V

In their loftiest moments, contemplating the marvels of the heavens above and the earth beneath, devout souls have, wherever they looked, been confronted with the Vision of God. 'What do I see in all Nature?' said Fénelon, 'God. God is everything, and God alone.' 'Everything,' said William Law, 'that is in being is either God or Nature or Creature: and everything that is not God is only a manifestation of God; for as there is nothing, neither Nature nor Creature, but what must have its being in and from God, so everything is and must be according to its nature more or less a manifestation of God.'

It is the thought which has inspired poets of the most diverse schools, which has been their most marvellous illumination and ecstasy.

Now it is Alexander Pope:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

Now it is William Cowper:

There lives and works
A soul in all things and that soul is God.

Now it is James Thomson of The Seasons:

These, as they change, Almighty Father! these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of Thee.

Now it is William Wordsworth:

I have felt
A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
A motion and a spirit which impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Now it is Lord Tennyson:

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains,
Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him Who reigns?
* * * * *
Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet.
Closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands or feet.

Certainly, we may say, nothing atheistic in utterances like these: they are the utterances of lofty thought, of profound piety, of soaring aspiration, and of childlike faith. They have a pantheistic tinge: what is there to dread in Pantheism? Not much in Pantheism of that kind: would there were more of it! But it will be observable that, in the instances cited, though God is in Nature and manifesting Himself through it, there is a clear distinction between Nature and God. It may seem as if it were merely the sky, the sun, the stars, the ocean, that are apostrophised: in reality it is a Life, a Spirit, a Power not themselves, in which they live and move and have their being: not to them, but to That, are the prayers addressed. And, we venture to think, it is scarcely ever otherwise: scarcely ever is the Visible alone invoked: identify God as men will with the material universe, or even with the force and energy with which the material universe is pervaded, when they enter into communion with it, in spite of themselves they endow it with the Life and the Will and the Purpose which they have in theory rejected. But the absolute identification of God and the Universe, the assumption that above and beneath and through all there is no conscious Righteousness and Wisdom and Love overruling and directing, that is a belief to be resisted, a belief which enervates character and enfeebles hope.[[9]] 'Whoever says in his heart that God is no more than Nature: whoever does not provide behind the veil of creation an infinite reserve of thought and beauty and holy love, that might fling aside this universe and take another, as a vesture changing the heavens and they are changed, ... is bereft of the essence of the Christian Faith, and is removed by only accidental and precarious distinctions from the atheistic worship of mere "natural laws."'[[10]] 'In our worship we have to do, not so much with His finite expression in created things as with His own free self and inner reality ... all religion consists in passing Nature by, in order to enter into direct personal relation with Him, soul to soul. It is not Pantheism to merge all the life of the physical universe in Him, and leave Him as the inner and sustaining Power of it all. It is Pantheism to rest in this conception: to merge Him in the universe and see Him only there: and not rather to dwell with Him as the Living, Holy, Sympathising Will, on Whose free affection the cluster of created things lies and plays, as the spray upon the ocean.'[[11]]