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world (although the real nature of both is hidden)," every religion has necessarily made provision for social laws governing civil life and have attached rewards and punishments to certain acts both in this world and the next, "for the sake of the welfare of the people (society)," though not without appending to these a great many extraneous things which on the other hand have done more harm than good. Out of this tangle of truth and untruth, any person of sound mind" can thread his way to the one Being who is the fountain of the harmonious organization of the universe, and will pay attention to the good of the society," thus "becoming free from the useless restraints of religion which sometimes become sources of prejudice one against another and causes of physical and mental troubles." With such a belief in a purely utilitarian origin and end of all religion as this is, religion which serves mainly the end of preserving and advancing the social and personal well-being of man, it is no wonder that he found very little in great religions to sympathize with and much to protest against. The only argument that he brings forward against all those systems of penances and punishments which most of the old religions are full of, besides their being non-conducive to social and personal wellbeing is that they contradict one another and therefore they are false. According to youthful Ram Mohun, people believe in these and "the centres of the circles of faiths" because they do not distinguish between nature which leads them to a belief in God as the source of creation" and in the sequence of cause and effect, and habit which leads them to believe in all those things that they are told by their elders and religious

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teachers from their childhood and boyhood. They are misled further into believing these by a belief in miracles which are said to have taken place in the lives of the great founders, but in all such belief they forget that there must be some unknown hidden natural cause behind every such alleged miracle if it at all took place, for all these miracles are accepted on tradition", which itself is very doubtful, being handed down from age to age and thus getting additions and accretions. Moreover these traditions of various religions are contradictory of one another, and therefore they are all false, unless we prefer to be thrown on either of the horns of the dilemma of admitting two contradictories" or "giving one thing preference over another without any reasonable ground."' Hence no tradition which is contrary to reason is to be accepted.

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After discrediting thus the value of miracles and tradition, Ram Mohun proceeds to do the same with the authority or even the necessity of "prophets or leaders of religion." He says with regard to this as follows:-"Some people argue in this way that the Almighty Creator has opened the way of guidance to mortal beings through the medium of prophets or leaders of religions. This is evidently futile, because the same people believe that all things in creation, whether good or bad, proceed from the Great Creator without any intermediate agency, and that the apparent causes are the means and conditions of that ( i.e., their coming into existence). Hence it is to be seen whether the sending of prophets and revelation to them from God are immediately from God or through intermediate agency. In the first case there is no necessity of an intermediate

agency for guidance to salvation, and there does not seem any necessity of the instrumentality of prophets or revelation. And in the second case, there should be a series of intermediate agencies. Hence the advent of prophets and revelation like other external things have no reference to God, but depend upon the invention of an inventor. Prophets and others should not be particularly connected (or mixed up) with the teaching of a faith. Besides what one nation calls a guide to a true faith, another calls a misleading to an erroneous way."

He goes on to argue in the same way against all those who plead for belief in the established faith on the ground of practical prudence etc., and then lays down his own positive belief in contrast with that of the believers in established religions in these words :

"Those who prefer the so-called invented revelation of mankind to the natural inspiration from God, which consists in attending to social life with their own species and having an intuitive faculty of discriminating good from evil, instead of gaining the union of hearts with mutual love and affection of all their fellow creatures without difference in shape and colour or creeds and religions, which is a pure devotion acceptable to God, the Creator of nature, consider some special formulæ and bodily motions to be the cause of Salvation and receiving bounty from Almighty God.'

After contrasting thus his own faith with that of most people, he classifies mankind into the following four kinds :

Firstly-A class of deceivers who in order to attract the people to themselves wilfully invent

doctrines, creeds and faiths and put the people to troubles and cause disunion among them.

2ndly-A class of deceived people who, without inquiring into the fact, adhere to others.

3rdly-A class of people who are deceivers and also deceived: they are those who having themselves faith in the sayings of another induce others to adhere to them.

4thly-Those who by the help of Almighty God are neither deceivers nor deceived. "

He closes the book with a promise of publishing another book entitled Discussion of Various Religions in which he was to give details bearing on the subject, a work which he could not write, or at any rate was never published.

As said above, this book, if it has any value, has it only as being the first expression of his mind and as showing the prevailing influence thereupon at this early period. The case of pure Rationalism is very clearly set forth here, and therein he has much in common with the school of Deists and Illuminists which had done the same kind of work only a short while back in Europe and more particularly in France, a work which preceded the French Revolution. This shows how the human mind is the same whether in the East or the West, for at this period Ram Mohun knew nothing of the French school or of the English language, his sole study hitherto being that of the Moslem and Hindu literatures and cultures. Moreover, this book affords a very interesting study of the working of the mind of a man who, in course of time, advanced from its barren negative position to the very positive one of the "Precepts of Jesus" and the TrustDeed of the Brahma Samaj, and later on came to be known almost as the founder of the Science of Comparative Religion.

CHAPTER III

IN THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL LIFE AND

OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

Ram Mohun entered into the service of the British East India Company in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and thereby he not only entered the school of life where he came to know the world more intimately but came to have a proper acquaintance with Western Civilization also. His keen and appreciative mind soon understood the sterling worth of the English people upon whom he had looked so long with much distrust, and by means of the English language which he mastered in course of time he came to comprehend the greatness of the Western Civilization in many of its aspects as few Indians have done since, in spite of the manifold advantages of schools, colleges, universities, libraries, etc., that the people of the following generations have possessed. But he could do all this because he was a man of capa. cious and versatile mind. He soon interested himself in the politics of Europe, in which Napoleon Bonaparte was then the moving figure and came to conceive much admiration for his great genius. He studied very carefully the momentous questions of constitutional and democratic government that were then being decided, not in the Houses of Parliaments of different nations, but on the battlefields of Europe. He came not only to understand but even to appreciate some of the principles that governed the French Revolution and began to look upon Democracy as the last word in politics, and as almost a new dispensation. Though England had not taken very kindly to the new