[Sidenote: The beginning of the nineteenth century.]

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

Returning to Bengal, it would seem from Rammohan Roy's evidence that in
1820 the standpoint of the learned at that time was exactly what we have
called the standpoint of an intelligent individual among the masses
to-day, namely, a plea that the multitude of gods were agents of the one
Supreme God. "Debased and despicable," he writes, "as is the belief of
the Hindus in three hundred and thirty millions of gods, they (the
learned) pretend to reconcile this persuasion with the doctrine of the
unity of God, alleging that the three hundred and thirty millions of
gods are subordinate agents assuming various offices and preserving the
harmony of the universe under one Godhead, as innumerable rays issue
from one sun."[73] Turning to testimony of a different kind, we find
Macaulay speaking about the polytheistic idolatry he knew between 1834
and 1838. "The great majority of the population," he writes, "consists
of idolaters." Macaulay's belief was that idolatry would not survive
many years of English education, and we shall now take note how in the
century the sphere of idolatry and polytheism has been limited. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, we may now say that Indian Hindu
society consisted of a vast polytheistic mass with a very thin, an often
invisible, film of pantheists on the top. The nineteenth century of
enlightenment and contact with Christianity has seen the wide acceptance
of the monotheistic conception by the new-educated India. The founding
of the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j or Theistic Association in 1828 by Rammohan
Roy has already been called the commencement of an indigenous theistic
church outside the transplanted theism of Indian Christianity and Indian