At the top of all is the pure pantheist, a believer in the illusion of the senses, and generally though not always an ascetic. For life is not worth living if it is merely an illusion, and the illusion must be dispelled, and the world of the senses renounced. If "father and brother, etc., have no actual entity," said the reformer Raja Rammohan Roy [1829] when combating pantheism, "they consequently deserve no real affection, and the sooner we escape from them and leave the world the better." So the pantheist is generally an ascetic cut off from the world to be consistent in his pantheism. Yet again, we repeat that such pure pantheists are very rare, and that "in India forms of pantheism, theism, and polytheism are ever interwoven with each other."[67] To one familiar with India, such a medley is neither inconceivable nor improbable; the debatable question only is, what sufficient account of the cause thereof can be given. Why is it that Hindu doctrine has never set? Why this incongruity between doctrine and domestic practice? Why this double-mindedness in the same educated individual? Much might be said in the endeavour to account for these characteristic features of India, the despair of the Christian missionary. I confine myself to the bearing of the question upon the influence of Christian ideas, and particularly of Christian theism. [Sidenote: Fluidity of Hindu thought; rigidity of Hindu practice.] For the student of this special aspect of Hinduism a second pertinent fact here emerges, namely, that Hindu practice is much more established than Hindu doctrine. The unchangeableness of Hindu ritual is not a new idea; it is its bearing on doctrine that has not been clearly considered. There _is_, then, a distinctly recognised Hindu orthodoxy in manners and worship, at least for each Hindu community, while there is no orthodoxy in doctrine. The broad distinctive marks of Hindu practice, we may repeat, are the social usage of caste, and the employment of brahmans in religious ritual. With ideas, then, thus fluid and practice thus rigid, it will be easily understood that Christian and modern ideas have made much greater headway in India than Christian customs and modes of worship. The mind of educated India has been Christianised to a much greater extent than the religious or domestic practices have been. Perhaps it might be said that all down the centuries of Christian Church history, opinion has often been in advance of worship and the social code, that social and religious conventionalities have lagged behind belief. If so, it is the marked conservatism in ceremonial that is noteworthy in India. While Hindu beliefs are dissolving or dropping out of the mind, Hindu practices are successfully resisting the solvent influences or only slowly being transformed. [Sidenote: More progress towards Christian thought than Christian practice.]