Page:Sketches of some distinguished Indian women.djvu/85

 reverence. The purer morality of the West makes the student blush with shame at much that claims divine sanction: a more robust philosophy sets him free from the trammels of old-world ideas. He finds himself drifting into a general attitude of doubt, if not of scepticism: his faith in the religion of the Brahmans is destroyed before he is prepared to accept in its place the religion of Christ.

But the Indian mind is naturally a religious one, to which free-thought or atheism in its hopeless selfishness is repugnant, and it clings to the hope that, when stripped of the superstitious and degrading accretions which have gathered round it in the course of centuries, the religion of Brahma may yet be found to contain something capable of satisfying the heart without offending the intellect.

Such a via media many deem they have found in the system of the Brahmo-Somaj. The word Somaj means a society or association, so that it corresponds very nearly to our word "Church," and its members frequently speak of it as the Theistic Church of India. This society or sect owes its origin to Rajah Rammohun Roy, who founded it about the year 1828, with the object of reviving the primitive Hindu religion. According to Professor Monier Williams, "it ushered in the dawn of the greatest change that has ever passed over the Hindu mind. A new phase of the Hindu religion then took definite shape, which