Ever fresh, the broad creation,
A divine improvisation,

From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.

Once slept the world, an egg of stone,

And pulse and sound and light were none,

And God said 'Throb' and there was motion,
And the vast mass became vast ocean.
Outward and onward the eternal Pan,
Who layeth the world's incessant plan,
Halteth never in one shape,

But for ever doth escape,

Like wave or flame into new forms.
Of gem and air and plant and worms,
I that to day am a pine

Yesterday was a bundle of grass.
He is free and libertine

Pouring of His power the wine.

To every age and every race,

Unto every race and age,

He emptieth the beverage
Unto each and all,

Maker and Original

The world is the ring of His spells

And the play of His miracles.

A

CHAPTER XV.

WHAT IS PANTHEISM?

celebrated Frenchman once said that language was invented to conceal our thoughts. This may not be true, yet surely men's thought are very indefinite, or language is a very imperfect What careful reader of these vehicle for expressing them. pages has not wished long ere now that writers, especially on abHow many struse subjects, would define all the terms they use. mistakes would this prevent. How much time and labor would it save the reader. The word Pantheism seems to be the most indefinite of all indefinite words. To sum up a man, and call him a Pantheist,' says Mr. Stirling in his book on Hegel,' is to tell you just nothing at all about him.' What religion from Indian Brahmanism to English Protestantism?-What philosophy from Thales to Hegel might not be called Pantheistic? And to what religion or to what philosophy will its advocates admit that the word is rightly applied? In the first chapter we excluded entirely the Atheistic side, or that which measures God by material laws, and allows Him no existence beyond the assemblage of individual beings which compose the universe. This is called material Pantheism, but it is not Theism in any proper It is what has always been known as Atheism, and why should a new element of confusion be introduced into a subject already sufficiently difficult by the use of new and indefinite words? If a distinction is to be made between the Atheist who believes that all arose from chance, and him who sees in all nature an eternal order and the working of certain and immutable law, let the distinction be made, but let us call them both Atheists, for this is their proper appellation. We should then lay aside the words 'material Pantheism.' They mean nothing. They carry in themselves an express contradiction.

sense.

What, then, we have hitherto meant by Pantheism is what is called spiritual Pantheism. We have seen it exhibited in all its forms, the poetical, the mystical, the religious, and the metaphysical. We may eliminate the extravagances of some of the mystics and the intoxication of the Sufis; and, this being done, we shall try to find the value and meaning of what remains. But, before proceeding to this enquiry, it will help us, first briefly to review one or two popular forms of theology said to be partly, if not altogether Pantheistic.

The first is that of Schleiermacher. Neander did not overestimate Schleiermacher when he announced his death in these words, We have now lost a man from whom will be dated henceforth a new era in the history of theology.' Schleiermacher gave the death blow to the old Rationalism of Germany, and he sowed the seeds of the new. He regenerated theology, and gave it a fresh start; and, what is more, he revived religion. His Moravian piety was combined with the speculations of Schelling; and the glowing Discourses, by which he recalled the educated classes of Germany to a sense of religion, took for their standpoint the philosophy of Spinoza. Piety' he says, 'was the maternal bosom in the sacred shade of which my youth was passed, and which prepared me for the yet unknown scenes of the world. In piety my spirit breathed before I found my peculiar station in science and the affairs of life. It aided me when I began to examine into the faith of my fathers, and to purify my thoughts and feelings against all alloy. It remained with me when the God and immortality of my childhood disappeared from my doubting sight. It guided me in active life. It enabled me to keep my character duly balanced between my faults and my virtues. Through its means I have experienced friendship and love.' The God and immortality' of his childhood disappeared. The personal God whom the Moravians worshipped was exchanged for the impersonal Divinity of philosophy. Nor did this theology seem impious. No, it was the very essence of true religion. The pious soul has an immediate knowledge of the Infinite in the finite-of the eternal in the temporal. True piety is to seek this Infinite; to find it in all that lives and moves, in all which is born and changes, in all acting and suffering. It is a life in the all. It is to possess all in God and God in all. Nature becomes a continuous action of the Divinity in the world, and in the sons of men. Religion, as the highest science, tries to comprehend the unity of the Divine works-the unchangeable harmony which vivifies

THE TRINITY NOT TRIPERSONAL.

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the world. In one of his famous 'Discourses on Religion, Schleiermacher exclaims, with enthusiastic adoration,-'Offer up reverently with me a lock of hair to the manes of the holy, repudiated Spinoza! The high World-Spirit penetrated him; the Infinite was his beginning and his end; the universe his only and eternal love. In holy innocence and lowliness he mirrored himself in the eternal world, and saw himself as its most loveworthy image. He was full of religion and of the Holy Spirit; and, therefore, he stands alone and unreachable, master in his art above the profane multitude, without disciples and without citizenship.' When philosophers' he says again 'shall be religious, and shall seek God like Spinoza; when poets shall be pious and love Christ like Novalis, then will the great resurrection be celebrated in the two worlds.'

The old Rationalists placed religion in reason; the orthodox in authority. Schleiermacher, following Jacobi, placed it in devout feeling, or an immediate self-consciousness. Out of this he drew his entire theology, and on this ground he tried to harmonize theology with philosophy. To describe the forms of this religious feeling; the conditions of the pious consciousness, is the work of theology. Now the first and most obvious of these is a consciousness of ourselves as completely dependent, which is the same thing as a consciousness of ourselves in our relation to God. This feeling is the Divine element in our constitution. By it we are capable of fellowship with God. It proclaims the presence of God in us, and shows how we may be one with the Infinite.

Jesus Christ differed from other men in this, that in Him there was a perfect consciousness of God. He was actually what all men are potentially. He was the realization of our humanity; a perfect indwelling of the Supreme constituted His inner-self. The Divine activity, which is in humanity, was chiefly manifested in Him. The Divine word was not an eternal person. It only became a person in Jesus of Nazareth. As the Divinity is potentially a person in every man, we may at once conclude that the Trinity in the orthodox, or Western view of it, was rejected by Schleiermacher. There are not three persons, but three activities.The Father in creation; the Son in redemption; the Holy Spirit in sanctifying the Church. It is only in an improper sense that we apply the word person to Deity at all. He is the Infinite Being, the universal substance. We may think of God as a person if we can separate from His personality everything incompatible with His infinity. Indeed it is a neces

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INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY.

sity of our minds that we do form a personal conception of God, yet God is more than a person. The question, he says 'between us and the material Pantheist is not whether there is a personal, but whether there is a living God. The attribute, 'living,' Schleiermacher regarded as not placing the same limitations to the Divine Being as that of personal. It might be objected that the humblest beings, even unorganized matter, possess life, and that Schleiermacher, instead of raising onr views of the attributes of God, as He intended to do, in reality lowers them. But this would be an irrelevant objection for Schleiermacher is showing the materialist that God is a living Being, and not a blind necessity. What kind of a Being He is, and in what respect He is personal, is to be discussed not with the materialist, but with the believer in God.

Schleiermacher's doctrine of creation was the same as Spinoza's. There is a creation, but it is eternal. God as the absolute causality could never have been without a something caused. He dwells immanently in His universe, and creates unceasingly. The fall was a necessary step in human progress. It was inevitable from the existence of the sense element in man. Redemption is, therefore, a necessary result, or a continuation of creation. Its object is to raise men to a perfect communion with God, such as was possessed by Jesus Christ. Revelation is the revealing of God in us. Inspiration is the growth of the Christ within. In the life of Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is completed and His earthly life perpetuated. We are progressing God-wards. In Christ humanity becomes divine, and this by an eternal predestination, not of some men only, but of all men, to eternal life.

Schleiermacher said that the immortality as well as the God of his childhood disappeared. The last enemy to be destroyed is not death, but the hope of immortality' said Strauss; but Schleiermacher had said before that,-Life to come, as actually conceived, is the last enemy which speculative criticism has yet to encounter, and, if possible, to overcome.' He means individual immortality-an immortality apart from God; a continuance of our present unreal existence. The true eternal life is that of which the religious soul has a foretaste in communion with God. Thus to lose ourselves-thus to abandon ourselves to the universe, to our eternal interest; to know that we are a part of the All, and one with the Eternal is not to be lost without a return, not to be annihilated without reward. On the contrary, it is to create the true personality, to know that