IV
Now we face the question, Why then is pantheism regarded by so many with instinctive inhibition — as if indeed a doctrine to avert? In coming to this after what we have just discerned, we must not neglect the fact that pantheism plays an indispensable part in the forming of a genuine theistic theory. It is the transitional thought by which we ascend out of the idolatrous anthropomorphism of sensuous theism into that rational and complete theism which has its central illumination in the comprehended truth of the Divine Omnipresence. In the morally interpreted immanence of God in the world, this completed theism finds the true basis, the pure rational theory, of the divine perpetual providence. In God’s dwelling with the society of spirits, as “the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” it finds the rational basis for the universal and perpetual divine revelation. Even this higher, this ethically rational view of Divine Immanence, we must not forget, has come to us through the suggestion in the lower immanence taught in pantheism.
Indeed, in this suggested omnipresence of God, — this indwelling of God in the world by the activity of his image in the soul, — pantheism lays a foundation for the rational conception of a Perpetual Incar-
