Scripture, indeed, fairly interpreted, knows nothing of that immanence of God in nature which lies at the root of all pantheistic modes of thought. Physical pan- theism, which confounds God with nature and nature with God, and looks on the world as a huge animal with a rational and sensitive soul, repels by its very grossness, and has few votaries, except perhaps among the fanatics of the table-moving and spiritual-manifestation school. Intellectual pantheism, which is more recondite and plausible, asserts that all the diversities of nature are resolvable into a unity of essence, and that this essence is God. He is the substance — suhstans — the occult sub- stratum which underlies and upholds everything that we see. (Such was the pantheism of Benedict Spinoza.) But the noumenon, or substance, can never be known except as phenomenon, or appearance ; and, therefore, Spinoza's God was nothing more than a grand concep- tion, a nonentity. Yet Mr. Lewes says, " Spinoza stands out from the dim past like a tall beacon, whose shadow is thrown athwart the sea, and whose light will serve to wiXYw the wanderers from the shoals and rocks on which hundreds of their brethren have perished'' {IJi^t. (f I'hilos. ii, 154). The logical consequence of pantheism, whether physical or intellectual, is really to ignore the personality alike of God and of man ; to subvert the foundation of all moral government ; to eradicate a con- sciousness of sin ; to turn man into a self-idolater; and to load him with the chains of a crushing and inexorable fatalism. To paraphrase a well-known expression of Hohbcs, we should call pantheism the ghost of atheism sitting crowned upon its grave. " Nous ne savons pas ce (pie Dieu est," were the last words of philosophy accord- ing to Pascal ; " ni s'il est" was the mocking addition of those who garbled his text. The fact is instructive; it
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teaches us how far philosophy can go, and what it must end in without the lamp of revelation. The unknown God of philosophy ends in the no-God of the Positivist, or the all-God of the Tantheist. Nor are the two so far apart as some imagine. Impatient of the anthropomor- phism of Scripture, and blind to the trutli that the Fa- ther of our spirits is not far from every one of us, those who are unable to rest in materialistic atheism profess a spiritualistic pantheism which is curiously like and un- like the old dreary negation from which it is a recoil. The dynamical philosophy has replaced the mechanical : force and not matter is now at the beginning of all things; but force is no more God than matter. When the spiritual desires of humanity are really kindled, it can no more rest in the one than in the other. What we crave is a living person, not an abstract principle — a hand to direct us, an eye to look on us, and a heart to love and pity us. Philosophy shrinks from anthropo- morphism of this kind, and in its pride of intellect de- spises the vulgar for making to themselves a magnified man as God. But the genuine needs of human nature are not to be reasoned away with a sneer; divine phi- losophy, unlike human, sees the felt necessity, and meets it. In the words of a modern writer :
"Pantheism expresses tlie astonishment of reason to see nature separate from God. It is the specuhuion of the sonl which ought to be one with the Eternal, but is robbed of the divine treasure, and cannot realize her loss. . . . But it is vain to sigh for a speculative unity, wheu the moral unity is broken. It is vain to deny the mystery of change, because we cannot see how it is to be reconciled with the existence of the Unchangeable. It is vain to attempt by means of syllogism to represent the Creator and his universe as one shoreless, waveless ocean, profound, equable, unbroken. . . . There is, in- deed, an ocean of bei]ifr, and the soul whicli sighs and reasons may think itself a wave upon the surface. But in one sense the comparison fails to hold. It is not at the mercy of the winds, nor wholly determined by the vast waters which support it. It has a unity and a mov- ing power of its own. In another sense the comparison holds good. The war of elements, ihe confusion we see everywhere, belongs only to the surface. The ocean is deeper than the waves. It cannot be intlueuced by the winds of time, nor stirred from its place by the billows which dash themselves, and foam, and are broken on the shore of human life. . . . 'The floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their waves; but the Lord on high is niiiihtier than the voice of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea' " (Tulloch, Christian Theism, i, 204, 205).
The attempt to transcend such a conception as that of our Father in heaven, and to test it as a mere accom- modation or landing-stage in the development of the human mind, from fetichism up to the pure philosophy of the absolute, only recoils on those who make it. We get no nearer the true absolute by using the phrase ; on the contrary, by ridding ourselves of so much an- thropomorphism, we only get out of the region in which true religious emotion is possible at all, viz. that of the emotions and affections. Men will not adore what they can neither love nor fear. In the legend of Icarus, Daedalus made him waxen wings, but as he soared nearer the sun the wax melted ; and so the higher he rose the greater his fall. In the case of the modern Icarus there is the same failure, though from au op- posite cause. In attempting to soar into the region of the absolute and unconditioned, men do not really reach the sun of absolute being, they only rise into a region where the air is too rarefied to breathe, and where, for want of a refracting medium, the light is as darkness. Their wings do not melt with the warmth of the sun's rays; on tiie contrary, they are frozen to death at these migenial altitudes, and if they descend at all in safetv, it is to learn the lesson that, if we would know God at all, we must know him as he has been pleased to reveal himself. "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then. Show us the Father?"