The sj'stem of philosophico-theology, which main- tains God to be everything, and everything to be God, has extensively spread its baleful intiuence among the masses of the people in various Continental nations. It pervades alike the corammiism of Germany and the socialism of France. Feuerbach, in the one country, holds that God is to be found in man, and the Saint- Simonian, Pierre Leroux, in the other, that humanity is the mere incarnation of Divinity. In England and America also the same gross pantheism, decked out with all the charms of poetry and eloquence, is taught in our day. Man-worship is, indeed, the pervading ele- ment of the philosophy taught by the Emerson school, or Intuitionists, and is advocated and believed by a con- siderable number of speculative thinkers in England and America. "Standing on the bare ground," says the apostle of this latest form of pantheism, " my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God." " The world proceeds from the same Spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God — a projection of God in the unconscious." "Intellectual science has been ob- served to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter." " The soul is . . . wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love." Mr. Emerson regards Jesus as belonging to a true race of prophets, because he said, " I am divine ;" but his Christ is plainly not an exceptional person, only one of a class. The language of the Bible he uses in a most extraordinary way, and all who insist on finding monotheism in the Scriptures, and not pantheism, as he does, he calls "dogmatical bigots." The God of the Bible is a father with a father's pity for his children, but the God of the Pan- theist is eternal fate which devours all things. "Be- lieve in the God within you," sa3'S Mr. I'^merson. On 'principle Mr. Emerson is no philanthropist, but a dis- approver of acts of charity. He counts a man no more sacred than a mouse, and confounds the good with the bad (see Prof. Prentice's articles in Meth. Quar. Rev. July, 187-i ; April, 1875). Mr. Carlyle shares these opin- ions. The Pantheists themselves claim Frederick Rob- ertson as theirs ; but there is no more ground for this than for their claim on Schleiermacher. Indeed, Robertson's view of the relation of God to the world is as near to Schleiermacher's as it well can be. See Robertson. Theodore Parker is also claimed by the Pantheists, but we think with as little propriety as Robertson. True, Parker was not as devout a man and as ardent a be- liever in Christianity, but he was a believer in Prov- idence and the immortality of the soul. His chief work. A Discourse on Religion, and his after declara- tions present him to us as a Deist, and not a Pantheist. He was influenced by Schleiermacher, but got farther away from the Church and Christianity, and may be said to have held the position now assumed by Renan, the author of the Life of Christianity. Both accept the essence of Christianity as essential to the needs of humanity, but refuse to acknowledge as lord and mas- ter the author thereof. See Parkei;. Hunt, the author of an essay on pantheism, and a noted English divine of our day, is the modern apostle of Christian pantheism. He insists that Christianity and pantheism must be reconciled, otherwise it will be the worse for Chris- tianity :
"Pantheism is on all hands acknowledged to be the theology of reason— of reason it may be in its imiioteiice, but still of such reason as man is gifted witfi in this pres- ent life. It is the philosophy of religion— the philosophy of all religious. It is the goal of Rationalism, of Piotest- iintism, and of Catholicism, for it is the goal of thought. There is no restiuf^-place but by censing to think or rea- son on God and things divine. Individuals may stop at the symbol, churches and sects may strive to make rest- ing-phices on the w:iy l)y appealing to the authority of a Church, to the letter of" the Sacred Writings, or by try-
ing to fix the 'limits' of religious thought where God has not fixed them" (p. 3T5).
In order to determine what this Mr. Hunt would give the Christian, it is necessary to hear the dehnition of pantheism Hunt furnishes. Here it is :
" It might he better, indeed, to get rid, if it were possi- ble, of the term Pautheism; but we cannot get rid of the thing, for it emerges in all systems as it has emerged iu all ages. . . . The argument from final causes proves the existence of a world-maker. It demonstrates that there is a mind working in the world. It is a clear and sat- isfactory proof of the ordinary understanding of man ; but it proves nothing more than a finite God. We must supplement it by the argument from ontology. The one gives a mind, the other gives being, the two together give the inlinite God, impersonal and yet personal — to be called by all names, or, it' that is irreverent, to be called by no name" (p. 37S). ..." Is what is called Pautheism anything so fearful that to avoid it we must renounce reason ? To trace the history of theology from its first dawning among the Greeks down to the present day, and to descri1)e the whole as opposed to Christianity, is surely to place Chris- tianity in antagonism with the catholic reason of man- kind. To describe all the greatest minds that have been engaged iu the study of theology as Pantheists, and to mean by this term men irreligious, un-Christian, or athe- istic, is surely to say that religion, Christianity, and the- ism have but little agreement with reason. Are we seri- ously prepared to make this admission? Not only to give up Plato and Plotinus, Origen and Erigena, Spinoza and Schleiermacher, but St. Paul and St. John, St. Augus- tine and St. Athauasius?" (p. 379).