abstract being; He must, as with the Alexandrian thinkers, be so exaggerated an abstraction as to transcend existence itself; He must be conceived of as utterly unreal, lifeless, non-existent; while the only real beings are those finite and determinate forms of existence whereof 'nature' is composed. This dilemma haunts all the historical transformations of pantheism, in Europe as in the East, to-day as two thousand years ago. Pantheism must either assert that its God is the one only existing being whose existence absorbs and is identified with the universe and humanity; or else it must admit that He is the rarest and most unreal of conceivable abstractions; in plain terms, that He is no being at all." If pantheism must thus sacrifice, however, either the infinite to the finite or the finite to the infinite-either God to nature or nature to God-it is not difficult to see which will be in greatest danger of being surrendered. Profoundly speculative and deeply devotional minds may refuse on any account to abandon their faith in the infinite, and be content to sacrifice the existence of the worlds of sense and consciousness; but ordinary minds will assuredly never be able to persuade themselves that all finite things, themselves included, are mere illusions and nonentities, and will, consequently, confound God with the universe-thereby resolv1 Bampton Lectures for 1866-8vo ed., pp. 448, 449.

ing God as distinguished from nature into a mere notion or name.

Religion and morality are so allied, that when we treat of the relation of pantheism to one of them, we cannot leave wholly out of consideration. its relation also to the other. In fact, it is precisely in its non-recognition of the moral relations on which the communion of sinful man with a holy God ought to rest that pantheism most signally fails as a religion. Through its blindness to the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man it can only elicit and sustain a piety which is exclusive of morality. It allows, yea, leads, its votaries to believe that they can be religious without caring to be righteous. It implies that all self-accusation is self-deception, since the worst passions and vilest actions of humanity are states and operations of the One Absolute Being. Man cannot be justly held responsible for what truly belongs to God-for affections or deeds which are necessarily manifestations of the Divine nature. This characteristic of pantheism has doubtless been to many an attraction. It is only too natural that those who love sin should not desire to have to do with a God who hates it. Piety without morality cannot fail to please many better than a piety which is inclusive of morality. But such a piety can never truly satisfy a living and awakened soul. Conscience is an ineradicable principle of the

human spirit; it is even the highest principle of the human spirit, because it testifies to the existence and presence of a law which is the expression of a supremely high and holy nature. There is no principle to which religion is more bound to conform and yield satisfaction, yet pantheism contradicts its most sacred and certain convictions, and directly tends to eradicate and destroy it.

Yes, pantheism is not only an inadequate religion, but it strikes at the very roots of morality, and strives to set aside its fundamental postulates. Man feels himself a free agent and responsible for his conduct. He recognises an order or law which impresses him as sacred, and he has a conviction that he can either bring his life into harmony with it or war against it. He acknowledges obligations and rights; he experiences the joys of an approving conscience, and the bitterness of remorse. The pantheist is a man, and these convictions and feelings are known to him as well as to other men; and he may, as many pantheists do, try earnestly to retain them, to do justice to them, to incorporate them into his system. But the task is a hopeless one. If evil be no less necessary or divine than good, evil must be but good in another way we are not skilled in, and neither God nor man can reasonably condemn it. If human personality and freedom are illusions, then must obligation, guilt and retribution be the absurdest

fictions. In a word, from pantheistic premisses we can only legitimately infer that "whatever is, is right," or that "might is right."

Pantheists who have had any regard to logic have never been able to reach other conclusions. The advocates of the Vedanta doctrine teach that sin is neither real in itself nor capable of reaching to what is real in man; that it is but a creation of ignorance; that "though the soul plunge itself in sin, like a sword in water, it shall in no wise cling to it;" that the distinctions of right and wrong are mere appearances which will vanish as soon as the dream-state of life is dispelled. The beautiful Bhagavad Gita distinctly teaches that what are called right actions and wrong actions are alike to God; that He may be served with evil as well as with good. It may be said that Stoicism, although a form of pantheism, was sublimely morala system which inspired and moulded heroic natures and nourished the noblest virtues. But it must be borne in mind that the entire morality of Stoicism rested on affirmations which no Stoic ever made even a serious attempt to reconcile either with the unity of existence or the fatalism of events. Stoic morality was rooted in the belief that reason and righteousness ruled the universe, and, above all, in the conviction that the will is outside of the sphere of fate-that it is free; that man is the absolute lord of his own actions;

that the soul is essentially above fate, and equal to Jove himself. Stoicism escaped the moral consequences of its pantheism only by disregarding speculative consistency, and asserting the most manifest contradictions with truly Roman audacity. Pass to Spinoza. He had the merit of at least making desperate efforts to attain consistency. What sort of moral creed, then, did he deduce from pantheistic principles ? One which almost looks as if it had been the joint production of a Thomas a Kempis and a Thomas Hobbes, containing, as it does, along with a rule of life which is rather too good for saints so long as they are in the flesh, another which is only followed by the brutes. Spinoza was a naturally noble-minded man, and so he taught that virtue is the intellectual love of God; but he was also a pantheist and a reasoner, and therefore he taught, too, that the measure of man's right is his power and appetite; that the best right is that of the strongest. In like manner, whenever Hegelian. pantheism has been fully thought out and clearly expressed, evil has been maintained to be essential to the self-manifestation of God and necessarily involved in the existence of good, might has been proclaimed to be right, success has been held to be its own sufficient justification, war has been defended on immoral grounds, and personal liberties have been despised. The whole history of panthe