'The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Him.' 'Whither shall
I go from Thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?' 'My
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways saith the
Lord.' 'In Him we live and move and have our being.' 'Of Him and
through Him and to Him are all things, to Whom be glory for ever.
Amen.'[6] Now it cannot be denied that some who have striven to
express after this fashion the unutterable majesty and the universal
presence of God, who have endeavoured to demonstrate that God is in all
things, and that all things are in God, have at times failed to make
their meaning plain. Either from the obscurity of their own language,
or from the obtuseness of their readers, they have been considered
Atheists. While vehemently asserting that God is {76} everywhere, they
have been taken to mean that God is nowhere. The actual conclusion to
be drawn from the treatises of Spinoza, the reputed founder of modern
Pantheism, is still undecided. But no one now would brand him with the
name of Atheist. He was excommunicated by Jews and denounced by
Christians, yet there are many who think that his aim, his not
unsuccessful aim, was to establish faith in the Unseen and Eternal on a
basis which could not be shaken. So far from denying God, he was,
according to one of the greatest of German theologians, 'a
God-intoxicated man.' 'Offer up reverently with me a lock of hair to
the manes of the holy, repudiated Spinoza! The high world-spirit
penetrated him: the Infinite was his beginning and his end: the
Universe his only and eternal love.... He was full of religion and of
the Holy Spirit, and therefore he stands alone and unreachable, master
in his art above the profane multitude, {77} without disciples and
without citizenship.'[7] Dean Stanley went so far as to say that 'a
clearer glimpse into the nature of the Deity was granted to Spinoza,
the excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam, than to the combined forces of
Episcopacy and Presbytery in the Synod of Dordrecht.'[8] Such a
judgment is rather hard upon the divines who took part in that
celebrated Synod, but at any rate it indicates that the great
philosopher, misunderstood and persecuted, was elaborating in his own
way, this great truth, 'In him we live and move and have our being.'
'Of Him, and through Him are all things.'
V
In their loftiest moments, contemplating the marvels of the heavens
above and the earth beneath, devout souls have, wherever they looked,
been confronted with the Vision of God. 'What do I see in all {78}
Nature?' said Fenelon, 'God. God is everything, and God alone.'
'Everything,' said William Law, 'that is in being is either God or
Nature or Creature: and everything that is not God is only a
manifestation of God; for as there is nothing, neither Nature nor
Creature, but what must have its being in and from God, so everything
is and must be according to its nature more or less a manifestation of
God.'
It is the thought which has inspired poets of the most diverse schools,
which has been their most marvellous illumination and ecstasy.
Now it is Alexander Pope:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
Now it is William Cowper:
There lives and works
A soul in all things and that soul is God.
Now it is James Thomson of _The Seasons_:
These, as they change, Almighty Father! these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of Thee.
{79}
Now it is William Wordsworth:
I have felt
A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
A motion and a spirit which impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Now it is Lord Tennyson:
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains,
Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him Who reigns?
* * * * *
Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet.
Closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands or feet.
Certainly, we may say, nothing atheistic in utterances like these: they
are the utterances of lofty thought, of profound piety, of soaring
aspiration, and of childlike faith. They have a pantheistic tinge:
what is there to dread in Pantheism? Not much in {80} Pantheism of
that kind: would there were more of it! But it will be observable
that, in the instances cited, though God is in Nature and manifesting
Himself through it, there is a clear distinction between Nature and
God. It may seem as if it were merely the sky, the sun, the stars, the
ocean, that are apostrophised: in reality it is a Life, a Spirit, a
Power not themselves, in which they live and move and have their being:
not to them, but to That, are the prayers addressed. And, we venture
to think, it is scarcely ever otherwise: scarcely ever is the Visible
alone invoked: identify God as men will with the material universe, or
even with the force and energy with which the material universe is
pervaded, when they enter into communion with it, in spite of
themselves they endow it with the Life and the Will and the Purpose
which they have in theory rejected. But the absolute identification of
God and the Universe, the assumption that above and {81} beneath and
through all there is no conscious Righteousness and Wisdom and Love
overruling and directing, _that_ is a belief to be resisted, a belief
which enervates character and enfeebles hope.[9] 'Whoever says in his
heart that God is _no more_ than Nature: whoever does not provide
_behind the veil of creation_ an infinite reserve of thought and beauty
and holy love, that might fling aside this universe and take another,
as a vesture changing the heavens and they are changed, ... is bereft
of the essence of the Christian Faith, and is removed by only
accidental and precarious distinctions from the atheistic worship of
mere "natural laws."'[10] 'In our worship we have to do, not so much
with His finite expression in created things as with His own free self
and inner reality ... all _religion_ consists in _passing Nature by_,
in order to enter into direct personal relation {82} with Him, soul to
soul. It is _not_ Pantheism to merge all the life of the physical
universe in Him, and leave Him as the inner and sustaining Power of it
all. It is Pantheism to rest in this conception: to merge Him in the
universe and see Him only there: and not rather to dwell with Him as
the Living, Holy, Sympathising Will, on Whose free affection the
cluster of created things lies and plays, as the spray upon the
ocean.'[11]