IF There was a philosopher, a great man in Aberdeen ; his name was Dr. Beattie. He had a little boy about five years old, who was just able to read. Dr. Beattie wanted to teach his little boy about God, and how do you think he did it ? He went into the garden, and in a corner, with his finger, he made in the ground the letters of his little boy's name ; and when he had made those marks in the ground he put some mustard and cress in those lines. About ten days afterwards his little boy came running into his study, saying, " Father, father, there is my name coming up in my garden," He could just read it. The father said, " Nonsense ! nonsense ! There cannot be your name in the garden. Don't talk like that." He said, "Father, come and see." He took him out, and there was his name in the garden. The father said, "There is nothing remarkable in that; it all came by chance." The little boy pulled his father by the coat into the house, and said, " I do not think it came by chance, father. It could not come by chance." The father said, " Do you think somebody put it there, then ? " " Yes, I do, fatlier," said the
» H. P. Liddou.
GENESIS I. I 9
little boy. " I think somebody must have put it there." Theu his father began to tell him about God, " That is just the way with you," he said. " Somebody rmist have made you. You are more wonderful than that mustard and cress." ^
2. Pantheism. — From the belief that the Universe is the result of matter and force guided by chance a violent recoil is natural ; and when this recoil takes place without the guidance of Revela- tion the result is Pantheism. While the Atheistic Materialist says, " There is no God," the Pantheist answers, " Everything is God." The Universe is not made by God ; it is God in solution ; God passing into various manifestations of being. God is the soul of the Universe ; He is the common principle which constitutes its unity ; He is at the root of. He combines, He manifests Himself in all its infinite variety of being and life. He is the common fund of life, which animates all that lives; He is the existence which is shared in by all that exists. Pantheism lays emphasis on, it exaggerates, two great truths — the Omnipresence of God, and the interdependence of created life. But Pantheism denies that God is independent of the world ; it asserts that He has no existence apart from the Universe which manifests Him as being Himself. It asserts that He is not a Person, having as such consciousness, memory, and will; that He is only an impersonal quality or force; or that He is an Idea, slowly realizing itself in being. Of the general doctrine there are many shades and modifications, but they practically agree in making the Universe identical with God.
IT Pantheism often uses a religious kind of language whicli puts people ofiF their guard and blinds them to its real nature and drift. But if Pantheism speaks of God it practically denies Him. Pantheism says that God is the Infinite ; but then it goes on to say that this Infinite exists only in that which is finite. But if the Infinite be thus literally identified with the finite, it ceases to be, or rather never was, the Infinite, and there is in reality no Infinite in existence ; in other words, there is no God. This is a speculative objection, sufficiently formidable but less serious than a moral objection which I proceed to notice. The very first element of our belief in God is that God is a Moral Being, that He is Essential Eight, Essential Justice, Essential Sanctity, Essential Purity, Essential Truth, Essential Leva
' James Yauglian,
lo THE CREATION AND THE CREATOR
But if you Bay with the Pantheist that God is Universal Life, and that Universal Life is God, you thereby destroy God's Morality. You make God the agent and producer of evil as well as the agent or producer of good ; or else you deny that the distinction between absolute good and absolute evil really exists. You make God, indeed, the energy which produces deeds of charity, of courage, of justice, of integrity ; but you also identify Him with the energy which issues in adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, and all that is untrue, cruel, impure.^
^ It is surely more philosophical to believe that all true being centres in Personality, and proceeds from Personality, than that some pantheistic or atheistic It is the ground and first principle of Nature. The one implies that Nature is thought/«s5, souU«ss, and the other that she is full of soul.'
3. The Eternity of Matter. — Besides the doctrines of Material- istic Atheism and Pantheism there is one other supposition — that the Universe and God are both eternal ; that an Eternal Universe has existed side by side with an Eternal God. This is the refuge of minds which shrink from the revealed truth of a creation, yet hesitate to acquiesce in the dark theories of a Universe without God, or a Universe which is God. But this third theory inevit- ably resolves itself into one of the two first. Unless it is to say that there are two Gods, two self-existent, co-eternal Beings, either it must say that the Universe is the reality, and God the imaginary counterpart, or it must say that the Universe itself is God. And if, somewhat violently, this consequence be declined, and the co-existence of God and an Eternal Universe be resolutely maintained, whence then, we ask, come the laws, the harmony, the form of this self -subsisting, uncreated Universe ? We have only the difficulties of Atheism or of Pantheism, as the case may be, without their completeness.