the means at our disposal, and never to be cowed or overcome; not to whine about disadvantages and trials, nor grumble at fortune; fortune is on the side of the cheerful, devout plodder, and earnest worker, and God will befriend him however long and hard the battle of life may be. Leave consequences; dare to be right, to do right, come what will.

E. H.

TH

ART. VI.-ELEMENTARY THEOLOGY.

No. VII.

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD-PANTHEISM.

HE highest truth is very often little removed from serious error, so near each other do they lie that the vocabulary of truth is almost entirely appropriated by error, as in human life worthless feeling frequently usurps the language of what is most pure and divine. A warm temperament develops itself excitedly under the influence of associations and circumstances of a religious character, and the feeling in its gushing and intense force is identified with devotion; but it is not devotion, it is a mere display of animal feeling produced by influence external to the man. Devotion true and genuine arises from deep convictions respecting God and man's need of fellowship with him-eternity and man's need of preparation for it-indeed respecting all that is most solemn and real in human life. A pure and lofty thing is genuine devotion, different altogether from the play of an ardent temperament under exciting influence, with which it is often confounded. And as what is worthless and low in feeling is often put for what is pure and elevated, so error is frequently advanced as the truth by which perplexing phenomena are to receive their fullest explanation and the difficult problems of being their most thorough and satisfactory solution.

That God is all-present is a great and precious truth, the practical importance of which in human life cannot be over-estimated. It is impossible for us to have too deep a conviction that God is "not far from every one of us"; that he is in the world; that he is in this strangely mysterious life of ours as a Father and Friend, to guide onward and upward, until this beginning of existence blossoms into a higher and nobler life. This conviction beyond all

others will shed abroad in our hearts an elevating influence, and exert in our lives a regulative power. Amid the darkest experiences of earth this will be a light shining steadily and clearly in the gloom; under the most crushing sorrow we may have to endure this will be a stay and support. When the great crisis in the life of Jesus drew nigh, and he and his disciples were met for the last time previous to his crucifixion, and when the hearts of his followers were sad and sorrowful, because of the approaching experiences he had revealed-he said to them, "Let not your heart be troubled, ye believe in God, believe also in me." Faith in God-God in the world-God in humanity-the Father and Friend of men ; this he recognised and set forth as the great tranquilising power in human life.

This great fact of divine omnipresence is perverted in pantheistic theories. It is given in these fascinating speculations, but it is riven from its connections and denied its complimental truth. An unlimited and infinite presence is but one side of this fact; personality requires to be added-or if we may so say, a localisation of presence so that everywhere and everywhere equally there shall not only be the presence of Deity, but a divine personality. It may be a grand and captivating theory, that in every ray of light, in every blade of grass, in every beautiful flower, and in man with his power of thought and strength of affection, yea, that in the countless forms and forces of nature we have Deity; but if this infinite presence be destitute of will, character, the essential elements of personality, what practical relations can it sustain to human thought and action? Polytheism contains the complimental truth of pantheism. These two errors are but the perversions of complimental truths-the omnipresence and personality of God. Pantheism affirms that God is all, or all is God, and by these affirmations denies personality. Polytheism localises God by deifying various forms of being, and even products of human labour, ignoring the all-pervading living energy of the Great Spirit in its unity. Pantheism destroys the personality of God; polytheism while vividly realising personality, so far elevates it as to destroy the unity of the infinite presence. The truth contained in these forms of error is set forth and maintained by Christian theism in the doctrine of an all-present, personal Deity.

Pantheistic speculation presents a two-fold aspect. Materialistic pantheism affirms that the universe is God, that the many are but the One in its totality. The difficult problems of how the One can produce the many, and how the One and the many can co-exist, are disposed of by denying all difference between the One and the many-they are the same. Throughout the vast material frame there is intelligence displaying its energy and manifesting itself in various modes, but it exists not apart from the universe it ani

mates; it has no independent being, no personality, and is without moral character. It is a sort of plastic nature or rational and sensitive soul, but not the living God that made heaven and earth. This doctrine was maintained by many of the stoics in ancient times, and in one form or other has been frequently advocated. Recently speculations of this nature have excited considerable interest and attention. This is attributable to rather singular phenomena of a "spiritualistic," biological, and mesmeric character, which have not as yet perhaps been altogether accounted for satisfactorily. By many the phenomena have been considered unquestionable, the very thought of imposture has been repudiated, though it is probable there has been more of trickery than anything else in the recent spirit-rappings, clarvoyance, and mesmeric displays. Accepting these phenomena as facts, it has been inquired how they can be accounted for, and the answer has not unfrequently leaned towards materialistic pantheism. A recent discovery (or fancied discovery, for it does not pass unquestioned) is supposed to establish the existence of a subtle, imponderable, all-pervading essence, which manifests itself under different conditions in all forms of organic life, in the earth, and in space. This essence, whether it really exist or be a mere figment of fancy, has been named odyle, and is conjectured to be the cause of the "spiritualistic" and all similar phenomena. Indeed it is thought by many that the supposed discovery will account for the phenomena of life, and that it is unnecessary to look beyond this living cause in the world for the explanation of its many-sided and wondrous activity. All the phenomena of being, life, and thought, find their adequate solution here; for there is nothing needed to furnish a rational theory of what is, beyond the great odylic principle which permeates all space and pervades all things. Now, certainly this looks like the old doctrine of the soul of the world, and differs little, if at all, from the ancient teaching that the energies of life centred in the world-spirit-the fiery matter of the spheres or some other subtle all-pervading fluid, which while in the all, was inseparable from the all-in fact identical with it.

Idealistic pantheism may be formulated by reversing the statement of materialistic pantheism-the universe is God. The idealistic pantheist affirms that God is the universe. The two statements may seem equivalent, but there is nevertheless a wide difference, making them distinctive of the two aspects of pantheistic speculation. The pantheistic materialist does not distinguish between God and the things which are. The great world-spirit is to him nothing apart from the world. There is, or at least is intended to be in his speculations, an identification of God with all that isthe universe is God. The pantheistic idealist affirms that God is the substratum of the things that appear to be. In these appear

ances there are diversities, and it may be inconsistencies, but beneath all there is one original substance or essence, and this essence is the Infinite Being. It is the noumenon; the things which appear are but phenomena. These appearances are in themselves nothing, the only substance or being is that Infinite One which lies beneath all that phenomenally presents itself to man-God is the universe. The things which appear are not God, they are but the evolutions of the Infinite One under the forms of thought and extension, so that mind and matter are but phenomenally distinct, the essence beneath them is one and the same. This is the substance of idealistic pantheism as it has been variously advocated in theosophic speculation.

Pantheism under either of its aspects is not anything new; as the Stoics maintained in substance the doctrine of materialistic pantheism, so the Eleatics taught that there was but one essence under all phenomena. The establishment of this school was perhaps due to the influence exercised over early Grecian thought by the teaching of Xenophanes and Parmenides, from whom Zeno the recognised founder of the Eleatic philosophy, derived the principal doctrines he taught. The theosophic philosophers of Hindoostan are essentially pantheistic, and there is a remarkable similarity between the recent speculative inquiries in Europe and the half dozen schools of Hindu philosophy.* Spinoza is regarded as the Corypheus of modern pantheism. The starting point of his speculations was furnished in the Cartesian principle that every thought in consciousness which is clear and distinct, forms an adequate expression of objective truth. Descartes derived existence from thought. Spinoza identified the two and referred them to the one substance of which all phenomena were but manifestations. That the one could in any strict or proper sense produce the many, or even a duality, Spinoza held to be impossible. There might be diversity in phenomena, but it was only a varying mode of the one substance. He found it impossible to construe in thought that the complement of existence had increased-or in other words that nothing had become something; just as he found it impossible to think that something had become nothing; but instead of recognising here an impotence of thought, and confessing the incompetency of man to furnish an adequate solution of the deep problems of being, he made this impotence the ground of dogmatic assertion, and affirmed that because man could not think the one producing the many; in reality there was only the one, and all apparent diversity was but modes of its existence. God was the only reality, all else was but phenomena.

See Maurice's "Religions of the World, and their Relations to Christianity."

Much of the recent philosophical speculation in Germany cannot be considered as anything else than pantheistic idealism. Fichte affirms that man's knowledge is purely subjective. He knows nothing and can know nothing beyond his own state of mind, of this he is assured by consciousness, but beyond this he cannot pass. The external world is in reality nothing to man-"For nature is nothing; mind is everything; for nature is only known as imaged in the mind." According to this theory there is no real knowledge of anything objective, our states of mind are no guarantee that there is existence external to ourselves, for we cannot verify them. In the "me In the "me" we have self, Deity, the universe, the all. Schelling identifies thought and existence under the name of the absolute, and refers all that is to the development of this selfexisting absolute. This self-development he conceives takes place under law, which law contains and is in fact expressed by three several potencies or movements. The first Schelling calls the reflective potency, and by it denotes the endeavour of the infinite to embody itself in the finite. The second potency which he designates subsumption, denotes the attempt of the absolute-after having represented itself in the finite-to return to the infinite. The third is called the potence of reason, it denotes the union of the first and second, the point of indifference at which the expansive and attractive-that is the developing and resuming processes are blended. In the first of these movements by which the absolute, according to the necessary law of its own nature strives after self-development, we have finite existences; but these are only developments of the absolute, the one real essence, manifested under these forms. In the second potence by which nature seeks again the infinite, we have mind, which is simply nature rising to a state of consciousness, and in this way endeavouring to return to its infinite form. We have but the one essence still. Blind and unconscious in its self-development, it realises consciousness in its attempt to resume the form of the eternal. Will this consciousness be lost when the form of the eternal is gained? Schelling endeavours to furnish an answer to this question in his explanation of the third potence, which he describes as the reunion of subject and object in divine reason: it is God not in his original or potential existence, but in his developed and realised being constituting the entire universe. This is a purely imaginary theory, for what can man know of the mode of absolute being? It is true Schelling supposes that we have an intellectual intuition of the absolute, an elevated spiritual sense, by which exalted above the ordinary conditions of knowledge, we can gaze upon the eternal principle itself; but men are not aware of possessing any such faculty, and this transcendental vision of the absolute and eternal is but a vain philosophic dream to which nothing corresponds, either in the ex