'It does not seem credible that the new morality could escape being egoistic and hedonistic, and these principles alone would dictate complete reversal of all our present notions as to what is noble, what is useful, what is good. An egoist hedonism that should not be selfish and sensual is a fond superstition; it would have to be both and frankly. All the prophylactic expedients whereby a reciprocal egoism must safeguard its sensuous rights would certainly be there; and they represent in spirit and in practice whatever we have learned to consider execrable. We do not require Professor Haeckel[[1]] to inform us, with the triumphal rhetoric that accompanies a grand new discovery, of the prudential homicide which is to confer a supreme blessing upon humanity, for it has raged throughout antiquity, and still stalks abroad in daylight wherever the kingdom of men is not also the kingdom of Christ. Ten minutes' thought is sufficient to convince any rational man or woman what must inevitably follow in a world of animal rationalism, where no souls are immortal, where the human will is the supreme will and there is eternal peace in the grave. It could scarcely transpire otherwise than that "euthanasia" should replace care of the chronic sick and indigent aged; that infanticide should be in a large category of circumstances encouraged, and in some compelled; that suicide should offer a rational escape from all serious ills, leaving a door ever hospitably ajar to receive the body bankrupt in its capacity for sensual enjoyment, the only enjoyment henceforth worthy of the name. These are the "virtues" under the new morality; there are other things of which it were not well to speak. Imagination turns its back. In a world that has never been without its gods, among human creatures who have never existed without a conscience, deeds have been done and horrors have been practised through centuries, through ages, that make annals read like ogre-tales and books of travels like the works of morbid novelists; and the worst always goes unrecorded. What then ought we to anticipate for a world yielding obedience to nothing loftier than the human intellect, seeking no prize obtainable outside the individual life time, logically incapable of any gratification outside the individual body, convinced of nothing save eternal oblivion in the ever-nearing and inevitable grave, and reposed on the calm assurance that "goodness" and "badness," "virtue" and "vice" (whatever these terms may then correspond to) are recompensed, indifferently, by nothing better and nothing worse than physical animal death?'—JASPER B. HUNT, B.D., Good without God: Is it Possible? p. 51.
[[1]] See The Wonders of Life, chap. v., popular translation, and other works.
APPENDIX XI
'When we say that God is personal, we do not mean that He is localised by mutually related organs; that He is hampered by the physical conditions of human personality. We mean that He is conscious of distinctness from all other beings, of moral relation to all living things, and of power to control both from without and from within the action of every atom and of every world. This is what we mean by personality in God. It is not a materialistic idea. It is essentially spiritual. It is a breakwater against the destruction of the very thought of God, or the submersion of it in the mere processes of eternal evolution. There is a Pantheism which obliterates every trace of Divine personality, which takes from God consciousness, will, affection, emotion, desire, presiding and over-ruling intelligence. But such Pantheism is better known as Atheism. It destroys the only God who can be a refuge and a strength in time of trouble. It annihilates that mighty conscience which drives the workers of iniquity into darkness and the shadow of death, if possible, to hide themselves. It closes the Divine Ear against the prayer of faith. It abolishes all sympathy, all communion between the Father and the children. It makes God not the world's life, but the world's grave. Therefore, against all such Pantheism our being revolts.'—PETER S. MENZIES, Sermons ('Christian Pantheism').
APPENDIX XII
'There is an Old Testament Pantheism speaking unmistakably out of the lips of the Prophets and the Psalmists, ... so interwoven with their deepest thoughts of God, that any hesitation to receive it would have been traced by them most probably to purely heathen conditions of thought, which ascribes to every divinity a limited function, a separate home, and a restricted authority.... But undoubtedly the most unequivocal and outspoken Pantheist in the Bible is St. Paul. He speaks in that character to the Athenians, affirming all men to be the offspring of God, and, as if this were not a sufficiently close bond of affinity, adding, "In Him we live and move and have our being." His Pantheistic eschatology casts a radiance over the valley of the shadow of death, which makes the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians one of the most precious gifts of Divine inspiration which the holy volume contains. "And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all and all." Nor, if he had wished to administer a daring shock to the ultra-Calvinism of our own Confessional theology, could he have uttered a sentiment more hard to reconcile with any view of the Universe that is not Pantheistic than that contained in the 32nd verse of the present chapter: "For God hath concluded them all in unbelief that He might have mercy upon all." It is quite clear in the face of all this Scripture evidence that there is a form of Pantheism which is not only innocent, defensible, justifiable, but which we are bound to teach as of the essence of all true theology. Nothing could be more childish than that blind horror of Pantheism which shudders back from it as the most poisonous form of rank infidelity.'—PETER S. MENZIES, Sermons ('Christian Pantheism'),