It was founded in Calcutta in 1828 by the famous
reformer, Raja Rammohan Roy, first of modern Indians. The Br[=a]hma
Sam[=a]j is confessedly the outcome of contact with Christian ideas. By
the best known of the Br[=a]hma community, the late Keshub Chunder Sen,
it was described as "the legitimate offspring of the wedlock of
Christianity with the faith of the Hindu Aryans." "No other reformation"
[in India], says the late Sir M. Monier Williams, "has resulted in the
same way from the influence of European education and Christian ideas."
The founder himself, Raja Rammohan Roy, was indeed more a Christian than
anything else, although he wore his brahman thread to the day of his
death in order to retain the succession to his property for his son. In
London and in Bristol, where he died in 1833, he associated himself with
Dr. Carpenter and the more orthodox section of the Unitarians,
explicitly avowing his belief in the miracles of Christ generally, and
particularly in the resurrection. In Calcutta, indeed, the origin of the
Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j was acknowledged at its commencement. After attending
the Scotch and other Churches in Calcutta, and then the Unitarian
Church, Rammohan Roy and his native friends set up a Church of their
own, and one name for it among educated natives was simply the Hindu
Unitarian Church. It is a secondary matter that, to begin with, the
reformer believed that he had found his monotheism in the Hindu
Scriptures, now known to all students as the special Scriptures of
pantheism.

Raja Rammohan Roy, the brave man who made a voyage to Britain in
defiance of caste, the champion of the widow who had often been
virtually obliged to lay herself on her dead husband's pyre, the
strenuous advocate of English education for Indians, the supporter of
the claim of Indians to a larger employment in the public service, has
not yet received from New India the recognition and honour which he
deserves. To every girl, at least in Bengal, the province of
widow-burning, he ought to be a hero as the first great Indian knight
who rode out to deliver the widows from the torturing fire of Suttee.

[Sidenote: Service of the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j to India.]

As its theistic name implies, the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j professedly
represents a movement towards theism, _i.e._ a rise from the polytheism
and idolatry of the masses and a rejection of the pantheism of Hindu
philosophy. Of course, noteworthy though it be, the foundation of the