short of the conception demanded by the highest practical religion. For religion as a practical power in human experience — the very conception of theism as an operative life in the spirit — depends not merely on the omnipresent influence of God, but equally on the freedom and the immortality of the soul: on its freedom in the strictest sense; that is, its unqualified autonomy and self-activity. In fact, not only is it impossible for souls to be souls, apart from freedom, immortality, and God, but it is just as impossible for God to be God, apart from souls and their immortality and freedom. In other words, the self-existent perfection of deity itself freely demands for its own fulfilment the possession of a world that is in God’s own image, and such a control of it as is alone consistent with its being so: a divine creation must completely reflect the divine nature, and must therefore be a world of moral freedom, autonomous, and, in the last resort, self-active or eternal.
But this requirement of genuine and fulfilled theism, pantheism cannot meet. Its theory, whether atheistic or acosmic or agnostic or absolute-idealistic, is the radical contradiction of real freedom and significant immortality.[1] Indeed we may say,
