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

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

[Sidenote: Fluidity of Hindu thought; rigidity of Hindu practice.]

For the student of this special aspect of Hinduism a second pertinent
fact here emerges, namely, that Hindu practice is much more established
than Hindu doctrine. The unchangeableness of Hindu ritual is not a new
idea; it is its bearing on doctrine that has not been clearly
considered. There _is_, then, a distinctly recognised Hindu orthodoxy in
manners and worship, at least for each Hindu community, while there is