Long before Christianity, other great religions, Brahmanism and Buddhism, which are much more comprehensive and less arrested in their development, followed the course of evolution by which a literal faith comes to be transformed into a symbolic faith. They have been reconciled successively with one metaphysical system after another—a process which has been inevitably carried forward with a fresh impulse under the English rule. To-day Sumangala, the Buddhist high-priest of Colombo, interprets in a symbolic sense the at once profound and naïve doctrine of the transmigration; he pretends to reject miracles. Other enlightened Buddhists freely accept modern doctrines, from those of Darwin to those of Spencer. On the other hand, in the bosom of Hinduism there has grown up a really new and wholly theistical religion, that of the Brahmaists.[54] Râm Mohum Roy founded, at the beginning of the century, a very deeply symbolical and wide-spread faith; his successors have gone the length, with Debendra Nâth Tâgore, of denying the authenticity even of the very texts which they were in the beginning most concerned to interpret mystically. This last step was taken suddenly, under circumstances which it is worth while to detail, because they sum up in a few characteristic strokes the universal history of religious thought. It happened about 1847. The disciples of Râm Mohum Roy, the Brahmaists, had been for a long time engaged in a discussion about the Vedas, and, quite as in the case of our liberal Protestants, had been giving especial prominence to texts in which they imagined they found an unmistakable affirmation of the unity of the Godhead; and they rid themselves of all concern with the passages that seemingly contradicted this notion by denying their authenticity. Ultimately, somewhat alarmed at their own progress, they sent four Pundits to Benares to collate the sacred texts: it was in Benares that, according to the tradition, the only so-called complete and authentic manuscript was preserved. During the two years that the labour of the Pundits covered, the Hindus waited for the truth in the same spirit that the Hebrews had done at the foot of Sinai. Finally the authentic version, or what purported to be such, was brought to them; and they possessed the definitive formula of revelation. Their disappointment was great, and they took the matter into their own hands, realizing at one blow the revolution which the liberal Protestants are pursuing gradually in the bosom of Christianity: they rejected definitively the Vedas and the antique religion of the Brahmans, and proclaimed in its stead a theistical religion, which rests in no sense whatsoever upon revelation. The new faith must in time develop, not without heresy and schism, but its adherents constitute to-day in India an important element in progress. [54] M. Goblet d’Alviella, _Evolution religieuse contemporaine_.