But the main currents of the deep-running stream which is touched in this lecture are on better-explored ground. "The identity of all divine energies underlying this incessant stir and semblance of life in the world is soon recognised by reflective minds; the highest god as well as the lowest creature is a mere vessel of the Invisible Power; the god is only a peculiar and extraordinary manifestation of that power; the mysterious allegorical Trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, at the summit of Hinduism, suggests and personifies its regular unchanging operation."[1] Most truly there is a confession of the unity of "spirit" and "nature" and a reference of both to what lies beyond the planetary scale, which "is ingrained in the minds of all thoughtful persons"[2] in some form perhaps more widely than in India alone, while there "the inner meaning lies everywhere close below the outward worship, and it comes out at the first serious question".[3] May we not here ask whether in this wider sense such a "pantheism" must be exclusively regarded as the absolutely "final stage in the fusion and combination of the multitude of forms and conceptions bred out of vagrant superstitions"?[4] If in one sense it is truly a last stage, may it not well prove, when transfigured in the light of that new world of knowledge now rising upon us in steadily increasing brilliancy, a first stage in the ascent of a reverence for the divinely natural and the naturally divine which is but waiting for a real and living and universal recognition of God as Light; as the very Abolition of Darkness and Unveiling of Truth and Good, which is, as we are, best rendered by a "personal" mode of expression which only fails by reason of lack and limit? And in so far as he is conscious of these ever-brightening rays and beams of living Truth, well may the writer remind us that "every successive death does indeed interrupt consciousness; but so does sleeps;[5] and end by venturing "to suggest that the upward striving of nature through the modifications of forms and species is reflected, as in a glass, darkly, by this vision of spiritual evolution",[6] whatever its concomitant shortcomings. The "discovery that all nature is imbued by one divine energy"[7] may indeed be associated with much that is crude, that is fanciful, that fails to account for nature or life as we find them, or either to satisfy or refute the irrepressible
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General Theory and Classification Section.
