I
Of all the questions, perhaps none is surrounded with more vagueness than the first — What is pantheism? The recognised defenders of religion, the theologians who speak with the hoary authority and the presumptive weight that naturally belong to historic and instituted things, are indeed in the habit of drawing a sharp verbal distinction between theism and pantheism, as they also do between theism and deism; but when the unbiassed thinker, anxious for clearness and precision, inquires after the real distinction intended by these names, he hardly finds it in any sense at once intelligible and reasonable. We constantly hear that theism is contradicted by both deism and pantheism: by deism, through the assertion of God’s distinctness at the expense of divine revelation and providence; by pantheism, through the assertion of the divine omnipresence at the expense of the distinctness of God from the world. We hear constantly, too, that theism, to be real, must teach that there is a being who is truly God: that the Principle of existence is a Holy Person, who has revealed his nature and his will to his intelligent creatures, and who superintends their lives with a providence which aims to secure their obedience to his will as the only sufficient condition of their blessedness. Yet all this is but an abstract and very
