things are all so fair, so wondrous, so wrapt in mystery, it is no marvel that men say, This is divine; yes, the All is God; he is the light of the morning, the beauty of the noon, and the strength of the sun. The little grass grows by his presence. He preserveth the cedars. The stars are serene because he is in them. The lilies are redolent of God. He is the One; the All. God is the mind of man. The soul of all; more moving than motion; more stable than rest; fairer than beauty, and stronger than strength. The power of Nature is God; the universe, broad and deep and high, a handful of dust, which God enchants. He is the mysterious magic that possesses the world. Yes, he is the All; the Reality of all phenomena.
But an old writer thus pleasantly rebukes this conclusion: “Surely, vain are all men by nature, who are ignorant of God, and could not out of the good things that are seen, know him that is … but deemed either Fire, or Wind, or the swift Air, or the Circle of the Stars, or the violent Water, or the Lights of Heaven, to be the Gods which govern the world. With whose beauty if they being delighted took them to be Gods; let them know how much better the Lord of them is, for the first Author of beauty had created them.”[1]
To view the subject in a philosophical and abstract way, Pantheism is the worship of All as God. He is the One and All; not conceived as distinct from the Universe, nor independent of it. It is said to have prevailed widely in ancient times, and, if we may believe what is reported, it has not ended with Spinoza. It may be divided into two
- ↑ Wisdom of Solomon, Ch. xiii. 1, et seq. At the present day Pantheism seems to be the bugbear of some excellent persons. They see it everywhere except on the dark walls of their own churches. The disciples of Locke find it in all schools of philosophy but the Sensual; the followers of Calvin see it in the liberal churches. It has become dangerous to say “God is Spirit;” a definite God, whose personality we understand, is the orthodox article. M. Maret, in his Essai sur le Panthéisme dans les Sociétés modernes, Paris, 1840, 1 vol. 8vo, finds it the natural result of Protestantism, and places before us the pleasant alternatives, either the Catholic Church or Pantheism! Preface, p. xv. et al. The rationalism of the nineteenth century must end in scepticism, or leap over to Pantheism! According to him all the philosophers of the Spiritual School in our day are Pantheists.—Formerly divines condemned Philosophy because it had too little of God; now because it has too much. It would seem difficult to get the orthodox medium; too much and too little are found equally dangerous. See the pleasant remarks of Hegel on this charge of Pantheism, Encyclopädie der philosoph. Wissenchaften, &c., third edition, § 573.
