while the other annuls the active reality of the cosmos, or world of existences other than God, by reducing these to modes of the one and only Universal Life.
Both forms are manifestly open to the criticism visited upon pantheism by the standard defenders of theism: they both contradict the essence of the divine nature by sacrificing the distinctness of the divine personality to a passion for the divine omnipresence. The sacrifice of the distinctness is obvious, at any rate, even if such a loss of distinct being is not so evidently incompatible with the true nature of godhead; though that this loss is incompatible with real deity will erelong appear.
Further, both forms are in the last analysis atheisms; the one openly, the other implicitly so. The one may be more exactly named a metaphysical or theoretical atheism, as it dispenses with the distinct existence of God in his office of Creator; the other may properly be called a moral or practical atheism, as in destroying the freedom and the moral immortality of the individual it cancels God in his greater office of Redeemer. Under either form the First Principle is emptied of attributes that are vital to deity. In the first, the entire distinct being of God disappears; in the second, all those attributes are lost that present God in his adorable characters of justice and love, and in the
