Charles Wood, "A Modern Hindu Reformer" 

. . . . Keshub Chunder Sen is a disciple neither of Moses, nor Buddha, nor Zoroaster, nor Mohammed, nor Christ. He calls himself by none of these names. He is an apostle of the new dispensation. He is the bringer in so he believes of a new epoch to India and humanity. Why may it not be? All the ancient religions were once new. They were all born in the Orient. India herself was the first to hear the infant cries of Sakyamuni, the first to heed his teaching, and the first, too, to forget it. Why may she not, even in the last half of the nineteenth century, have given birth to another as great as the great Buddha himself? The hour is ripe. The old is passing away. Buddha is dead. Brahma and Mohammed are not reverenced as they once were. The Hindu laughs heartily with you over the hideous puerility of the idol worship from which he has just come, and to which he will probably tomorrow return. India has need of a new dispensation, and some fifty years ago a few of her leading spirits began to organize a reform, which has resulted at least in the establishment of a new church, the Brahmo Somaj.

"At first," says Chunder Sen, "this Brabmo Somaj to which I belong was simply a church for the worship of the one true God according to the doctrines and ritual inculcated in the earliest Hindu Scriptures." For the time the members of this church held to the infallibility of the Vedas; "but," continues Sen, "the Brahmo Somaj, because it was the work of God, could not but break with the Vedas as soon as they were found to contain errors." The Brahmo Somaj, released from the nature worship and absurdities of the Vedas, became a pure theistic church, "the centre," says Sen, "of a moral, social, and religious reformation." "In the Brahmo Somaj," he adds, "we see concentrated all those great, urgent, and pressing reforms which India needs at the present moment. Is it the amelioration of the condition of women that India wants? Look at the Brahmo Somaj, and you see already are gathered in some of its chapels ladies who have discarded idolatry, superstition, and caste altogether; who have learned to pray in their own houses unto the one true God, and have set their faces boldly against every form of polytheism and idol worship; and some of whom have published most beautiful theistic verses and hymns. Is it the distinctions of caste that are to be leveled? You see among the Brahmos a good number of valiant and brave men, who not only dine with men of all classes, irrespective of the distinctions of color, caste, and creed, but who have promoted intermarriages between members of different castes. The high-caste Brabman has accepted as his wife a low-caste Sudra, and vice versa."

This monotheism is certainly immensely superior to the idolatrous worship which one may still see everywhere in the Hindu temples of India. . . . . That Keshub Chunder Sen should have found his way into a church of this sort is the most natural thing in the world. How it came about was explained by Lord Lawrence, once Viceroy of India, at a great meeting of welcome given to Chunder Sen on his arrival in England in the spring of 1870. "Our guest," said Lord Lawrence, "is a Hindu gentleman, of respectable and well-known lineage. His grandfather was the associate and coadjutor of one of the most profound Sanskrit scholars in this country. Left an orphan in his youth, he was placed by his uncle in an English school, and afterwards was graduated in the college at Calcutta, where he gained a thorough knowledge of English language, literature, and history. It was impossible that, with this knowledge, he could remain an idolater. Early in his career he learned to despise the worship of idols, and by degrees, by thought, by reflection and prayer, he learned to believe in one God. He then joined a party known in Lower Bengal as the Brahmo Somaj, who worship Brahma, the creator. After a short time he became the head of a reforming party among those reformers, so that in Keshub Chunder Sen they saw the representative of the most advanced section of the great re- forming party which was rising in Bengal."

That such a man, so eager for light, should not have become a Christian may at first glance seem very strange; but the Hindu has always looked upon Christianity as the religion of his conquerors; it is almost inseparably associated in his mind with English cannon and English soldiers. It has come to him as something foreign and Occidental. The Christian convert suffers more socially than the Brabmanist, or Mohammedan, or the member of the Brahmo Somaj. These are reasons sufficient, if there were no others, why Chunder Sen should have cast in his lot with the theistic rather than the Christian church. For the last ten years he has been the leading spirit it would not be an exaggeration to say the Pope of the Brahmo Somaj. The form of its development is due to him rather than to any other member, or perhaps to all the other members combined. He is the pastor of the church in Calcutta, and the editor of the weekly newspaper published by the society.

It is next to impossible to determine accurately the creed of an organization that has no written confession of faith, no infallible books, no authoritative articles. But as Keshub Chunder Sen always speaks ex cathedra, we might form some idea of what the theistic church is from his own utterances, were it not that he always speaks, so he himself tells us, as an Oriental, in tropes and figures. He can cry, in an address to the Brahmo Somaj, in the town hall of Calcutta, on its fifty-first anniversary, "Blessed Jesus, I am thine. I give myself, body and soul, to thee. If India will revile and persecute me, and take my life-blood out of me, drop by drop, still, Jesus, thou shalt continue to have my homage. Son of God, I love thee truly!" But he can say also in the same address, "Christ's dispensation is said to be divine. I say that this dispensation the Brahmo Somaj is equally divine." With his missionaries he can go on "pilgrimages," as he calls them, in the "worship room" of his own house, or in his study, where, surrounded by book shelves loaded with the wisdom of ages, and in the midst of literary associations, they communed with Socrates. "The following saints were visited on the dates specified against their names: Moses, 22d February; Socrates, 7th March; Sakya, 14th March; The Rishis, 21st March; Christ, 8th August; Mohammed, 19th September; Chinitauya, 26th September; scientific men, 3d October."

"Before the flag of the new dispensation," cries this hroadest of broad churchmen, "bow, ye nations, and proclaim the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. In blessed eucharist let us eat and assimilate all the saints and prophets of the world. Thus shall we put on the new man, and say, The Lord Jesus is my will, Socrates my head, Chaitauya my heart, the hindu Rishi my soul, and the philanthropic Howard my right hand." The doors of this modern Pantheon stand always wide open. There is room enough within for all heroes and prophets, if not for all gods. The Bramho Somaj is an attempt to render equal service to many masters. . .

Source: The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 49, Issue 294 (April 1882), pp. 483-88. (Passages excerpted from 484-86.)