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]]
VI
God is not as we are, and yet He is as we are. God is not made in the image of man, but man is made in the image of God. It is through human goodness and human purity and human love that we attain our best conceptions of the Divine Goodness and Purity and Love. 'If ye being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?' Picture to yourself what is highest and best in the human relationship of father and child: be sure that the Heavenly Father will not fall below, but will infinitely transcend, that standard. All the justice and goodness which we have seen on earth are the feebler reflection of His. It is by learning that the utmost height of human goodness is but a little way towards Him that we learn to think of Him at all aright. But the justice and the love by which he acts are different only in degree, and not in kind, from ours. When we think of God as altogether such as we are, we degrade Him, we have before us the image of the imperfect; when we try to think of Him under no image and to discard all figures, He vanishes into unreality and nothingness, but when we see Him in Christ, we have before us that which we can grasp and understand, and that in which there is no imperfection.
If there is no God but the universe, we have a universe without a God. Worship is meaningless, Faith is a mockery, Hope is a delusion. If the universe is God, all things in the universe are of necessity Divine. The distinction between right and wrong is broken down. In a sense very different from that in which the phrase was originally employed, 'Whatever is, is right.' Nothing can legitimately be stigmatised as wrong, for there is nothing which is not God. 'If all that is is God, then truth and error are equally manifestations of God. If God is all that is, then we hear His voice as much in the promptings to sin as in the solemn imperatives of Conscience. This is the inexorable logic of Pantheism, however disguised.'[[12]] 'I know,' says Mr. Frederic Harrison, 'what is meant by the Power and Goodness of an Almighty Creator. I know what is meant by the genius and patience and sympathy of man. But what is the All, or the Good, or the True, or the Beautiful? ... The "All" is not good nor beautiful: it is full of horror and ruin.... There lies this original blot on every form of philosophic Pantheism when tried as the basis of a religion or as the root-idea of our lives, that it jumbles up the moral, the unmoral, the non-human and the anti-human world, the animated and the inanimate, cruelty, filth, horror, waste, death, virtue and vice, suffering and victory, sympathy and insensibility.'[[13]] Where these distinctions are lost, where this confusion exists, what logically must be the consequence? Honesty and dishonesty, truth and falsehood, purity and impurity, kindness and brutality, are put upon a level, are alike manifestations of the One or the All.
It is said that in our day the sense of sin has grown weak, that men are not troubled by it as once they were. There is a morbid, scrupulous remorsefulness for wrong-doing, a desponding conviction that repentance and restoration are impossible, which may well be put away. But that sin should be no longer held to be sin, that evil should be wrought and the worker experience no pang of shame, would surely indicate moral declension and decay. Were the time to come when, universally, mankind should commit those actions and cherish those passions which, through all ages in all lands, have gone by the name of sin, should become so heedless to the voice of conscience, that conscience should cease to speak, the time would have come when men, being past feeling, would devote themselves with greediness to anything that was vile, so long as it was pleasant, the bonds of society would be loosened and destruction would be at hand. The Religion of the Universe ignores the facts of life, the sorrow, the struggle, the depravity, the need of redemption. Fortunately, human beings in general are still inclined to mourn because of imperfection or of baseness: still they are inclined at times to cry out, 'Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' and still they have the opportunity of joyfully or humbly saying, 'I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.'
'And now at this day,' listen to the ungrudging admission of perhaps the most earnest English apostle of Pantheism, Mr. Allanson Picton: 'We of all schools, whether orthodox or heterodox so-called, whether believers or unbelievers in supernatural revelation, all who seek the revival of religion, the exaltation of morality, the redemption of man, draw, most of us, our direct impulse, and all of us, directly or indirectly, our ideals from the speaking vision of the Christ. Such a claim is justified, not merely by the spiritual power still remaining in the Church, but almost as much by the tributes paid, and the uses of the Gospel teaching made in the writings of the most distinguished among rationalists.... Such writers have felt that somehow Jesus still holds, and ought to hold, the heart of humanity under His beneficial sway. Excluding the partial, imperfect and temporary ideas of Nature, spirits, hell, and heaven, which the Galilean held with singular lightness for a man of His time, they have acquiesced in and even echoed His invitation to the weary and heavy laden, to take His yoke upon them and learn of Him. And that means to live up to His Gospel of the nothingness of self, and of unreserved sacrifice to the Eternal All in All.'[[14]] If such is the conclusion of Rationalism and of Pantheism, how much more ought it to be the conclusion of Christianity. The imagination of a God confined to times and places, visiting the world only occasionally, manifesting Himself in the past and not in the present, ought to be as foreign to the Christian Church as to any Rationalist or Pantheist. Be it ours to show that we believe in God Who filleth all things with His presence, Who is from Everlasting to Everlasting, that to us there is but one God the Father, by Whom are all things and we in Him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by Whom are all things and we by Him, that God has identified Himself with us in Jesus Christ, His Son. Be it ours to lose ourselves in Him. For, after all our questionings as to the government of the world, as to abounding misery and degradation, as to what lies beyond the veil for ourselves and for others, this is our hope and our confidence: 'God hath concluded all in unbelief that He might have mercy upon all. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been His counsellor? or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed unto Him again? For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things: to Whom be glory for ever. Amen.'
[[1]] Riddle of the Universe.