Roy's endeavour at first was to purify the native forms of religion, and, recurring to the Vedas, to find a high philosophy in them; but he and the friends he gathered round him soon became convinced that these contained no system of reasonable theology, still less of morality, and they then constructed for themselves a theory culled from Christianity, but rejecting whatever did not approve itself to their intellect, in especial the holy mysteries regarding the nature of the Godhead and the Incarnation of our Lord.

This teaching, called Brahmoism, from Brahma, the purest and highest of Hindoo divinities, is, under another form, the Neo-Platonism of the Greeks, or the Soofeeism of the Persians.

There was even the germ of it in the grotesque medicine-man encountered by David Brainerd.

It is the form of opposition which the spirit of evil always stirs up, wherever the natural character is elevated enough to appreciate the beauty of Christian morality.

It only prevails where there are refined and cultivated men, afraid of all belief in the supernatural, as a humbling of their intellect to superstition; and just at present a form of it is very prevalent in India, owing to the amount of education which the natives receive, which uproots the old belief, but does not always implant the new.