To the careful student of the sacred Scriptures the O.-T. writings reveal a healthy realism in their con-
ception of God. He is above the world and outside it. He taketh up the isles as a very little thing. He weighs the hills in scales and the mountains in balances. To the Psalmist, e. g., God is present in nature ; but never once in the highest flights of devotional poetry does he let fall an expression as if the things we see were anything else than his handiwork. They are never co-eternal with God — on the contrary, they are his creatures. "When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained ;" it is God who " appoints the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth his going down." He "opens his hand, they are filled with good." God is in the growing grass and the rolling thunder, in " the great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping and in- numerable, where go the sliips, and where is that leviathan who is made to play therein." The rain is " the river of God," and " the cedars of Lebanon" are said to be his planting ; but we search in vain for a syllable or a hint of that mystical imnianence of God in nature, such as modern pantheism conceives of as the relation of God to the universe. We may strip the Bible bare of its poetry, or translate it into the baldest and drj'est prose, but it yields up in no case any other sense than that of theism. The Deus opij'ex is there throughout, and almost in express terms. The argu- ment of design, so much decried in our days, as if it had been an invention of the same school that invented the "Evidences," is, by implication, if not in express terms, found in the O. T. " He that planted the eye, shall he not see ; he that formed the ear, shall he not hear?" It is foreign, of course, to the simplicity of Scripture to introduce illustrations of contrivance in the adaptation of the organs of men and animals to the pre- existing laws of matter. But the argument of Paley has been anticipated in principle, if not in detail. Man is the last of the works of God, and as the world was adapted to him, so he was adajited to the world. Light existed before there was a single human eye to behold it, and therefore, as the properties of light ex- isted before there was the organ to observe it, that organ was accommodated to the laws of light — not the laws of light to the organs of seeing. The stress of Paley's argument lies in this. And the Scriptures, rightly in- terpreted, tell the same tale. The transcendental, not immanent thought of creation is, as we have seen, the keynote of Hebrew inspiration. There is an advance in the N.-T. writings. The governmental character of God sinks a little into the background, and the Father- ly relation becomes more prominent in its stead. But the N. T. never oversteps itself or falls into the lan- guage of mysticism, confounding the Creator with his works. True, it glances at the thought that there shall be a time when even the Son, who must reign till he hath put all enemies under his feet, shall give up the kingdom to him that hath put all things under him, that so God may be all in all. But this is very unlike pantheism, though it may be taken to mean pantheism by those who wish to wrest that meaning out of Scripture. All that it implies is the ultimate and final elimination of moral, and with it physical evil out of tlie universe. God is to be all in all in the sense that he shall become the supreme truth of the universe — a truth which is law in the imconscious and love in the coiiscious class of his creatures. The reign of law will then be un- broken, not only from pole to pole of the universe, but also through all ranks and degrees of agents endowed with free will.
HI. IIistonj.~The origin of pantheistic doctrine is as obscure as the dogma itself. The name Pantheists was first employed by the English Deist Toland in A.D. 1705. This somewhat learned man was at that time secretary and cha))lain of a society which advocated the peculiar speculative view of God and his creation now known as Pantheism. A defence which he then published of this strange class of religionists— they claimed to be such — he entitled Socinianisni Truly Stated, . . , hij a Pan-
PANTHEISM
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PANTHEISM
theist to Ms Oiihodox Friend. In A.D. 1720 he pub- lished an exposition of the society's doctrines, and he entitled that work PaniheisHcon. Toland then said expressly that he had borrowed his notion from Linus, which the motto of his rantheisiicon expressed as " ex toto sunt omnia, et ex omnibus est totum," briefly put by his antagonist Fay as " Pantheistarum Natura et numen unum idemque sunt." But though Toland may have framed the doctrines of liis society after Linus, we are sure that the antiquity of pantheism is far be- yond any such modern period. We find that it had its origin at a very remote period in the East, for it is prevalent in the oldest known civilization in the world — the Hindu. Yet it is a later development of thought than polytheism (q. v.), the natural instinctive creed of primitive races, and most probably originated in the attempt to divest the popular system of its grosser features, and to give it a form that would satisfy the requirements of philosophical speculation. AVe have said above that the notion of the immanence of God in nature lies at the root of all pantheistic modes of thought. The student of Eastern religions will con- firm us in this, at least so far as these ancient religions of Asia are concerned. The Oriental mind is saturated with the emanation notion. The doctrine reappears in a thousand shapes ; it exhales alike in poetry and phi- losophy. Creation signifies the summoning into exist- ence of that which before was not. Emanation is a mere modification of that which is; it maintains the self-same existence, though under other forms and other conditions; it is the developed fruit of the quickened germ. It supposes an infinite eternal substance which arouses itself into action by a self-energy, and clothes itself with a multiplicity of forms that in the aggregate make up the universe. Thus the idea of the divine is that the whole is all things, and all things are the whole, and in the end all things will return once more into the inscrutable oneness from whence they came forth. Such was the groundwork of the Brahminical system. It is taught in the L'lmnishad (q. v.), the Vedanta (q. v.), and Toga (q. v.) |)liilnsophies, in the cosmogony of the most ancient Indian writing, the Institutes of Menu (q. v.), and in those poetical books which embody the doctrines of the Hindu philosophies, e. g. the Bhaga- vad Gita, which follows the Yoga doctrine. It is poet- ical and religious rather than scientific, at least in its phraseology; but is substantially similar to the more logical forms of Western development.