The same effect which Mohammedanism produced on Hinduism is now being produced, in a much higher degree, on the religious mind of India by the mere presence of Christianity. That silent influence began to tell many years ago, even at a time when no missionaries were allowed within the territory of the old East India Company. Its first representative was Ram Mohun Roy, born just one hundred years ago, in 1772, who died at Bristol in 1833, the founder of the Brahma-Samâj. A man so highly cultivated and so highly religious as he was, could not but feel humiliated at the spectacle which the popular religion of his country presented to his English friends. He drew their attention to the fact that there was a purer religion to be found in the old sacred writings of his people, the Vedas. He went so far as to claim for the Vedas a divine origin, and to attempt the foundation of a reformed faith on their authority. In this attempt he failed. No doubt the Vedas and other works of the ancient poets and prophets of India, contain treasures of truth, which ought never to be forgotten, least of all by the sons of India. The late good Bishop Cotton, in his address to the students of a missionary institution at Calcutta, advised them to use a certain hymn of the Rig-Veda in their daily prayers.[13] Nowhere do we find stronger arguments against idolatry, nowhere has the unity of the Deity been upheld more strenuously against the errors of polytheism than by some of the ancient sages of India. Even in the oldest of their sacred books, the Rig-Veda, composed three or four thousand years ago--where we find hymns addressed to the different deities of the sky, the air, the earth, the rivers--the protest of the human heart against many gods, breaks forth from time to time with no uncertain sound. One poet, after he has asked to whom sacrifice is due, answers, “to Him who is God above all gods.”[14] Another poet, after enumerating the names of many deities, affirms, without hesitation, that “these are all but names of Him who is One.” And even when single deities are invoked, it is not difficult to see that, in the mind of the poet, each one of the names is meant to express the highest conception of deity of which the human mind was _then_ capable. The god of the sky is called Father and Mother and Friend; he is the Creator, the Upholder of the Universe; he rewards virtue and punishes sin; he listens to the prayers of those who love him.