God the Known and God the Unknown | Page 6

will and consciousness consist. No philosopher,
whether Christian or Rationalist, has attempted this without
discomfiture; but I can, I hope, do two things: Firstly, I can
demonstrate, perhaps more clearly than modern science is prepared to
admit, that there does exist a single Being or Animator of all living
things - a single Spirit, whom we cannot think of under any meaner
name than God; and, secondly, I can show something more of the
persona or bodily expression, mask, and mouthpiece of this vast Living
Spirit than I know of as having been familiarly expressed elsewhere, or
as being accessible to myself or others, though doubtless many works
exist in which what I am going to say has been already said.
Aware that much of this is widely accepted under the name of
Pantheism, I venture to think it differs from Pantheism with all the
difference that exists between a coherent, intelligible conception and an
incoherent unintelligible one. I shall therefore proceed to examine the
doctrine called Pantheism, and to show how incomprehensible and
valueless it is.
I will then indicate the Living and Personal God about whose existence
and about many of whose attributes there is no room for question; I will
show that man has been so far made in the likeness of this Person or
God, that He possesses all its essential characteristics, and that it is this
God who has called man and all other living forms, whether animals or

plants, into existence, so that our bodies are the temples of His spirit;
that it is this which sustains them in their life and growth, who is one
with them, living, moving, and having His being in them; in whom,
also, they live and move, they in Him and He in them; He being not a
Trinity in Unity only, but an Infinity in Unity, and a Unity in an Infinity;
eternal in time past, for so much time at least that our minds can come
no nearer to eternity than this; eternal for the future as long as the
universe shall exist; ever changing, yet the same yesterday, and to-day,
and for ever. And I will show this with so little ambiguity that it shall
be perceived not as a phantom or hallucination following upon a
painful straining of the mind and a vain endeavour [sic] to give
coherency to incoherent and inconsistent ideas, but with the same ease,
comfort, and palpable flesh-and-blood clearness with which we see
those near to us ; whom, though we see them at the best as through a
glass darkly, we still see face to face, even as we are ourselves seen.
I will also show in what way this Being exercises a moral government
over the world, and rewards and punishes us according to His own
laws.
Having done this I shall proceed to compare this conception of God
with those that are currently accepted, and will endeavour [sic] to show
that the ideas now current are in truth efforts to grasp the one on which
I shall here insist. Finally, I shall persuade the reader that the
differences between the so-called atheist and the so-called theist are
differences rather about words than things, inasmuch as not even the
most prosaic of modern scientists will be inclined to deny the existence
of this God, while few theists will feel that this, the natural conception
of God, is a less worthy one than that to which they have been
accustomed.


CHAPTER III
PANTHEISM. I

THE Rev. J. H. Blunt, in his "Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, etc.,"
defines Pantheists as "those who hold that God is everything, and
everything is God."
If it is granted that the value of words lies in the definiteness and
coherency of the ideas that present themselves to us when the words are
heard or spoken-then such a sentence as "God is everything and
everything is God" is worthless.
For we have so long associated the word "God" with the idea of a
Living Person, who can see, hear, will, feel pleasure, displeasure, etc.,
that we cannot think of God, and also of something which we have not
been accustomed to think of as a Living Person, at one and the same
time, so as to connect the two ideas and fuse them into a coherent
thought. While we are thinking of the one, our minds involuntarily
exclude the other, and vice versa; so that it is as impossible for us to
think of anything as God, or as forming part of God, which we cannot
also think of as a Person, or as a part of a Person, as it is to produce a
hybrid between two widely distinct animals. If I am not mistaken, the
barrenness of inconsistent ideas, and the sterility of