A Pluralistic Universe | Page 8

our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a
great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show
the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have
always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already
instituted and established without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the
most we can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such adhesion as
ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to. The situation here again is
radically dualistic. It is not as if the world came to know itself, or God came to know
himself, partly through us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists per se
and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us knows it or is ignorant,
and it would continue to exist unaltered, even though we finite knowers were all
annihilated.
It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has always operated as a

drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox theology has had to wage a steady
fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the
mystical experiences of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic
superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God as intimate soul
and reason of the universe has always seemed to some people a more worthy conception
than God as external creator. So conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly,
he made it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an external
creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I have been told by Hindoos
that the great obstacle to the spread of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our
dogma of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the requirements of even
the illiterate natives of India.
Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with Hinduism in this matter.
Those of us who are sexagenarians have witnessed in our own persons one of those
gradual mutations of intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the
thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression
of a different race of men. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our
ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality
and eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of God as an
external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of us as if it
were some outlandish savage religion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has
opened, and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the type of our
imagination, and the older monarchical theism is obsolete or obsolescent. The place of
the divine in the world must be more organic and intimate. An external creator and his
institutions may still be verbally confessed at Church in formulas that linger by their mere
inertia, but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling on them, the sincere heart of us is
elsewhere. I shall leave cynical materialism entirely out of our discussion as not calling
for treatment before this present audience, and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic
theism for the same reason. Our contemporary mind having once for all grasped the
possibility of a more intimate Weltanschauung, the only opinions quite worthy of
arresting our attention will fall within the general scope of what may roughly be called
the pantheistic field of vision, the vision of God as the indwelling divine rather than the
external creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep reality.
As we have found that spiritualism in general breaks into a more intimate and a less
intimate species, so the more intimate species itself breaks into two subspecies, of which
the one is more monistic, the other more pluralistic in form. I say in form, for our
vocabulary gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish between form and substance here.
The inner life of things must be substantially akin anyhow to the tenderer parts of man's
nature in any spiritualistic philosophy. The word 'intimacy' probably covers the essential
difference. Materialism holds the foreign in things to be more primary and lasting, it
sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy. The brutal aspects overlap and outwear;
refinement has the feebler and more ephemeral hold on reality.
From a pragmatic point of view the difference between living against a background of
foreignness and one of intimacy means the difference between a general habit