by English, 
 education. They are therefore favorably received by 
 those of our countrymen who, under the different de- 
 nominations of Brahmos, Comtists, and spirit-rappers, 
 construct religions via media between Hinduism, of 
 which they are ashamed, and Christianity, which they 
 regard with natural though unreasonable antipathy. 
 
 The tunes utilized, by the Eajah are perhaps more in 
 unison with prevailing taste than the subtle truths em- 
 bodied in his hymns. The primitive sacred notes of 
 Bengal, though pathetic and sweet, were becoming 
 unfashionable when he commenced his career of relig- 
 ious reform. The soothing melody and voice which 
 accompanied songs in honor of the flirtations of Krishna 
 with the milkmaids of Brindabun were being most un- 
 
196 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 accountably disliked by the progressive Bengalis of his 
 day, while the pathetic metres which had for ages sweet- 
 ened the effusions of orthodoxy were becoming the mo- 
 nopoly of porters and wagon-drivers. Ram Mohun's sa- 
 gacious eye did not fail to observe this change in our 
 national taste ; and so, instead of choosing tunes which, 
 though sweet, were devoid of sublimity, he adopted such 
 as were lofty and elevating. He sailed with the tide, 
 and though his hymns would perhaps lose in effect if sung 
 by a regular choir, such as that of a Sankritan, they 
 soothe and elevate the soul when plied by the modulat- 
 ing voice of individual songsters. I need scarcely add 
 that these tunes, though sublime, cannot be compared 
 in elevation of voice or modulation of tone to the 
 reverberating psalmody which animated the drooping 
 courage of the Scottish Covenanters as they marched 
 from their meeting-place to the battle-field, or the 
 grand swell of the cathedral organ as it raises the ac- 
 cording voices of a practised choir amid the dead but 
 not unquestionable silence of those whose devotional 
 feelings it is intended to guide. 
 
 But though adorned with all that is novel and attrac- 
 tive in thought, music, and song, these hymns are not 
 destined to be popular, in the widest sense of the term, 
 in Bengal. They embody truths which are too subtle 
 and incomprehensible to the popular mind, and they 
 present no character around which our thoughts and 
 feelings may cluster. The virtues and vices of chiv- 
 alry could never have been immortalized had they not 
 been embodied and richly illustrated in King Arthur 
 and his Knights of the Round Table. . The daring but 
 romantic outlawry of the middle ages could not have 
 been perpetuated had it not been personified in Robin 
 Hood and his bold companions. A metaphysical ab- 
 
RAJAH HAM MOHUN" ROY AS A IIYMNOLOGIST. 197 
 
 straction, however fitted it may be to gratify the soar- 
 ing vanity of the human intellect, is not likely to be a 
 central object of popular feeling and popular adora- 
 tion. And it is such an abstraction that we find in 
 these hymns shimmering and flashing like an electric 
 current. They cannot therefore have anything like a 
 permanent hold on the popular mind. They may suit 
 the soaring aspirations of Anglicized Bengali gentle- 
 men, and may be received with open arms in the meet- 
 ing-houses of the Brahmos, but they cannot be 
 regarded as part and parcel of the heritage of the 
 Bengali nation. In this respect they are inferior to 
 the popular songs of our country, which embody 
 truths, useful, beneficent, and sublime, in characters 
 whicli will never die, or die only with the entire frame- 
 work of our social system. 
 
 The filial piety and devotional earnestness of Ram, 
 the modesty and meekness of Seeta, the enthusiasm of 
 faith as personified in Prahlad, and the sublime abne- 
 gation of self as illustrated in the sacrifice of Brishaketu 
 — these, in spite of the absurdities with which they are 
 mixed, are more likely to do good to the national mind 
 and heart than the transcendental speculations of Rajah 
 Ram Mohun Roy. And while these beautifully con- 
 ceived and beautifully sustained characters have pre- 
 vented the total shipwreck of our national morals con- 
 sequent upon the demoralizing influences of ignorance 
 and superstition, his hymns have hardly stood between 
 temptation and sin in one case out of a thousand. 
 
 "What a contrast between these songs and the 
 hymnology of the Christian Church ! The Christian 
 hymns do not embody truths too subtle to be appre- 
 hended, too obscure to be clearly seen, too unsubstan- 
 tial and shadowy to tell upon life and character. They 
 
198 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 present an ever-living, ever-near Saviour, glorious in 
 holiness, fearful in praises, yet possessed of a nature 
 similar to ours and therefore comprehensible by us ; 
 mighty to save, full of loving-kindness and tender 
 mercy, bearing our griefs and rejoicing in our joys, 
 conducting us in triumph through the trials and vicissi- 
 tudes of life, guiding our footsteps through the valley 
 of the shadow" of death, and ultimately receiving us 
 with open arms into the realms of light above. Here 
 is no shadowy abstraction to plunge us headlong into 
 the abyss of uncertainty and doubt, no deity figuring 
 in a series of coarse and ignoble gallantries, no hero 
 letting loose an army of baboons and apes against mon- 
 sters of hideous features and giant strength, no incarna- 
 tion, half man, half brute, exhausting his fiendish rage 
 on the professors of a heterodox creed. Here is light 
 in darkness, balm for the wounded spirit, manna for the 
 hungry soul, liberty to the captives, rest unutterable to 
 the weary and heavy laden. 
 
 What, however, is the character of these hymns ? 
 Are they bright and cheering, or gloomy and depress- 
 ing ? Do they breathe the spirit of light and life and 
 joy, or do they augment our wretchedness, intensify 
 our sorrows, and deepen the darkness which overshad- 
 ows us ? These are not trifling, unimportant ques- 
 tions. The tree is known by its fruits. The nature 
 and tendencies of a particular form of religion are 
 clearly reflected as in a mirror in its hymnology. Is it 
 calculated to support and cheer us under the poignant 
 trials of life ? the spirit of love and joy glistens under 
 its hymns. Is it fitted merely to thicken the surround- 
 ing darkness and make confusion worse confounded ? 
 the demon of uncertainty and ignorance frowns upon 
 us from the inmost depths of the hymnology which has 
 
RAJAH RAM MOHUK ROY AS A HYMNOLOGIST. 199 
 
 grown into maturity under its shade. Let us apply this 
 unmistakable touchstone to the Rajah 5 s hymns. Let 
 us see whether they are the off shoots of a religion such 
 as irradiates our path through the pitfalls and quag- 
 mires of life, alleviates its inevitable sorrows and mis- 
 eries, and crowns it with joy and gladness ; or whether 
 they are the murky brood of a philosophy which 
 glories in confusion and chaos, and breeds all the dark 
 features of a morose character. 
 
 The predominant feature of these hymns is darkness. 
 They depress instead of stirring up the lethargic soul, 
 and soothe the feelings into a dead calm without charm- 
 ing them into active play. Pensiveness and sorrow, 
 melancholy musings and painful reflections are their 
 fruits. Look at the hymn of which the following is a 
 literal translation : 
 
 "Whose art thou? Who is thine? Whom dost thou call thy 
 own ? In the delusive sleep of earthly affection thou dreamest ! 
 Birds of various kinds spend the night together on the same tree, 
 but fly in different directions as soon as the day dawns. Thus be 
 sure are thy friends and relations, who will fly away when thou 
 needest their assistance, there being nothing to hinder them. 
 
 " Where are thy perfumes and chaplets ? Where thy shining 
 jewels? Where dost thou expect to find the very friends of thy 
 bosom ? Where shall be thy wealth, youth, respect, and pride, when 
 cruel death swallows thee up ?" 
 
 Here is a picture of life, gloomy indeed, but by no 
 means overdrawn as regards those whose hopes of hap- 
 piness are confined to this world. Life a dream ! Its 
 relationships, its energies, its activities, its toils, its 
 pleasures, its amusements, its hopes, its anticipations, 
 are all delusive as the mirage. This has been the lan- 
 guage of what may be called world-inspired poetry 
 from the beginning of days. The wisest man emerged 
 from a course of extravagant folly to exclaim, 
 
200 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 "Vanity of vanities ! all is vanity." And many an 
 individual, wise or foolish, lias raised from the inmost 
 recesses of his heart that cry of a wounded spirit. 
 
 But is there nothing to relieve the picture — nothing 
 to hallow life into a solemn reality, a scene of useful 
 toil and holy activity, a sphere of hopes which make 
 not ashamed, and joys which are durable and perma- 
 nent ? Look at these songs, and your answer to the 
 question is, Nothing — alas ! nothing. Look at our 
 Christian hymns, and the scene changes: darkness 
 gives place to light, sorrow vanishes before joy, life 
 becomes a sphere of toil, the results of which shall flow 
 on in endless succession throughout eternity ; of tri- 
 umphs fitted to display the unspeakable glory of God 
 under the admiring gaze of worlds more numerous than 
 the rustling leaves of the boundless forest. 
 
 Let us now advert to the views of the life that is to 
 come as embodied in these hymns. But a dead silence 
 is all that we have to encounter here. Bam Mohun 
 Boy the philosopher may descant with the acumen of 
 a practised logician on the doctrine of annihilation or 
 absorption in the deity, which is but another name for 
 annihilation. But Bam Mohun Boy the poet does 
 not perpetrate so big an outrage against human nature. 
 He knows that a paradise of nonetity or death only less 
 appalling than the unutterable horrors of perdition, 
 however attractive it may be when presented behind a 
 formidable array of syllogisms, is quite out of place 
 among the charms of poetry, and he does well to 
 refrain from uplifting the veil beyond which the mind, 
 inspired by his reasonings, refuses to look forward. 
 But though he adroitly passes over this cardinal doc- 
 trine of his faith in his hymns, it casts its hideous 
 shadow over them, and thickens the darkness which is 
 
RAJAH RAM JIOHUN" ROY AS A HY.WOLOGIST. 201 
 
 their characteristic feature. Need I compare these 
 songs with our Christian hymns in this respect ? While 
 Ram Mohun Roy prevaricates, shifts, and shuffles, does 
 everything but state the truth in all its nakedness, the 
 Christian child sings in all the simplicity of childlike 
 
 " There is a happy land, 
 Far, far away ! 
 Where saints in glory stand, 
 Bright, bright as day !" 
 
 Or the experienced Christian, softened into tears by a 
 bright, Pisgah-iike view of the glories which eye hath 
 not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered the heart 
 of man to conceive, raises from the depths of his heart 
 the jubilant song : 
 
 ; ' Jerusalem the golden, 
 
 With milk and honey blest, 
 Beneath thy contemplation, 
 Sink heart and soul opprest. 
 
 • ' I know not, oh, I know not 
 What social joj^s are there ; 
 What radiancy of glory, 
 
 What bliss beyond compare. 
 
 ' They stand, those halls of Zion, 
 Loud echoing with song ; 
 
 And bright with many an angel, 
 And many a martyr throng. 
 
 There is the throne of David ; 
 
 And there from pain released, 
 The shout of them that triumph, 
 
 The song of them that feast. 
 
 And they beneath their leader 
 Who conquered in the fight, 
 
 Forever and forever, 
 
 Are clad in robes of white." 
 
 The views, moreover, of God embodied in these 
 hymns are by no means cheering. God is represented 
 as the Being of beings, the Light of our eyes, and the 
 Life of our lives, pervading all space, embracing all 
 substance, whispering in the breeze, warbling in the 
 streamlet, dashing in the cascade, and thundering in 
 the sea. All this is beautiful enough to garnish the 
 effusions of poetry and the reasonings of a species of 
 philosophy, which, unhappily, is making some progress 
 
202 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 in Christendom. Bnt there is a grossness about such 
 descriptions of the Godhead which all the poetry and 
 philosophy of the world cannot conceal from our view. 
 To make material substances portions of the essence of 
 God, to confound the Creator with the creature, is the 
 easiest way of degrading God, is to make God a mon- 
 strosity which frightens the imagination and paral} r zes 
 the feelings. The Hindu monster, with his ten heads 
 and twenty arms, moving on like hideousness itself, 
 manifesting itself in Herculean stature and giant propor- 
 tions, is not more disgusting than the God who now rat- 
 tles in a flash of lightning from one end of the heavens 
 to the other, and then lies in the shape of a huge boulder 
 yawning over a mountain path. Then there is con- 
 nected with Earn Mohun Roy's theory a fatalism which, 
 based on uncontrollable laws of development, tends to 
 make God a hard taskmaster and a ruffian. 
 
 Again, because these hymns derive their inspiration 
 from dark views of life and eternity, and views by no 
 means cheering of God, the author of life, they are 
 necessarily monstrous. The low notes of sorrow are 
 the notes they raise. The human heart beats, in the 
 well-known words of Longfellow, " Funeral inarches 
 to the grave,' ' and they form the mournful procession 
 moving slowly on amid all the gloomy tokens, not 
 merely of grief, but of blank despair. Pleasant com- 
 panions indeed through the dreary and howling wastes 
 of life ! Oh for the rod of Moses to sweeten the 
 Marah of Ram Mohun Roy's hymns ! " "Where hast 
 thou brought me ?" he says. " What hast thou done ? 
 In the fathomless ocean of life thou hast left me to be 
 tossed to and fro. " Such is the picture of life apart 
 from Christ ! Storms within, storms without, desires 
 failing, hopes languishing, the agonizing tortures of 
 
RAJAH RAM MOHUN ROY AS A HYMNOLOGIST. 203 
 
 memory crowding around, a black train of days mis- 
 spent and hours wasted behind, the horrors of hell be- 
 fore ! Christians ! come forward with the songs of 
 your lips. There is balm in Gilead, and a Physician 
 there. Look at your precious hymns. The inevitable 
 sorrows of life, your own failings and shortcomings, do 
 indeed give a sombre coloring to them. But beneath 
 the thin coating of darkness attributable to the weak- 
 ness of the flesh there shines the Sun of Righteousness, 
 dispensing life and joy around. 
 
 After what has been said it may seem unnecessary to 
 affirm that the Eajah's hymns are not indications of a 
 healthy and regenerated soul. Within their compass 
 we shall in vain look for the yearnings of a renewed 
 heart — that gratitude which words are too poor to de- 
 scribe, that love which in its first outflowing leaves no 
 part of the soul untouched, that eagerness to be free 
 from the bondage of indwelling sin, those noble strug- 
 gles toward spotless holiness, those hungerings and 
 thirstings after a union the result of which is peace in 
 this life and ineffable blessedness in that which is to 
 come, those sorrows which end in gladness, those joys 
 which flow on in a ceaseless, ever-expanding stream 
 until engulfed in the illimitable ocean of heavenly 
 felicity. Earn Mohun's songs embody the cry of 
 nature, the moanings of distress, the shrieks of agony, 
 the groans of despair. They are the cries of a man 
 without hope, without G-od, unwilling to look into the 
 depths of iniquity within, afraid to look forward ! 
 
 The Christians' hymns have raised drooping spirits 
 and animated desponding souls amid the sharpest trials 
 of life. They have scared away the horrors of the 
 battle-field, dispelled the gloom of the dungeon, and 
 alleviated the agonies of the stake. They have 
 
204 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 softened the pillow of sickness, and extracted the sting 
 out of death. They cheered the martyrs of old as they 
 hung over the flames kindled by bigotry and hate, ani- 
 mated Cromwell's Ironsides as they fought under the 
 flag of religious toleration, consoled John Bunyan as, 
 amid the hardships and privations of a prison cell, he 
 garnered up those creations of genius which have made 
 the world weep and laugh for nearly two centuries. 
 Nay, they have sustained the "drooping soul amid bodily 
 and mental tortures the most excruciating that can be 
 imagined. The slave torn from his country, his rela- 
 tions, and friends, compelled to toil for an iron-hearted 
 villain, with the lash ever ready to force out the blood 
 of his veins, and without a single ray of earthly hope, 
 found in moments of unutterable agony rest for his 
 troubled soul as 
 
 ' ' Loud lie sang the Psalm of David ! 
 He a negro and enslaved — 
 Sang of Israel's victory, 
 Sang of .Zion, bright and free." 
 
 Numerous instances can be brought forward to show 
 that these hymns are calculated to light up the faded 
 eye of sickness and dispel the gloom of a death-bed 
 scene. One will suffice. Among the first fruits of the 
 Free Church Mission in Bengal there were two con- 
 verts, brothers beloved, whose earthly career, though 
 short, was so bright that each of them being dead yet 
 speaketh. They were sweet and pleasant in their lives, 
 and in death they were not divided. One of them, 
 Mohendra Babu, was distinguished by vigor of intellect 
 and solidity of attainment rarely seen among the youth 
 of India — nay, rarely seen among the youth of any 
 country under the sun. He commenced his apostolic 
 career with all the enthusiasm of a Peter or a Paul, and 
 
RAJAH RAM MOHUN" ROY AS A 1IYMXOLOGIST. 205 
 
 his rich, sonorous, and powerful voice was heard in the 
 streets of Calcutta and in many a quiet village of 
 Bengal, proclaiming the truth as it is in Jesus. But 
 that noise was hushed ere its silver tones had mellowed 
 into the gravity of age, and when lingering between 
 life and death he assured Dr. Duff, the venerable 
 Father of the Free Church in Bengal, that lie was not 
 at all afraid of death, his only concern arising from the 
 distressed condition in which he was leaving his wife 
 and daughter. His friend and brother, Kailas Babu, 
 was of a very different temperament, meek and lowly, 
 resembling the disciple whom Jesus loved. Early pros- 
 trated on the bed of sickness, from which he was never 
 destined to rise, his only grief was that he was doing 
 nothing for the Lord. " You are, dear brother, doing 
 something for the Lord ; you are suffering for Him !" 
 Such was the consolation ministered to him by the now 
 sainted McDonald, whom he resembled in sweetness of 
 disposition and simplicity of character. But the clouds 
 thickened, and death appeared so palpably that it 
 could not be mistaken. This was indeed a critical mo - 
 ment. Did he repent of his apostasy from the Hindu 
 faith ? Our Hindu friends generally represent us con- 
 verts as doing nothing but perpetually mourning over 
 the rash step we have taken in embracing a foreign 
 religion. We may assure them that we never for a mo- 
 ment do so. We do mourn over the follies we have 
 perpetrated after conversion, over the bad examples we 
 have set, over the little we have done to set forth the 
 excellency of our religion ; but we never, even in our 
 dreams, recall the fact of our being separated from 
 Hinduism but with lively emotions of gratitude. In 
 the stillness of the night, when deep sleep cometh upon 
 us, we frequently revisit the homes from which we 
 
206 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 have been thrust out, see around us the bright faces 
 which once hung over us with all the yearnings of 
 tender affection, and live once more the sunny days of 
 our childhood. But we say the truth in Christ Jesus, 
 we lie not, our consciences also bearing witness that we 
 have not even in our dreams bowed the knee before a 
 god or goddess of the Hindu pantheon ; we have not 
 even in our dreams wavered in our conviction that 
 there is none other name under heaven whereby men 
 can be saved except the name we adore. 
 
 Excuse this digression. Kailas Babu found death 
 staring him in the face, with a young and affectionate 
 wife weeping by his bed. The scene was indeed 
 gloomy. But light burst in and kindled his faded eye 
 and brightened his stiffening features as he repeated 
 the hymn : 
 
 " The hour of my departure's come, 
 I hear the voice that calls me home. 
 Now, O my God ! let trouble cease, 
 And let Thy servant die in peace. 
 
 " The race appointed I have run, 
 The combat's o'er, the prize is won ; 
 And now my witness is on high, 
 And now my record's in the sky. 
 
 " Not in my innocence I trust, 
 I bow before Thee in the dust ; 
 And through my Saviour's blood alone 
 I look for mercy at Thy throne. 
 
 " I come, I come without a tear, 
 Save for the friends I hold so dear ; 
 To heal their sorrow, Lord, descend, 
 And to the friendless prove a friend." 
 
SUPPLEMENT 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ASPIRATIONS OF YOUNG INDIA.* 
 
 It sometimes does us good to begin at the root and 
 work upward ; and so let me raise the question, What 
 is an aspiration ? An aspiration may be legitimately 
 defined as a desire upward. Men in this world are 
 animated and influenced by various classes of desires. 
 These, however, may all be classed under two heads — 
 desires upward and desires downward, desires which 
 lead to our improvement and those which lead to our 
 degradation. The latter class of our desires, viz. , the 
 class embracing those which lead to our degradation, 
 cannot with any degree of propriety be called aspira- 
 tions, and therefore with them I have nothing to do 
 this evening. 
 
 Nor is it my intention to treat of all classes of your 
 aspirations. You have, for instance, your political 
 aspirations, and you most naturally and most properly 
 wish to see the middle wall of partition between your- 
 selves and the members of the ruling class broken 
 
 o 
 
 * The above is given in the form of a lecture rather than an essay, 
 to show the sort of discourses given in India for the benefit of its 
 educated, English-speaking native inhabitants, by those who are 
 aware that a learned and a systematically thought-out discourse is 
 sure to be wasted on them. — R. G. B. 
 
208 BRAHM01SM. 
 
 down, and yourselves raised to the position of influence 
 and affluence occupied by them. In this wish of 
 yours, as a native of India and one of yourselves, I 
 most cordially sympathize ; and to all legitimate efforts 
 put forward toward the attainment of this lofty status 
 I heartily bid God-speed. But with your political 
 aspirations I have nothing to do this evening. Then 
 you have your educational aspirations. You wish most 
 naturally and most properly to see carried out in your 
 country a system of education fitted to raise you intel- 
 lectually not a little above yourselves, but up to the 
 very level of those who at present are tempted to look 
 down upon you. In this wish of yours, a countryman 
 of yours, and one of yourselves, I most cordially sympa- 
 thize, and to all legitimate efforts put forward in this 
 line of our national improvement I cannot but bid God- 
 speed ! But with your educational aspirations I have 
 nothing to do this evening. "Nor have I this evening 
 anything to do with those of your aspirations which 
 have for their object } r our rise in civilization and 
 glory, though there is no one in this meeting more 
 ready to sympathize with } r ou in them. 
 
 I have to take notice of and express my deep sym- 
 pathy in your religious aspirations. These are em- 
 bodied in the principles, the creed, the constitution, 
 and the operations of the Sadharan Brahmo Somaj, a 
 Somaj resting, in our humble opinion, on a basis more 
 rational by far than that of the ~New Dispensationists. 
 The watchwords of this Somaj embody the moral and 
 religious aspirations of young India. These are : 
 (1) Independence of Thought, (2) Catholicity of Spirit, 
 (3) Immediacy, and (-1) Spirituality. Of these battle- 
 cries of the Sadharan Brahmo Somaj we shall take 
 notice as embodying not merely the principles it is 
 
THE ASPIRATIONS OF YOUNG INDIA. 209 
 
 fighting for, but the religious aspirations of our edu- 
 cated countrymen in general. 
 
 1. The first of these cries is Independence of Thought. 
 You most naturally wish and pray for this blessing. 
 The country has but too long groaned under supersti- 
 tion and error, kingcraft and priestcraft, temporal and 
 spiritual tyranny of the most galling type. The coun- 
 try has for ages and ages untold been bowing to human 
 authority. You have to a great extent been liberated 
 from its trammels, and you most naturally wish for 
 independence of thought. And let me assure you that 
 we, Christian preachers, deeply sympathize in this wish 
 of yours. Far from opposing it, we look upon it as a 
 praiseworthy aspiration and a harbinger of real prog- 
 ress under proper guidance. 
 
 Do you, however, pause and inquire in what does 
 true independence of thought consist ? Pray remember 
 that genuine independence of thought does not consist 
 in its being absolutely free. Absolute freedom of 
 thought is unattainable, and would be a curse to us were 
 it attainable. Your thought cannot possibly be free 
 from all control. It must either be under right control 
 or wrong control, under proper guidance or improper 
 guidance. Emancipated from all control or guidance, 
 perfectly uncontrolled and unguided it cannot possibly 
 be in its present condition, perhaps under all conceiv- 
 able circumstances. 
 
 Let me illustrate this by an example. The legiti- 
 mate sovereign of the human heart is God. When 
 God is allowed to rule in it, all its affections and pas- 
 sions, inclinations and tendencies, desires and aspira- 
 tions are properly developed and properly directed, and 
 there is harmony within. But if God is thrust out of 
 the throne of the heart, it is by no means left uncon- 
 
210 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 trolled and unguided. Sin takes His place, and, under 
 the control of the monster, all its powers and suscepti- 
 bilities are improperly developed and misdirected. The 
 result is disharmony and disquietude. The heart can- 
 not possibly be left freed from all control, good or bad, 
 emancipated from all guidance, right or wrong. Or, in 
 other words, the heart cannot be neutral, moved neither 
 by good nor by bad feelings, hanging between loyalty 
 and disloyalty to God, its legitimate Sovereign. 
 
 In the same way the mind cannot be left entirely 
 uncontrolled, emancipated from all guidance, right or 
 wrong. The legitimate sovereign of the mind is truth, 
 and its independence consists in its being placed under 
 the guidance of truth, not in its being left uncontrolled 
 and unguided, even if such a mental state were possi- 
 ble. When the mind is under the guidance of truth, 
 its legitimate sovereign, all its faculties and powers are 
 properly developed and properly directed, and there is 
 harmony within it. But when truth is thrust out of 
 the throne of the mind it is not left uncontrolled, for 
 error takes its place and begins the domination, the 
 result of which is disharmony and disorder. Under 
 the guidance of error all the noble faculties of the mind 
 are improperly developed and sadly misdirected. 
 Thought is ennobled and exalted under the control of 
 truth, degraded and debased under the dominance of 
 error. Independence of thought therefore consists in 
 its being emancipated from wrong control and placed 
 under right control, liberated from error and placed 
 under the guidance of truth. 
 
 But what is truth, or the truth ? Christ calls Himself 
 the truth, the truth embodied, personified, concentrated 
 and exemplified. He emphatically claims Divinity 
 when He says, " I am the Truth !" You may be dis- 
 
THE ASPIRATIONS OF YOUNG INDIA. 211 
 
 posed to question such a claim ; but you will not object 
 to my calling God the truth in the sense in which 
 Christ represented Himself as the truth. God then is 
 the legitimate sovereign of the human mind as well as 
 the human heart, and independence of thought consists 
 in its being freed from the control of error and placed 
 under the control of God Himself. In God then does 
 your thought find its highest liberty ! 
 
 Please remember that your thought finds its highest 
 expansion in God. We see in this world an endless 
 chain of truths fitted to enlarge and ennoble our minds, 
 rising from the lowest of created objects up to the very 
 throne of the Creator. Each link of truth in this all- 
 comprehensive chain is sure, when rightly apprehended , 
 to expand our minds ; and the higher we ascend in our 
 apprehension of the successive links of this chain, the 
 greater the expansion. And certainly, when We leave 
 the chain of created objects behind us, and meditate on 
 the varied attributes of the Creator — on His infinite 
 justice and unbounded love, as well as on His matchless 
 power and unerring wisdom — we feebly attempt to 
 grasp what is fitted to lead the mind to the highest 
 stages of development. In God then the mind finds 
 not only its noblest freedom, but its highest expansion. 
 
 Please remember also that your thought finds its last 
 resting-place in God. You cannot possibly confine 
 yourself to the work of registering the phenomena of 
 which you cannot but be cognizant. The impulse that 
 leads you to such registration leads you a step farther 
 — leads you to throw aside the veil of phenomena and 
 observe the occult forces at work behind them. It is 
 possible to proscribe metaphysical inquiry, but it is im- 
 possible to keep the human mind from rushing toward 
 such investigation. Again, the same necessity of the 
 
212 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 intellect that leads you to the region of metaphysical 
 forces leads you a step*' farther — leads you to recognize 
 the unseen spirit that guides these hidden and indefin- 
 able powers of nature. But when you have reached 
 this terminus your mind rests. You never think of 
 going or pushing your research beyond the Almighty. 
 In God does your vagrant thought find its abiding rest. 
 Again, your path in this world is beset with enigmas 
 and mysteries, with problems you cannot solve, and 
 riddles you cannot unriddle. For instance, you cannot 
 possibly reconcile absolute foreknowledge on the part 
 of God to your own responsibility ; the sovereignty of 
 the Creator to the free agency of a rational creature 
 like yourself. But in all such matters, where you can- 
 not explain you can trust. Your thought in its soaring 
 flight gets wearied and finds an abiding resting place 
 in God. 
 
 Now we, Christian preachers, do not ask you to bow 
 to human authority — the authority of .missionaries and 
 chaplains, of bishops and archbishops, of popes and 
 councils. We simply exhort you to bow to the author- 
 ity of God, your Creator and Preserver, your Sovereign 
 and Judge, not to say your Father in heaven. The 
 Brahmo comes to you with a string of his opinions, 
 which he may dignify by means of specious names, 
 such as intuitions, primary convictions, ultimate princi- 
 ples of faith, etc. But they are, barring a few funda- 
 mental truths which are by no means enough to land 
 us where peace with God and holiness of character are 
 attainable, his opinions, and as such they are to be 
 adopted only when they accord with our convictions. 
 But we come to you armed with the Word of God, 
 which rests on evidence which you cannot dispassion- 
 ately examine without being convinced of its conclu- 
 
THE ASPIRATIONS OF YOUNG INDIA. 213 
 
 siveness. And we call upon yon to build your faith on 
 this rock, which the gates of hell cannot shake. Do we 
 not encourage your longing for freedom of thought ? 
 
 2. The second watchword of the Sadharan Brahmo 
 Somaj is Catholicity of Spirit. Your wish for this ex- 
 cellency is most natural. The religion of this country 
 is perhaps the most exclusive system ever elaborated 
 by man, and its life is perpetual, ceaseless depletion. 
 Yigor is daily and hourly flowing out of its huge body, 
 and fresh accession of strength is impossible to it. Its 
 exclusiveness is therefore the most fruitful source of its 
 dissolution, and the time is not far distant when the 
 entire framework will come down with a tremendous 
 crash. You have to a great extent emancipated your- 
 self from its spirit of exclusiveness, and you most natu- 
 rally wish for catholicity of spirit as well as indepen- 
 dence of thought. And let me assure you that we 
 most cordially sympathize with you in this aspiration 
 of your hearts. 
 
 Of course it is the fashion to represent us as exceed- 
 ingly narrow-minded and exclusive. But it is not at all 
 difficult for us to prove that we are far more liberal- 
 minded and far less exclusive than the friends who are 
 never tired of accusing us of bigotry and exclusiveness. 
 Do these persons maintain that there are elements of 
 truth to be found in one and all the religions of the 
 world ? So do we ! Do they maintain that these 
 precious elements of truth ought not to be despised be- 
 cause they are buried under heaps of error ? So do we ! 
 In what sense then are we more exclusive than they ? 
 
 We maintain, without the slightest equivocation, 
 that precious elements of truth are to be found in all 
 the religions of the world, present or past. Nay, we 
 go a step farther and affirm that they could not possi- 
 
214 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 bly have spread if they had not such elements of truth 
 imbedded in them. A system of unmixed error has no 
 chance of success even in this sin-laden world. If there 
 were a religion invented without the slightest tinge of 
 truth in it, men, sinful though they confessedly are, 
 would recoil from it in horror, and it would he still- 
 born. The very fact that the religions of the world 
 have each secured the homage of masses of human 
 beings is a proof that they are not systems of unmiti- 
 gated error. 
 
 Thus far, then, we are most willing to go with our 
 accusers. But we most emphatically deny that it is 
 possible for a sinful man to separate these elements of 
 truth from the heaps of error under which they lie 
 buried, and construct them into a system of unmixed 
 truth. Man in his present condition has his judgment 
 warped and his heart vitiated by sin, and he cannot 
 discriminate between truth and error with infallible 
 precision or unquestionable certitude. He cannot in all 
 cases separate truth from error and build up a system 
 of unalloyed truth. And when a sinful man like Babu 
 Keshub Chunder Sen affirms that he is to take the 
 cream out of every system of religious faith and elabo- 
 rate a creed of absolute truth freed from the slightest 
 touch of error, we cannot but regard his pretensions 
 with suspicion and distrust. 
 
 The body of truths found in the religions of the 
 world is presented much more clearly and much more 
 authoritatively in our sacred Scriptures. "We adopt this 
 inferior body of truths, and are therefore not obnoxious 
 to the charge of narrow-mindedness and exclusiveness 
 so recklessly preferred against us. But we do some- 
 thing more. We adopt that higher body of truths to 
 which they obstinately refuse to listen, though these 
 
THE ASPIRATIONS OF YOUNG INDIA. 215 
 
 are attested by evidence of the most conclusive char- 
 acter. 
 
 A great German theologian represents heathenism as 
 the seeking religion, and Judaism as the hoping religion. 
 You will perhaps need a little explanation to enable you 
 to grasp the ideas imbedded in these expressions. 
 There are certain questions, appertaining specially to 
 the welfare of our undying souls, which we cannot help 
 raising or taking into our most serious consideration. 
 Is there a God ? Does He take a deep interest in our 
 affairs ? Is He willing to receive us back to His family 
 on earth, to the Fold of which He is the Shepherd ? 
 Is He willing to pardon our sins and deliver us from 
 their dominating influence ? Is He willing to guide us 
 through the vexations and trials of life ? These ques- 
 tions force themselves on our attention, and we can no 
 more get rid of them entirely than we can get rid of 
 our being. It is possible for us to bury them under our 
 secular aspirations and under specious theories ; but as 
 they are suggested by the very conditions of our being, 
 they cannot possibly be got rid of entirely. 
 
 Heathenism raises these all-important questions ; but 
 Heathenism does not solve them. Doubts and fears 
 are heaped up in its path, and certainty in religious 
 matters is a thing almost if not wholly unknown. The 
 existence of a God of some indefinable kind is certainly 
 admitted, but His feelings toward us are dubiously, or 
 rather wrongly, interpreted ; and we are left in uncer- 
 tainty as to His willingness to extend to us all the help 
 of which, in our present deplorable condition, we so 
 obviously stand in need. 
 
 Judaism advances a step farther. It raises the self- 
 same questions, and it does not solve them thoroughly. 
 But with prophetic certainty it points to a time when they 
 
216 BRAHMOISM. 
 
 will in the course of providence be satisfactorily solved. 
 Judaism has what Heathenism lacks — a prophetic 
 significance as well as a present efficacy — and its sub- 
 lime uniqueness, not to speak of its higher excellences, 
 is itself a proof of its divine origin. 
 
 Christianity solves these mighty problems, and solves 
 them in a glorious Personality rather than in a revealed 
 body of solutions. Christianity is summed up in 
 Christ, and in Christ these problems, which have per- 
 plexed for ages untold the loftiest minds the world has 
 seen, are solved, and that most satisfactorily. Is there 
 a God ? Christ is God Incarnate, the brightness of 
 God's glory, the express image of His person. Does 
 He take a deep interest in our affairs ? Christ is the 
 highest expression of the unspeakably profound interest 
 He takes in our affairs. Does He love us ? God so 
 loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, 
 that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but 
 have everlasting life. Is He willing to accept and bless 
 us ? Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy- 
 laden, and I will give you rest. Is He willing to guide us 
 through the vexations and trials of life ? I am the Good 
 Shepherd. The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the 
 sheep. I will never leave thee — I will never forsake thee. 
 These all-important problems are solved, as they have 
 never been, in Christ Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us. 
 
 We Christians go all lengths with our detractors in 
 adopting the inferior body of truth found in all the 
 religions of the world. But we advance a step farther 
 — we adopt the higher body of truth embodied in Jesus 
 Christ. Are we not more catholic than they are ? 
 Have we not better reason to bring a charge of narrow- 
 mindedness and exclusiveness against them than they 
 have to bring such charge against us ? 
 
THE ASPIRATIONS OP YOUNG INDIA. 217 
 
 At all events, let me assure you that we deeply sym- 
 pathize with you in your longing for breadth of view 
 and catholicity of spirit. But beware, my friends, that 
 this noble longing may not degenerate into mere senti- 
 mentalism — a morbid sentimentalism that refuses to 
 discriminate between truth and error, and glories in 
 constructing a system of heterogeneous elements, pre- 
 senting an odd mixture of sound doctrine and false 
 theory, of chaste principle and wild speculation, of 
 grovelling fetichism and sublime monotheism ! 
 
 3. The third watchword of the Sadharan Brahmo 
 Somaj is Immediacy. This involves the denial, per- 
 emptory and unequivocal, of the doctrine of mediation. 
 To nothing are our educated countrymen more thor- 
 oughly opposed than to this universally received doc- 
 trine ; and their opposition cannot bat appear at first 
 sight natural. The array of mediators presented in the 
 national pantheon are as a rule types of vice and crimi- 
 nality ; and one cannot contemplate the disgusting 
 forms of degradation they conjure up without a perfect 
 revulsion of feeling. A reaction, therefore, against the 
 doctrine so ludicrously travestied is on their part natu- 
 ral ; nor can we indulge in unmitigated condemnation 
 when we see them carried by it from one extreme to the 
 other, from a gross abuse and parody of the doctrine of 
 mediation to a complete denial of it. 
 
 What is the gist of their objections to this doctrine ? 
 They are often heard speaking in this strain : Why 
 should we go to an inferior being when we can approach 
 God direct ? Why should we go to his Excellency's 
 private secretary when we can go to the Yiceroy 
 direct ? We need not pause to affirm that in such dec- 
 larations our friends assume the very point to be proved, 
 viz. , that they can approach God direct. Nor do we 
 
218 BBAHMOISII. 
 
 stop to affirm that if they had only approximately 
 adequate views of their own sinfulness, they would not 
 speak in this reckless style. But we do affirm that 
 their objections to the doctrine of mediation lose all 
 their force as soon as they are applied to the Lord 
 Jesus Christ ? Christ is a divine Mediator, and ap- 
 proaching Him is approaching God direct ! If Christ 
 were a human being, like Socrates or Yyas or Nanak 
 or Chaitanya or Babu Keshub Chunder Sen, these 
 objections might legitimately be applied to Him, and 
 approach to God through Him deprecated. But Christ 
 being God- Incarnate, the Creator of the heavens and 
 the earth, the Lord of lords and the God of gods, these 
 objections lose their force as soon as they are applied to 
 Him. 
 
 Approaching Christ is in reality approaching God. 
 Christ has brought God down to the level of our com- 
 prehension ; has presented God in the only form in 
 which we can possibly know, love, and serve Him. An 
 ordinary illustration will make this clear. Suppose the 
 sun is eclipsed, and a person wishes to see what portion of 
 the glorious disk is darkened. What does he do ? He 
 knows he cannot lift up his eye toward the sun and 
 gaze upon it without being dazzled into blindness. He 
 therefore stains a piece of glass, and through it gazes 
 upon the luminary, and observes the portion of it 
 eclipsed. The stained glass is a softening medium, and 
 through it the effulgence of the sun reaches the eye 
 softened, and does not therefore dazzle it into blind- 
 ness. In the same manner the glory of God comes to 
 us softened through Christ, and does not therefore 
 dazzle and overpower us. Christ is, properly speak- 
 ing, God to us, and therefore approaching Him is 
 approaching God direct. And consequently your wish 
 
THE ASPIRATIONS OF YOUNG INDIA. 210 
 
 for immediacy is also encouraged, properly speaking, 
 by our holy religion. 
 
 4. And lastly, you ardently long for Spirituality, 
 which is the fourth and last battle-cry of the Sadharan 
 Brahmo Somaj. ]No wonder ! The religion of the 
 country has for ages been a system of pure external] sm, 
 a religion of dead forms and lifeless observances. 
 Under its influence the smallest things are tithed, and 
 the weightier matters of law and judgment are laid 
 aside. Formality is idolized, morality is cast over- 
 board, and the unspeakable blessings of heart-religion 
 are extinguished by a round of ceremonial observances, 
 the significance of which is not perceived, and the 
 efficacy of which is therefore simply nil. From this 
 mass of externalism you naturally recoil, and you 
 ardently wish for a system of religion more spiritual by 
 far. And in this wish of yours we, Christian preach- 
 ers, cannot but deeply sympathize. But you are in 
 danger of being carried to the other extreme, even by a 
 natural reaction against dead formalism. You are in 
 danger of wishing for a religion thoroughly and exclu- 
 sively spiritual, a religion free from all forms. We are 
 of course willing to admit that Christianity is not such 
 a religion. It is spiritual indeed, but it is not exclu- 
 sively spiritual — it is not free from all forms. It would 
 not be suited to our present circumstances if it were 
 so. We are dualistic, composed of bodies and souls ; 
 and the religion we need must be dualistic, or have a 
 body and a soul. A religion free from the slightest 
 touch of formality might be adapted to benefit angelic 
 intelligences, but it would be out of place in this world. 
 
 A great writer says that every spiritual idea in the 
 world tends to corporeity, or to appear in a bodily 
 form. An illustration or two will make this clear. 
 
220 LRAHMOISM. 
 
 Here is a painter who has a nice picture in his head. 
 He is naturally impelled to transfer that picture from 
 his head to the canvas. The picture cannot receive all 
 the finish of which it is capable without such trans- 
 ference, nor can it exert a reflex influence of a salutary 
 nature over the painter himself, and a direct influence 
 of such character over the world at large, so long as it 
 remains concealed in the dark chambers of his mind. 
 J$o wonder then that he is anxious to give it a tangible 
 and visible shape, and not to allow it to perish in its 
 embryonic state among the abortive creations of his 
 mind. Again, take the case of an architect who has a 
 grand idea in his mind. He most naturally wishes to 
 see that idea embodied in brick and mortar. "Why ? 
 Because he believes that the idea cannot receive all the 
 finish of which it is susceptible, and do good to himself 
 and the world at large, till it is thus embodied. Once 
 more, let us take the case of a man penetrated with 
 missionary enthusiasm, a desire to spread truth and 
 root out error. He is naturally led to communicate 
 that desire, through the medium of what may be called 
 personal magnetism, to a number of select friends. The 
 desire is then embodied in a committee, and when thus 
 embodied it does good to him, his associates, and the 
 world at large. Had the spiritual idea in each of these 
 cases not tended to corporeity, what would have been 
 the consequence ? It would not have approximated 
 perfection, would not have done good to the originator, 
 and would not have benefited mankind at large. We 
 are therefore so constituted that our spiritual ideas 
 tend to corporeity or appear in visible shapes. 
 
 If we have the religious feelings stirred up within us 
 by a vivid presentation of facts fitted to stimulate 
 them, they will tend to appear in tangible and visible 
 
THE ASPIRATIONS OF YOUNG INDIA. 221 
 
 forms. If we have, for instance, genuine penitence 
 stirred up by a view somewhat adequate of our sinful- 
 ness coupled with that of God's unspeakable love, it 
 will manifest itself in confessions and tears. If we 
 have our gratitude to God stimulated by a considera- 
 tion of our own unworthiness, and the innumerable 
 blessings, both temporal and spiritual, with which we 
 have been favored during our past lives, it will mani- 
 fest itself in the language of praise and thanksgiving. 
 And lastly, when the love of God, begotten by an 
 overpowering exhibition of His infinite though unmer- 
 ited love toward us, reigns in the soul, it will manifest 
 itself in appropriate acts of worship as well as in a life of 
 loyalty and obedience. And therefore forms of religion 
 are in our present condition unavoidable, when we have 
 the substance of it. Those who denounce forms in the 
 most sweeping manner have no religion in their hearts. 
 ~Nov is it necessary or proper for us to denounce all 
 forms. There are forms which are dead, and there are 
 forms which are living. There are forms with sub- 
 stance, and forms without substance. It is certainly 
 necessary to denounce dead forms and meaningless 
 mummeries, because they degrade the mind and enslave 
 the spirit. But living forms — forms which indicate the 
 life of religion in the soul — have no such consequences, 
 and ought not therefore to be run down. The, human 
 body is honored so long as it is animated by the soul ; 
 but when the vital spirit goes out it becomes a dead 
 corpse, and is in consequence thrown aside. In the 
 same manner forms of religion animated by the soul of 
 religion are sources of improvement and should not be 
 set aside. But when they are dead or become mean- 
 ingless mimicries and tomfooleries, the best thing you 
 can do with them is to get rid of them. 
 
222 BRAHMOisar." 
 
 In Christianity, then, all the religious aspirations of 
 Young India have their legitimate gratification or ful- 
 filment. They are not realized in Brahmoism, which 
 really, if not ostensibly, demands homage to human 
 authority, lacks catholicity enough to adopt and assim- 
 ilate to itself the higher body of truth revealed in the 
 Word of God, refuses to look upon approach to Christ 
 as approach direct to God, and either abandons itself 
 to a series of mummeries and tomfooleries, as in the 
 case of the New .Dispensationists, or shows a tendency 
 to denounce all forms, living or dead, as in the case of 
 the Sadharan Brahmo Somaj. We are justified, then, 
 in affirming that the religious aspirations of Young 
 India are realized in Christianity, and Christianity 
 alone ! 
 
 Let us conclude with the remark that these aspira- 
 tions are by no means the highest aspirations of your 
 undying souls. You have longings deeper and yearn- 
 ings higher than these, and these are also satisfied in 
 our holy religion. You long for light — such knowledge 
 of Gocl as elicits your faith, trust, and confidence — and 
 your longing for light is nowhere satisfied so thor- 
 oughly as in Christianity or Christ, who is the Light 
 of the World. You are troubled by a deep sense of 
 your guilt, and you naturally long for pardon ; and 
 Christianity comes to you with an assurance of God's 
 pardoning mercy. You are moreover troubled by 
 indwelling sin, of which unaided you can never get rid, 
 and Christianity comes to you with the regenerating 
 and sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit. You 
 long for guidance, and some reliable intimations about 
 the world toward which you are going, and these are 
 secured to you by our holy religion. All the noblest 
 yearnings of your souls are satisfied in Christianity ! 
 
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