‘Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale:
Sie ist das All mit einem Male.’
Nor core nor husk in nature see:
The All and All in One is she.
Im Innern ist ein Universum auch;
Daher der Völker löblicher Gebrauch,
Ein jeglicher das Beste das er kennet
Er Gott—ja seinen Gott—benennet.—Goethe.
Which may be rendered somewhat literally thus:—
Within there is an Universum too;
Whence the folks’ custom, good and true,
That each the Best he knows of all,
He God—his God, indeed—doth call.
[29] ‘Der alte und der neue Glaube.’ All Theists agree in this: that God is One, Changeless, and Eternal. But God without the Universe would not be the same as God with the Universe; whence the conclusion that God and the Universe can only be conceived of as correlatives. Seeing the impossibility of dissevering Property from the Object in which it inheres, the modern philosopher discards hypothetical agencies, under the name of Spirits, of every kind; from the all-pervading force that keeps suns and planets in their spheres, to such special agencies as those of brain and nerve. Servetus, we have seen, had himself got the length of saying that out of man there was no Holy Spirit.
[30] To Calvin God was no other than the Immanent Pantheistic principle of Modern Philosophy: ‘Ubique diffusus, omnia sustinet, vegetat et vivificat in cœlo et in terra—everywhere diffused, he gives life and growth and continuance to all things in heaven and earth.’ These are his words. He then goes on to say: ‘Fateor quidem pie hoc posse dici, modo a pio animo proficiscatur, Naturam esse Deum—I own, indeed, that provided we speak reverently it may be said that Nature is God.’ As this would be a ‘hard and inappropriate expression,’ however, and as in using it ‘God is confounded with his works,’ he thinks it is objectionable. Institut. Religionis Christianæ, I. iv. 14, and I. v. 5 of an early edition.
[31] Newspaper report of a Sermon preached by Dean Stanley on Christmas day, 1875.
[32] At the end of the copy of the ‘De Trin. Error.,’ which Alwörden describes in his Historia Michaelis Serveti, now in the National Library at Paris, there is a MS. Refutation of the views of the writer, which Tollin ascribes with great show of probability to Bucer, who, as we know, was personally acquainted with Servetus. Of this Refutation (Confutatio) Tollin has given an extended analysis in Riehm und Köstlin’s Theologische Studien und Kritiken für 1875, S. 711.