purity. I fully admit to objectors that the inward religion common to Jew and Christian may become morbid, namely, by assuming an intensity of grief which (in a weak nature) endangers moral despair. The ups and downs of a much-tempted, muchsinning man, often bitterly repenting, often jubilant with delight -whose sins perhaps (like those of the poet Cowper) are unknown to all but himself and hardly believed by others-may entail a mental malady like Cowper's; or, in a more robust and carnal nature, may drive a man into hardened courses. I wish objectors to understand that I see this danger. Nevertheless, as fire may burn us, and could not be the great aid to us that it is if this were impossible, so judge I of that mental contact between the impure soul and its far purer object of worship. The humiliation thus induced forbids a man to despise even the most sinful and polluted of his race, makes him tender-hearted and forgiving, preparing him to believe that there is a fertile seed of goodness in those who have plenty of visible imperfection. I strongly deny that such humiliation tends to unmanliness, or lessens human dignity. The vehemence of passion uses strong language -as in love, so in devotion. The "self-abhorrence," which is reproved as debasing, is felt only in the contrast of our darkness to God's purity, and has nothing to do with the comparison of Iman with man. To "crawl" before man is a loss of dignity, but before God we have no dignity to claim. Surely humility towards God must make us more amiable to man. "To do justly and love mercy" are in sweet concord with "walking humbly with God."

If there is any truth in what I have here laid out, a not unimportant inference seems to follow. A Hebrew Theist (such as I have described), though he believe neither in Moses nor in Jesus, finds true co-religionists in pious Jews and pious Christians; and not in those only who recognize him as "one of their invisible church," but in many who shun him and shudder at him-many whose religion is disfigured by puerile or pernicious error. On the other hand, he may regard a Greek Theist as a good man, a noble man, a man to be esteemed; but he does not find in him a co-religionist; nay, rather regards him as "unregenerate" and needing "conversion." So too the Greek Theist evidently finds nothing in a respectable Atheist, however hard and scornful, to repel him. The difference between these is one of intellectual speculation, and does not at all touch the heart. Thus, I incline to believe, the chasm which in Religion separates Theists who do

not worship and Theists who worship is a broad dividing line. Those on this side are co-religionists with Jews, Brahmos, Christians and Mussulmans; those on the other side, are coreligionists with Pantheists (?) and Atheists. When those nurtured in the old national religions unlearn dogmatic authority, all human nature may be united in a common belief of Hebrew Theism, as conscious children of One God. But if we disbelieve our personal relation to God, Religion has lost alike its restraining and its uniting power. A Theism which is a mere speculation of the intellect may indifferently be asserted or denied. Atheism is morally on a par with such Theism. Of course this is not adduced as any disproof, but only as indicating the practical importance of the controversy.

ON THE

RELATIONS OF THEISM TO PANTHEISM.

[1872.]

THANKS be to God, religious thought is not stagnant. His spirit is in men's hearts: under his constant pressure our intellects struggle forward into more knowledge, more wisdom. We are advancing. Of this the test is, that the more active and higher minds in opposite schools tend toward agreement, though they have not reached unity.

One condition of advancement is, that we should discern our own errors, and unlearn them. This, to a superficial eye, may suggest that our creed is melting away, and that believers in God are becoming unbelievers; but it is not so. Our notions of God from age to age have undergone vast enlargement; hence of necessity we drop from time to time many crude opinions concerning him, which opinions were of old fought for by Theists and opposed by Atheists or doubters. But simultaneously we attain greater richness and nobleness of conception, and towards our brethren who are in opposition a tenderer and wiser sentiment, in so far as their opposition is from diversity of intellect, not from perversity of morals. Without attempting anything so arduous as a history of opinion on these great subjects, a few broad outlines shall be essayed which may have interest.

In antiquity the only school of thought known to us which understood the real magnitude of the universe was practically atheistic; that of Democritus and Epicurus: and with Epicurus this magnitude, having nothing moral in it, could scarcely be called grandeur. A universal storm or curdling of atoms in tens of thousands of worlds, was all that he could see. With the poets of Greece and the vulgar, the gods were not the creators of worlds, but themselves first creations from the mighty power of blind nature; a notion which to us may seem to differ little from atheism. The first gods thus brought into existence were Titans, beings of gigantic powers, but prevalently deficient in intellect. They were conquered and superseded by Jupiter, who, though in the earliest poets represented as a selfish despot, yet disapproved

and chastised human wickedness. Hence with the progress of generations, the notion of Jupiter in the purest minds of Greece became little different from that of the chief god with the highest sages of Palestine or Persia.

Meanwhile, Grecian astronomy arose, and in about four centuries attained its fullest perfection in Alexandria. It stopped short in the solar system, of which the earth was made centre. To accommodate the forced geometry thus induced, numerous crystal orbs were imagined, and the stars were compared to brass-headed nails fastened into a far vaster solid vault. This agreed exceedingly well with the old Hebrew conception of a firmament, or, as the prophets call it, a sea of glass or crystal. By excluding the idea that the stars are suns, the view of God's universe which midnight opens to us was perverted into a mere show of fireworks; moreover, men were confirmed in the puerile error, that this earth is the divine centre, and sole or main object of divine interest. Learned men among the Hebrews, who received Alexandrian cultivation, enlarged their notion of Jehovah as the God of all nations, and easily harmonized with Greek Neo-Platonism.

Where to place Heaven, the special seat of God, was a difficulty with those who clung to the idea of some such sacred locality. The Greeks appear to have solved it in a most unsatisfactory way, by reverting to the old poetical idea which identified Heaven and God, and interpreting Heaven to be the outermost vault in which the stars are fixed. This, I believe, was prevalent with the Stoics, and it is put by Cicero into the mouth of Africanus, when he means to set forth the most advanced religious notions of his day. "By nine circles, or rather spheres, all things are knit together; of which one which comprises all others, is heavenly and outmost, the Supreme God himself, constraining and containing the rest; in whom are fixed those ever-revolving courses of stars; and in a lower region the seven [planets].” Nothing afforded more derision to the Epicureans than this notion of a visible, round, ever-rolling and blazing God; which certainly lowered the Greek Theism of that age.

The point on which the West and the East were prevalently divided, was on the relation of God to Nature or Matter. The authorities esteemed sacred by the Hebrews were in no necessary collision with the philosophic Greeks; for Jehovah was represented as the ever active force in all nature, not only creating originally, but sustaining all action in the elements, in brutes,

and in the human mind; in short, to use the modern epithet, he was immanent in his own creations. No antagonism was imagined between God and Matter. Miracles were not regarded as a suspension of the laws of Nature, because no sharp idea of Law had been attained; only in a miracle the God who is always at work in matter displayed his ordinary action with more than usual distinctness, that is, in such a way as to manifest his moral judgment. An obvious and vulgar illustration is, when some elementary disturbance is interpreted as a divine interposition. A man is struck dead by lightning, or a high tower is smitten; it must have been because the man had offended God by impiety, or the tower by aspiring to too proud a height. An earthquake or an inundation must have been elicited by the peculiar wickedness of the nation whom it afflicted. A God, who thus dispensed elementary inflictions as moral punishments, was not suspending his own laws, but administering them, if he sent down fire from heaven at the prayer of a prophet, or otherwise wrought through some favoured servant what is called a religious miracle. There is harmony in such a view. In truth a breach of harmony began, when it was taught that the men on whom the tower of Siloam fell were not therefore to be judged guiltier than others; that we must not interpret external calamity as a mark of God's anger; that whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth; that it is folly to run hither and thither, and look about with the natural eyes for marks of God's moral judgments, or expect signs from heaven; but that the kingdom of God is within us. The results of this doctrine were really antagonistic to miracle; but that, for long ages, Hebrew and Christian, was not discerned. God was regarded as not only immanent in Nature, but as obeyed systematically by Nature; who displayed, alike in her broad laws and in her apparently exceptional operations, the moral judgments of her supreme animator. The religious Greek philosophers, however little apt to believe in miraculous interpositions, entirely agreed with the Hebrew prophets as to the harmony of Nature with God who was the cause of all movement, all production, all mental action.

But the Eastern speculators, in Persia and perhaps beyond, prevalently accounted for Evil in the world by the incurable stubbornness of Matter, which could not be brought into obedience to the divine will. Hence with them God and Nature were eternal antagonists; and Matter played the part which Christendom has assigned to Satan, the evil Spirit who is supposed,