Religion implies belief in a God with whom man has to do. In his quest of salvation man has relied on the help of a Divine Being, and in the other forms of religious aspiration God has been presupposed as the supreme object that was to be obeyed, or to be beloved or to be contemplated in beatific vision. But while it may be said to be an article of the universal creed that there is a God, there has been much difference of opinion as to what God is. Though human beings taste of like experiences of good and evil with their attendant hopes and fears and desires, though they have the same entrances and exits, and the same mind with which to explore and interpret their situation, they have not been agreed as to what is the essential nature of the Divine Being, whether there be many gods or some or one, and what are the divine attributes, the divine purposes and the divine works. The ideas, in fact, which have been held about the Supreme Being have ranged from trivial and grotesque notions which the latter-day child finds ridiculous, to august doctrines in which the philosopher has recognised the quintessence of speculative wisdom; and from idols which bear the stamp of a terrorised or a foul imagination, to visions of incarnate or transcendent Godhead which enshrine the highest elements of spiritual beauty and sublimity that it has entered into the heart of man to conceive.

The questions which are naturally asked are—what has man believed concerning God? how did the beliefs arise? what truth, if any, do they contain? And to these correspond the tasks of description, genetic explanation and valuation, which have been undertaken from one standpoint by Theology, and from another by the Science of Religion and the Philosophy of Religion. The chief business of Theology has been to declare the knowledge of God prevalent in a particular religious community, and these statements of faith have been brought together in a comprehensive view in the History of Religions, and they have also to some extent been co-ordinated in a discipline of Comparative Theology. The genetic treatment of religious beliefs has always been felt to be fascinating. Theology has had much to say about beginnings—chiefly because it desired to fortify its knowledge of divine things by tracing it to a revelation; and the Science of Religion has addressed itself to the problems of origin with equal zest—largely because it desired to show that religion could be fitted with all other terrestrial phenomena into the evolutionary scheme, and that revelation was a gratuitous hypothesis. The valuation of theological ideas has gone on throughout the whole course of history—each religion being judged by its adherents to be true, and others of which they had knowledge being judged to be false, or at least to be adulterated with falsehood. And there are other tribunals to which the question has been referred. Reason instituted as a court of appeal the Philosophy of Religion, which has undertaken to make a survey of religious history as a whole, and has applied a rational criterion with a view to appraise the worth of each stage of the religious development, and to estimate the final outcome of this long-drawn travail of the human spirit. The other tribunal is that which has been set up by Providence, and whose findings have been given in the form of the verdict of history. Its procedure is slow, as is usual with divine machinery, but it has already disposed of much business, and it may be said to be engaged in a summing-up in which it has put aside many claims, made clear what are the great surviving alternatives, and also given indications as to how the final judgment will fall out.

In this chapter I shall classify and summarily expound the ideas concerning God which have circulated in the world; and thereafter I shall test them by the criteria of value which are supplied in the religious view of existence and by the spirit of religious history.

I

The objects of religious faith are commonly referred to by a generic term—as Gods, divinities or divine beings. As to the precise connotation of the term there has been a difference of opinion and usage. Some definitions are too narrow—as when Tylor makes the genus to be exclusively composed of ‘spiritual beings,’ and Flint limits it to beings which, ‘while not indifferent to man’s sentiments and actions,’ are ‘inaccessible to his senses.’1 On the other hand, a God is something more than the object in which a man heartily believes, which he loves beyond all else, and which prescribes to him the chief end of his exertions. It is an object which affects the human being in a unique way by awakening in him a peculiar awe, and by impelling him to acts of worship. The accompanying belief is that the object is in some sense supernatural, and that it wields an extraordinary power in the world, and in particular over the fortunes of the worshipper.

A rough list of the beings which have been worshipped is as follows: idols or fetishes, natural and artificial, species of plants and animals, forces and laws of nature, ghosts, demons, great deities, the impersonal Absolute, the infinite Personality, the unknown God. Using the categories of Descartes, we might classify these as extended substances, thinking substances, attributes of substance, and an unknown substance. In The Evolution of Religion, Dr. Caird has classified them as objects of external perception, perceiving subjects, and the Supreme Being, which, as constituting and transcending this distinction, may be termed the subject-object. But it may be said of Caird’s third and highest type of the idea of God, that it is equally difficult for the agnostic to recognise in it the Unknowable, and for the Christian Church to identify it with the personal God who was revealed in Christ. It seems better to adopt a simple form of classification which accords with ordinary thinking, and to distinguish as two main divisions the classes of things and souls or selves, and as a third the unknown entity or mystery. The things revered as divine fall into the two sub-classes of sensible objects and invisible forces, while the sensible objects may be further divided into the inanimate and the animate. The souls or selves form an ascending series, the successive stages of which are represented by the subhuman spirit, the superhuman spirit and the Infinite Personality. In accordance with this we may distinguish four main types of theological thought—the realistic, which conceives the thing as such to be divine, or identifies the sensible object with the Divine Being; the dynamistic, which construes the divine as an impersonal energy; the pneumatistic, which ascribes to it the personal mode of existence; and the agnostic, which denies the likeness of the divine to any other known kind of being. We may further distinguish two varieties of realistic thought—the materialistic, which views inanimate things, and the vitalistic, which views living things as divine. It is, however, to be remembered that the one religious object has been construed in different ways, and that its prima facie character, or what may be called its face-value, does not uniformly determine the thoughts and the attitude of the worshipper.2

A.—According to the realistic view, as we have termed it, the Divine Being is a sensible object, possessed of inherent properties which invest it with a supernatural dignity. That the sensible object as such has been adored and entreated as a self-contained deity, has been confidently affirmed and as emphatically denied. The Old Testament prophets took it for granted that the heathen and the Hebrew backsliders worshipped as gods the works of their own hands, with birds and beasts and creeping things. And the sages of India and of Greece have placed a similar construction on popular religion. On the other hand, it is now generally held that the idolater does not really render homage and supplication to the fetish which he sees and handles. ‘From the very first,’ says D’Alviella, ‘worship must have been addressed, not to the material object conceived as such, but to the personality supposed to be embodied in it.’3 But neither the universal affirmative nor the universal negative is justified by the evidence. Some worshippers have bowed before the sacred thing as itself possessed of divine qualities, some have hoped or trembled because of a mysterious energy with which they supposed the fetish to be charged, and some have reverenced a spirit which made in it its abode. In the Christian Church it is common ground that the sacramental elements bring the soul into the presence of the divine; but the Roman Catholic has revered them as the very body and blood of the Lord, the Lutheran has been taught to worship a divine substance that is present in, with, and under the corporeal substance, and the thoughts of the Calvinist have been lifted up to heavenly places where Christ is exalted at the right hand of God. And it may be taken for certain that analogous differences of attitude and interpretation have prevailed among the heathen.

1. The worship of the artificial idol was no doubt a secondary development. It cannot well be supposed that men set out to manufacture a God; rather must it be thought that, having previously seen reason to believe in a God of some sort, they proceeded to make the best likeness which they could imagine out of the most suitable materials which were at their disposal. But it is also very credible that, after the idol had become an established institution, it could be accepted by the multitude, and by the average worshipper, as being to all intents and purposes a God. We cannot completely set aside the testimony of the many witnesses of antiquity who assert that the way of the vulgar was to identify the object before which they bowed with the Divinity in which they put their trust. The human mind is quite capable of the crassest thinking; and that the heathen were capable of it is supported by the observation that, in the Church which is founded on faith in the God who is a Spirit, so much could be made of images and pictures that the worship has often been declared to have degenerated into pure idolatry.

The worship of natural objects has been more un-ambiguously associated with the materialistic view. These objects may be divided into three classes which start from the crudest superstition and reach the intellectual climax of an imposing metaphysical doctrine. The lowest stage is that of the minor nature-worship, at which the venerated things are casual objects, or odds and ends—as a stone with some peculiarity of shape or colour or origin, a fragment of iron, a shell, a bunch of gaudy feathers. A much higher plane was reached in the worship of great objects of the external world—as the earth, the mountain, the river, the sea, the sky, the sun, the moon and the stars. While the higher and the lower nature-worship were certainly understood and justified in different ways, the realistic interpretation has undoubtedly had a large following. The earth and the sky seemed so wonderful, and did such wonderful things, that it is not surprising if many said that one of these was enough of a Divinity for them, and left it to others, if they cared, to make more speculative ventures. At the end of this process of thought the world as a whole was conceived as a material object, attained the dignity of the Supreme Being, and was held to be the basis of all which exists, and the source of all operative energies. In this development Theology became a system of Philosophy whose cardinal tenet was that matter is the ultimate reality and the bed-rock of the universe—being the ground and principle, not only of all visible objects and of all mechanical movements and chemical changes, but also of all the ferment of human experience which common sense credits to beings who have souls as well as bodies, and traces to the activity of their minds and wills. It thus seems that the materialist, who, from the time of Democritus, has sought to discredit religion by tracing its origin to unreason, may be regarded as himself the lineal descendant of the least intelligent of the religious subjects of the times of primeval superstition, since his philosophy, as Comte observed, turns out to be little more respectable than a consummated and disguised Fetishism.

2. The realistic type of theological thought is further represented by the religions in which the Divine Being has been conceived as identical with, if not exhausted in, certain classes of plants and animals. This conception is specially associated with Totemism. Totemism is, indeed, much more than a religion. It is primarily a peculiar form of social organisation, based on a peculiar view of the scheme of life which is marked by features some of which strike us as utterly fantastic, and some as sensible and useful. It has also, like other prehistoric institutions, touches of modernity as in its theory of the descent of the human clan from an animal species, the position accorded to woman, and the provisions in regard to bars to marriage which anticipated to some extent the programme of Eugenics. But the totem-clan was also a religious community; and while it made use of different types of Theology, the de facto divinity doubtless was the species of animals or plants from which it took its name, which was regarded as its progenitor, with which it was joined in a mystic alliance, and on which it was dependent for the quickening of its vitality and the reinvigoration of its powers. And the veneration of the living thing has prevailed far outside the limits of the totemistic form of tribal life. The worship of the forest as the source of life and well-being is still met with among savage tribes; and plant-worship was carried over in various forms into the nomadic and the agricultural stages of civilisation. The reawakening in spring of things that seemed to have died, the new surge of life that was observed in germination and growth and took to itself the beautiful garments of leaf and blossom, the prodigal luxuriance of the summer, and the gathering up of the travail of the year in the harvest of fruits and grain—all this could well seem to be the climax of the extraordinary and the uncanny, and the more so when drought and famine brought home to the tribe its utter dependence for existence and comfort on the bounty that is shown by the green earth to man and beast. Moreover, as Spencer pointed out, there were trees and herbs from which drugs were extracted that gave the experience of an unwonted exaltation or tranquillity of soul, and were therefore thought to be of divine quality, or the gifts of a supernatural Being.4 This last point of view is entirely intelligible, as there has continued to be a world-wide sect which has found in the ‘nervous stimulant’ the substitute for God, whose prayer has been ‘Soma, do thou enter into us, full of kindness,’ and which has possessed its counterpart and travesty of the highest religious experience in the indulgence in which it was found that an accusing past was forgotten, a miserable present was transfigured, and a frowning future was robbed of its terrors. The spirit of plant-worship has survived in schools of poetry, and is appreciated by ordinary people who are able to realise the miracle of the seasons, and to find happiness in tending a garden. And Science has revealed that those who worshipped the plant-life of the earth had a better reason for exalting it than they knew; for if the sun be in a way the God of the external world, as the source of the physical energies of men and animals, it is the kingdom of the plants which acts as mediator between them and the solar Divinity, and which is sacrificed to the end that the creatures may have life and strength.

The worship of animals has been more widespread and tenacious, and has assumed more impressive forms. The animals have dropped into the back-ground in the modern centres of civilisation except as articles of food, those that were formidable and useless have been exterminated or put to flight, those that were useful to mankind have been made hid slaves, and even in this capacity are being largely displaced by superior machines; but there was a long past during which the chief incidents of the lot of man were his encounters with the beasts, and the question of the day was whether he was to eat or to be eaten, and when he must have looked on them with awe as his co-equal competitors for the lordship of the world. The prehistoric drawings in the caves of Western Europe point to a primeval association of religious thought and practice with the animal creation; and the awestruck impressions were gathered up at a later day, as in Beowulf, in the legends of brutish monsters that wasted fields and slaughtered men. The faith and the veneration acquired a new lease of life in a modified form in the therianthropic Polytheism of Babylonia and of Egypt. And a use was still found for some of the features in the system of ethical Monotheism; for the cherubim of the prophetic visions borrowed strength and majesty from the lion, the ox and the eagle, and Satan took on the form of the serpent or the dragon.

It might be inquired whether there was a stage at which the female sex was regarded with the same kind of veneration which was paid to sacred species of animals. Nature, no doubt, teaches the man, as it instructs the male animal, to accept the woman as a being of his own kind, and on this footing to associate with her, to protect her and to provide for her wants; but the human being came to have a mind that made him differ radically from the brutes, and an incidental result was that he could think out things to very extraordinary conclusions, one of which may quite well have been that he came to suppose that the female sex formed a special class of uncanny and supernatural beings. For the man felt that the woman exercised upon him a peculiar fascination—to be represented in Greek mythology by the shafts of Cupid—hers was the miracle of child-bearing by which the tribe was replenished and saved from destruction, and when the man was engaged in war or the chase she could be thought of as a Sibyl who brooded and wove her spells in the darkness and the silence of the cave. And there is historical evidence that she has been regarded as a being of another kind. The Old Testament teaches that Eve was made of a rib taken from Adam’s side, and this may have been intended as an argument in support of the unity of the human species, and a refutation of a contrary opinion which was in vogue among the ancestors of the Hebrews or among adjacent tribes. The matriarchal system, in which descent was traced through the female line, may have owed something to a principle of the divine right of woman; and this principle may also have left its mark in those polytheistic systems in which goddesses had the pre-eminence, and the priestess and the prophetess were held in high honour as the chosen organs of deity.

The vitalistic conception of the Divine Being, as we have termed it, was developed by way of Poly-theism to its philosophical goal. The phenomena of germination and generation continued to make a deep impression as the standing marvel of the course of nature; and it was characteristic of Semitic Poly-theism that the highest honours were paid to gods and goddesses representing the principle of fertility, and that the most popular of their sacred rites were those which were practised at the shrines in a setting of revelry and debauchery. In the world-picture of the Scandinavian skalds the good Gods are personifications of the productive energies of nature, and the ash Igdrasil has been interpreted as the symbol of a vitalistic interpretation of the ultimate principle of the universal scheme of things.

‘I like that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil,’ says Carlyle. ‘All life is figured by them as a tree. Igdrasil, the ash-tree of existence, has its roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe; it is the tree of Existence.… Its “boughs,” with their buddings and disleafings, events, things suffered, things done, catastrophes, stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs are histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of human existence onwards from of old.… Considering how human things circulate, each inextricably in communion with all—I find no similitude so true as this of a tree. Beautiful: altogether beautiful and great. “The Machine of the Universe”—alas, do but think of that in contrast.’5

Flint may have had this passage in mind when he wrote:

‘There are Pantheists who have conceived the absolute unity under the similitude of organic life. To them the universe has presented itself as a vast organism, everywhere instinct with a self-developing vitality. But surely there can be neither unity nor absoluteness in a life which is inseparable from physical conditions, confined within organic limits, and which grows like a plant or an animal. Anthropomorphism may be a poor theory, but it must be better than phytomorphism or zoomorphism. To conceive of the absolute after the manner of a plant or a beast may be poetical, but it is so plainly irrational as to call for no discussion.’6

Whatever be the merits of the theory, it certainly calls for discussion, and within the last generation it has bespoken somewhat respectful discussion. For Carlyle’s description of the totality of things as of the nature of a tree might be regarded as the text of L’Évolution Créatrice of M. Bergson, who rejects with equal emphasis the mechanical and the teleological interpretations, and represents the universe of living beings as resulting from the impulsion and the modifications of a single vital force, which in some way introduced itself into matter, shaped and organised it, adapted it to its environment, and flowered in intelligent thought, and in the rational, aesthetic and moral achievements of the race.

B.—1. The dynamistic doctrine construes the divine, not as a sensible object possessing inherent powers of the supernatural kind, but as a force which is concentrated in various objects, and which invests them with a divine character. The rudimentary form of the doctrine is represented by the Melanesian notion of mana, and by the kindred beliefs of the North American Indians and of the aboriginal tribes of Australia. The savage, it appears, recognises a force about which he thinks in much the same way that the white man thinks about electricity—viz., as a power which does extremely useful work, but which also, being very dangerous, has to be approached and handled with the utmost circumspection. It may also be illustrated by the idea of the lucky object, by the sense of a mystic property which differentiates the banknote from ordinary paper, by the impression of a peculiar virtue which goes forth from a great man, and by the feelings awakened by the supposed presence of a ghost. The mana of the Melanesian is thus described by Bishop Codrington:

‘It is a power or influence, not physical and in a way super-natural, which shows itself in physical force or in any kind of power or influence which a man possesses.’ ‘It is not fixed in anything and can be conveyed in anything, but spirits, whether disembodied souls or supernatural beings, have it and can impart it, and it essentially belongs to personal beings to originate it, though it may act through the medium of water or a stone or a bone.’ it is a force which ‘acts in all kinds of ways for good or evil, which it is of the greatest advantage to possess or control.’ ‘If a man has been successful in fighting, it has not been his natural strength of arm, quickness of eye, or readiness of resource that has won success; he has certainly got the mana of a spirit or of some deceased warrior to empower him, conveyed in an amulet of a stone tied around his neck, or a tuft of leaves in his belt, in a tooth hung upon a finger of his bow-hand, or in the form of words with which he brings supernatural assistance to his side.’7

Marett and Söderblom8 have shown that the uncanny force, while it may have a favourite receptacle in human souls and in other spiritual beings, exists independently of them, and that it can be introduced without their mediation into numerous other objects, both animate and inanimate. The idea of mana has doubtless supplied a subtler theology to adherents of religious systems in which the ostensible object of worship was a visible thing. It must have seemed to reflective minds the better notion, that the fetish or the totem owed its dignity to its special enrichment with a portion of the invisible divine stuff that worked wonders up and down the world. Under Polydaemonism the spirits were naturally regarded as centres and dispensers of mana. In the polytheistic systems it was conceived that an influence proceeded from the gods which stamped a peculiar impress on holy places and holy things, and which could also fill the mind with a divine frenzy.

2. A second form of the dynamistic conception of deity is met with in the higher nature-worship of the polytheistic systems of Oriental and classical antiquity. The earth, the sky and the other great objects of nature could be venerated, not as themselves divine, but rather as objects in which divine energies had their seat, and in which they were operative and manifest. The modification of the conception was that instead of the one mysterious force, a number of principles came to be recognised with diverse characters and functions. This dynamistic pluralism, as it may be termed, was the intellectual substance of much that took imaginative form in the mythological creations of ancient Polytheism. The polytheistic system of the Vedas was founded on a recognition of natural powers on which man felt himself dependent for existence and well-being—he needed light and he worshipped Varuna, water for his crops and his flocks and he worshipped India the storm-god, fire and he worshipped Agni, terrible yet beneficent, and high in honour with them was Soma, deification of sap, which could seem to be the very essence of all living things, and to make the difference between life and death. The Scandinavian mythology rested on a general impression that had been received of the constitution and course of nature; and its chief figures are easily identified as personifications of the powers which can be divined in the conflict of light and darkness, and in the ebb and flow of the tides of death and life that lay waste and again renew and replenish the earth. Similarly the classical mythology had its great gods who had originally represented the principles operative in the realm of nature, but it extended their functions so as to make recognition of the principles that inspire and govern the intellectual, the aesthetic, the political and the moral life of human societies.

3. At a third stage Theology reverted to the conception of a single force, and the attempt was made to consolidate and unify the system of powers and laws which had come to be revered as divine. This movement led along one line to Monotheism. Along another line, and more characteristically, the effort after unity issued in a dynamistic Monism or Pantheism. The quest was similar to that of the early Greek philosophers who reduced the elements to one, and declared this to be the basis and substance of all the contents of the external world—the difference being that religious thought went deeper and affirmed a spiritual principle which was the basis and substance of Gods and men, and of all things visible and invisible, and which was the efficient agent in all doings and happenings throughout the universe. This doctrine was probably understood by the sages to be the deepest meaning of the worship of Heaven and Earth in the state-religion of China, it was developed in the priestly circles of Babylonia and Egypt, it was the distinctive message of the Indian Philosophy which built on the foundation of the Vedas, it was held by the Eleatics and the Stoics, and it has been embodied in a series of Philosophical systems which have deeply influenced the intellectual life of the modern Western world.

The pantheistic scheme of thought is definite and consistent in regard to certain fundamental moments of the being of God, as well as in regard to certain attributes and works of God, while in respect of the distinctive character of the Divine Being, Pantheism speaks with an uncertain sound and with contradictory voices. The moments of the being of God which are unanimously affirmed are unity and infinitude. God is one, not merely in the sense that there is one God only, but in the sense that nothing truly exists save God—‘there is one being and no second.’ He is infinite, not merely in the sense that He possesses all perfections, but in the sense that there is nothing other than God—that all which exists is embraced within the Divine Being, and that all which occurs is a mode of the divine life and activity. On the negative side it is axiomatic that the Infinite is not to be conceived as an individual subject who distinguishes himself from other beings, and who is conscious of himself. God is impersonal, and self-consciousness can only be attributed to Him in the sense that it has emerged in classes of finite beings that have emanated from the divine source. The Infinite Being, next, is clothed with the most glorious perfections. He is the eternal—the Being that was before all and outlasts all, or rather who is outside of time-conditions. He is the immanent God—and that in the sense, not merely that He is present in all finite creatures which exist under spatial conditions, but that He is in them as their essence, and as the abiding spring of their life and power. He is in all things, so the Hindu father taught his son, as the melted salt is in the water. ‘That which is the subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the true. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it.’9 This operative omnipotence is often made to appear the brightest jewel in God’s crown:

Was wär’ ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse,

Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse,

Ihm ziemt’s die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,

Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen,

So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist,

Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst.10

The Infinite is in respect of power the Omnipotent. The attributes of knowledge and wisdom He possesses at least in the sense that He is the author of the finite minds that know and of the rational results that have been achieved in the cosmic process, and He possesses the moral attributes in the sense that from Him have sprung the beings that acknowledge a moral law, and that He has constituted the moral order which they recognise to the works of the Infinite, He is the ground of the world, and of all things therein—the fire which has filled a universe with its beams and sparks, the ocean from which all waters proceed and to which they return, the soul which has made for itself a body, and clothed itself therewith as with a garment and decked itself with jewels. The labour of the Infinite is a creatio continua. The divine causality is of universal sweep, and is subject to no restrictions or qualifications. The divine soul of the universe, as Pope says in one of his few clumsy lines, is ‘as full as perfect in a hair as heart.’ It is, moreover,

As full as perfect in vile man that mourns,

As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns.

God was incarnate in the sinless Christ, who out of love to men died upon the Cross, but so was He also incarnate in the Jews who prevailed upon Pilate to put Him to death, and in the disciple who betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss.

There remains, however, the important question as to the essential nature of the Being to whom the infinite attributes and the mighty works are ascribed, and on this point Pantheism has been a house divided against itself. One of two answers might be given: it could be said that God belongs to an order of being which is akin to ourselves and is therefore knowable, or it could be said that He belongs to an order of being which is utterly different from ourselves and is therefore unknowable. God, it is often said, can only be described by negatives, and so Pantheism has passed over into Agnosticism. On the whole, however, the pantheist, who has rejoiced in the tremendous vistas of knowledge that have opened up before him, has been unwilling to end with a confession of ignorance, and he has undertaken to construe the divine essence in positive terms. If, now, he was to affirm anything positive of the nature of God, there were in turn two fundamental possibilities—that the Divine Being is of the nature of matter, or that it is of the nature of spirit. When the former alternative has been adopted it leads to a Materialistic Pantheism. The usual course has been to conceive of the Absolute, though it is axiomatic that He is not a person, as at least Spirit, and as living the life and doing the works of Spirit. And if the conception was to be made more definite this could best be done by utilising our knowledge of spirit as that which thinks and wills, and by fastening on thought or on will as yielding the inmost secret of the Godhead. This has, in fact, been the procedure, and the chief types of Pantheism are distinguished according as God has been conceived of as essentially a rational principle or as an energising will. The conception of the Absolute which has been most favoured is that its essential activity is thinking, and there has even been a tendency to discard the category of substance, and to resolve the Divine Being into a mere process of thought. The notion that God is essentially a thinking being was the import of the Indian thesis ‘That art thou’: what was meant was that we have a clear intuition of the nature of the Being which is the world-ground and the spring of all activity when we look within and observe the mind at its work. Similarly, according to Hegel, ‘the Absolute is interpretable only in terms of mind, for mind is the highest type of individuality with which we have any acquaintance.’ God, in the Hegelian system, is the principle of a process of rational thought which unfolded in accordance with the dialectic that governs the development of the idea, and which has its monuments in the stages that have been traversed in cosmical and terrestrial evolution, and notably in the tortuous march of the history of mankind.

It has been matter of prolonged controversy whether in defining the Absolute as spirit Hegel conceived of God in Himself as impersonal or as personal spirit. That He was thought of as an eternal and independent centre of self-conscious existence seems to be implied in the repeated repudiations of Pantheism, and to be borne out by the emphatic affirmation that ‘the absolute Spirit as personality’ is the truth of the idea of God.11 But the Pantheism which Hegel repudiated was merely the realistic type of thought which identifies the phenomenal universe with God, and his chief concern was to affirm as against this view ‘the coherence of the phenomenal world in a single being.’ Further, by the truth of an idea Hegel understood the culmination of a process: the plant, for example, is the truth of the bud, the flower of the plant, the fruit of the flower; and on these terms the personality of God would be the truth concerning God in the sense, not that He is eternally personal spirit, but that personality was achieved as the result of the Absolute becoming incarnate in human beings and other rational creatures who have risen in time to the level of self-conscious existence.12 ‘Without the world,’ he says, ‘God is not God’: if the world be dependent on God for its existence, it would seem that God is no less dependent on the world for providing Him with a body, and in particular on the finite spirits in which He has become aware of Himself and also has appreciated the scope and the significance of His works.13

The second grand alternative is to conceive of the Divine Being as essentially a productive and determining will, which may or may not be also a rational and a beneficent will. It may be said that Buddha was a pantheist for whom God was will, since He recognised an eternal principle which is immanent in and upholds the world-order, and which, while responsible for the calamity of existence, is so far an ethical will that it ensures the operation of a retributive justice. Schopenhauer also found in volition the clue to the nature of ultimate reality.

‘When we observe,’ he says, ‘the mighty and ceaseless onset of the waters of the deep, the constancy with which the magnet turns to the pole, the yearning with which the iron flies to the magnet, the tendency of a weight to fall to the earth and similar phenomena, it costs no great effort of the imagination, great as is the distance which separates us, to recognise in what is there done blindly and dumbly the likeness to that which in us pursues its purposes by the light of knowledge. And just as the first streaks of dawn share with the noonday-beams the name of sunlight, so there as here the name of will must be given to that which is the absolute essence of everything in the world, and the sole kernel of all that appears.’14

It has to be added that for Schopenhauer the Absolute was an utterly irrational and unethical will which is guided by no leading idea, but is merely urged on by an insatiable and reckless lust of production. The remaining possibility is that the Absolute might be interpreted in terms of feeling. It would not have been surprising if this line also had been followed out, and the doctrine had been propounded that the Absolute is essentially an ocean of feeling. For there was something to found on in the fact that feeling is the most widely diffused of the manifestations of psychical life, and also that there are many phenomena in nature and history which resemble the ebb and flow of the feelings, and might therefore suggest that a mindless emotionalism is the soul of the totality of things.

C.—The most important type of theological doctrine is that which construes the divine nature as belonging to the same order of being as the conscious self. The idea of a soul is met with among the lowest as well as the highest races; it has been developed, but has not been radically altered in the idea of personality; and the conception that God is of the nature of a conscious self or a personal spirit is traceable throughout the known history of religion. It would be natural to call this the spiritual view were it not that the impersonal Absolute of Pantheism has also been commonly declared to belong to the realm of spirit. The term animistic was used by Tylor to embrace all forms of the conception, but there is a natural repugnance to ascribing a soul to God, and describing Theism as a form of Animism. I have therefore called the general conception the pneumatistic doctrine.

The spiritual beings to which man has ascribed a self-conscious life after the pattern of his own, fall into classes which are marked by widely different characteristics, and which form a graduated scale along several lines. They are distinguished, in the first place, according as God has been said to be many—as in Polydaemonism; some—as in Polytheism; two—as in Dualism; and one—as in Monotheism. The properties ascribed to them have corresponded generally with the numerical scale, and that in respect both of the nature and the degree of the divine attributes. In general it may be said that the many have had power but little wisdom and goodness, the few have had power and wisdom and no little goodness, the two have had power and wisdom and have been distinguished as good and evil, the One has been almighty, all-wise and all-good. The works ascribed to Deity have been consonant with the conceptions formed of the being and the attributes, and have been of every degree of importance from transactions affecting the pettiest interests of the individual upward to the control of the destinies of the race and the creation and preservation of the universe.

1. At the bottom of the scale are species of souls on the human and subhuman levels, which may be denominated the animistic group proper. The general doctrine of Animism is that the important beings of the world are souls, which are either human souls or others which are formed on the same pattern and behave in similar ways, and that everything which happens, or at least every unusual and arresting event, is due to the agency of one or other of these spiritual entities. On this foundation there was developed a very comprehensive system of thought, which provided savage man with a Natural Philosophy and a Psychology as well as a Theology. Specially important is the animistic Psychology. It is often said that introspection is a late achievement of cultured humanity, and no doubt it is only in the civilised era that it has been practised with real success; but Animism has its very elaborate psychological doctrine, and the savage is prepared to tender much fuller information about the nature and the powers of the soul than would be attempted by any of ourselves who did not chance to have been a professed student of the subject. The principal articles of the Psychology of the savage may be summarised as follows:

(1) Every man has at least two souls, which may be distinguished as the corporeal soul or soul-stuff, and as the breath-soul or apparitional soul.

(2) The corporeal soul or soul-stuff has the following characters:—(a) it is diffused throughout the body, but is collected in special intensity and richness in certain parts, as the heart, the brain, the kidneys, the hair, and in the blood and the secretions; (b) it is lost or impaired by removal of or injury to these parts and contents of the body, or by magical practices directed to them; (c) it is replenished and strengthened by acquiring, and especially by eating other bodies charged with, soul-stuff; (d) it is not destroyed at death, though it may no longer be associated with a conscious individual.

(3) The apparitional soul is a material or semi-material substance, like a film or vapour, which is a visible, if not tangible, image or shadow of the body, though it also on occasion assumes other shapes.

(4) The apparitional soul has the power of leaving the body temporarily during life, especially in dreams and sickness.

(5) The susceptibilities of the soul include (a) receptiveness for communications in dreams from ghosts and other spirits; (b) liability to take offence at bad treatment or a supposed want of respect; (c) exposure to injury from magical practices and from the machinations of spirits; (d) prevention by accident or design from returning to the body after temporary absence.

(6) The soul proper survives death at least for a time, haunts the familiar scenes, and takes to do with the survivors; but there is also an abode of the departed spirits in the sky, or in islands of the sea, or in distant places or under the earth.

The souls which have been treated as belonging to the sphere of the divine have been of three classes—the souls of living persons, departed souls, and souls of a kindred sort which are usually called demons.

(a) In view of the powers and capacities which he ascribed to the human soul the savage has found a quasi-religious object in his own spiritual constitution. He has venerated the spiritual entity which he found in himself as a higher order of being, has been careful not to offend it, has placated it with good things, has protected it by seeking to deposit it in a safe place in time of danger, and has addressed to it expostulations and supplications. The souls of others could be felt to have similar claims, and it has been considered an argument against punishing a child that its soul might take umbrage at the treatment and flee away. The souls of exceptional persons, notably the chief and the medicine-man, excited a veneration proportionate to the degree in which they towered above the common herd, and this sentiment lived on into later periods in the doctrine of the divine right oft kings, and in the investiture of priesthoods with divine prerogatives.

(b) Better established has been the religious status of departed souls, especially the souls of ancestors. ‘The worship of the Manes or ancestors,’ as Tylor observes, ‘has been one of the main branches of the religions of mankind.’15 Ancestor-worship is of high antiquity. It is vouched for in the prehistoric ages by the dolmen and the cromlech, which were certainly associated with the cult of the dead, and are perhaps the monuments of a spiritualistic movement which in early times swept over southern and western Europe, and gave a new direction and intensity to man’s communion with the unseen realm. The cult has struck root among all races, it has sometimes dominated the religious life, when overpowered it has usually been able to make terms with its conqueror, and to this day millions find in it their chief religious occupation and consolation.

What the worshippers of ancestral spirits have actually thought and intended in addressing themselves to the dead has been the subject of much controversy. It has been held by one group of anthropologists that these were regarded as friendly beings with whom it was a privilege and a loving duty to hold communion; and by another that they were unfriendly beings against whom they had to protect themselves defensive and offensive measures. It would seem that, while some could be reckoned on as well disposed—as the chief, the father, and the old friend who had passed from sight—the ghosts were regarded as on the whole wayward and malicious, and even disposed to be jealous and vindictive out of resentment at the cruel fate which had overtaken themselves. It has also been disputed whether ancestor-worship is really intended as the worship of divine beings. Some missionaries have declared it to be sheer and abominable idolatry, while others have seen in it a mode of showing reverence and gratitude to the departed which could easily be brought into harmony with the teaching of the Christian Church in regard to the communion of the saints. Doubtless the actual position has been, and is, that there have been many whose converse with the dead was neither more nor less of worship than the respectful attentions which they showed to earthly superiors, and the kind offices which they rendered to their friends; while others—and these perhaps the majority—looked on the spirits as veritably belonging to the sphere of godhead, and offered to them the highest adoration which it was in the power of their souls to offer.

(c) The third class of souls, the demons, have counted for much in the lower faiths. They have usually been supposed to be extremely numerous. ‘The number of supernatural beings,’ we are told, ‘that the aborigines of Australia acknowledge is exceedingly numerous; for not only are the heavens peopled with such, but the whole face of the country swarms with them; every thicket, most watering-places, and all rocky places abound with evil spirits—all apparently striving to do all imaginable mischiefs to the poor blackfellow.’16 A similar account is given of the cloud of demons that encompass the African negro, and carry on a treacherous and ruthless warfare against him and human kind. These evil-minded spirits were usually homeless vagrants. It has, however, been generally supposed that the demons which acquired a fixed habitation shared in the better qualities which naturally go with a settled life, and the acquisition of a stake in the country. They illustrated the observation of Benjamin Franklin:

I never knew an oft-removed tree,

Nor yet an oft-removed family,

That throve so well as those that settled be.

2. The superhuman class of souls is represented by the gods of the polytheistic systems of antiquity. They were distinguished from the hosts of spirits in important particulars—the many were reduced to the few, they acquired an individuality, a name and A history, they were exalted in power and wisdom, and they were on the whole benevolent and beneficent. On the other hand, the power of each god was limited by that of the rest of the divine society, as well as by the external world; they were not wholly wise, and they were far from being perfectly good according to the best human standards. Polytheism, especially in its polytheistic form, has had an immense fascination for mankind, and when discredited and over-thrown by spiritual and intellectual forces it has maintained itself under the ægis of Pantheism as a legitimised idolatry, while it has revived within the pale of Monotheism in the form of the worship of angels and of patron-saints. Man has felt drawn divine beings who were sufficiently like himself to make him feel at home, and who also surpassed the measures of humanity in a degree which inspired great confidence. Doubtless Polytheism has acted as a bulwark against Atheism; for while the monotheist who has found that the heavens were deaf to his petitions has often abandoned his faith in sorrow or in wrath, the polytheist could think that he had only made the mistake of applying to the wrong quarter, and could preserve his faith while he transferred his affections and his allegiance elsewhere.

3. In the dualistic system the many divine powers were reduced to two, the good attributes were concentrated in a good God and the bad attributes in an evil God, and the business of the universe and the decisive events in human history were distributed between them. In the pure form of Dualism the benevolent and the malevolent divinities have been conceived to be like in dignity and power, to be utterly irreconcilable, and to contend on equal terms in an age-long conflict of which the final issue is uncertain. It would, however, appear that in every system which has made a considerable figure in the world—save perhaps in Manichaeism—it has been believed that the good God was the greater in wisdom and in might, and was destined to prevail in the end. In the Scandinavian world-drama, the last scene is not the twilight of the Gods, but the dawn of the brighter day and the restoration of all things. The doctrine of Zoroaster was that, at the close of a conflict between Ormuzd and Ahriman, extending over many thousands of years, the good God gains the victory, purifies the earth and its inhabitants by fire, and builds for them a heaven of enduring holiness and felicity. Historic Christianity has had a dualistic aspect in that it has recognised Satan as the powerful adversary of God; but it rejected the principle of dualism by making the Devil completely subject to the permissive and controlling decree of God; and it achieved a final consolidation of the universe through the punishment of the diabolic spirits, and the reduction of their arrogant power to eternal impotence.

4. The series culminates in the monotheistic doctrine. The doctrine is met with in rudimentary form in the background of the religions of the lower culture, and in popular Polytheism there has usually been recognised a God who was stronger and wiser than all, and who also mirrored and to some extent supported the moral ideals of the nation or empire. The idea of the one mighty God is also met with in the henotheistic type of belief, in which the existence of many gods is affirmed, while yet one is worshipped and served to the exclusion of all others. A form of Monotheism was also reached when, as in the religion of Greece and Rome, the many gods of the Pantheon were made completely subject to the king of gods and men. And God was not left without a nobler witness. A lofty ethical Theism was proclaimed by many of the poets and the philosophers of Greece and Rome. In the schools of the prophets and of Jesus Christ the theistic doctrine was perfected, and through them it became a part of the common good of the civilised world.

The theistic doctrine may be summarised in the proposition that there is one God, the infinite personality, eternal and omnipresent, almighty, all-wise, and all-good, the Creator, the Preserver and the Governor of the world. The theistic conception, like the pantheistic, embraces the notes of unity, infinitude and spirituality, but there is the vital difference that spirituality is held to involve, not merely the exercise of one or more of the functions of spirit, but a conscious selfhood, which is the centre of the activities of thought and will along with such aspects of feeling as are compatible with the divine nature. In relation to time God possesses the attributes of eternity and immutability, in relation to space the attributes of immensity or omnipresence. He is not in time in the same way in which finite beings are in time—with a past, a present and a future; nor is He extended in space after the fashion of a world-aether: the essence of the doctrine is that God is the author of space and time, that the finite point of view is embraced by the divine intelligence, and that in every moment of time and at every point of space He is present to His creatures, holds them under His sway, and makes them partakers of His benefits and liable to His judgments. In power He is infinite, the omnipotent God, to whom all things are possible, save those which involve a contradiction, or which are inconsistent with His holy nature, and He is able to perform all that He wills. As infinite Spirit He is omniscient, possessing a knowledge which is intuitive and simultaneous, and which comprehends Himself and His perfections, all His creatures and all their actions, all things past, present and future, and all possibilities; and He is also the all-wise, who chooses the best ends, and who for the attainment of these ends employs the most suitable and efficacious means. He is clothed with all moral perfections, which may be summed up in righteousness and love. As righteous He is the just Lawgiver, who requires what is right, and the just Judge, who renders to all their due. Finally, God is love—the prototype as well as the source of all the gracious forms and of all the beneficent and sacrificing ministries whereby love makes its presence known in our world, possessing in perfect degree all that is shadowed forth in the love of fatherhood and in the highest human goodness. And as are the infinite attributes, so are His mighty works. He is the Creator of the world and of all that it contains. His methods have been various, but in the last resort the universe is His creation. What He has made He conserves—upholding the fabric and sustaining the energies of a system which apart from Him would drop back into nothingness. And this world He effectively governs—granting indeed to all creatures, and specially to the creatures He has endowed with reason and conscience, a relatively independent existence, but this on the footing that nothing befalls but by His permission, that the forces of evil are checked and impeded, according to the law ‘thus far and no further,’ and that all things are overruled by His power and wisdom for the furtherance of His Kingdom of truth and righteousness and love.

D.—There remains the agnostic type of thought which breaks in principle with the other theological types by refusing to construe God in terms of any mode of being that can be defined. By Agnosticism is here understood the doctrine which affirms that God is, but disclaims any knowledge of what God is. It is thus distinguished from the sceptical Atheism which is unable to affirm, but Which also refuses to deny, the existence of God. It is also to be distinguished from the partial Agnosticism met with in all the higher theologies which, while holding that man has a real knowledge of God, yet humbly concedes that he falls far short of comprehending the plenitude of the divine perfections, and the magnitude of the divine works in Creation and Providence. The general agnostic position has been reached from several sides. Materialism has always been found, on deeper reflection, to involve grave difficulties, speculative as well as ethical, and it is not therefore surprising that the dogmatic Materialism of an older generation has been largely replaced by a Naturalism or Positivism which confines its attention to phenomena, and declines to affirm anything either about matter or about God. Pantheism also has tended—and notably in the Hindu Schools—to pass over into a true Agnosticism. That God is, and is the essence of all, it was commonly affirmed, is the truth of truths, but what God is can only be declared by negatives.

Not in speaking, not by thinking,

Not by seeing is he apprehended.

He is: by this word and not otherwise

Does a man lay hold on God.

‘How should he know Him by whom he knows all this? That self is to be described by No, No. He is incomprehensible, for He cannot be comprehended. How, O beloved, should he know the Knower?’17 The Christian mystic has sometimes testified to the same effect. ‘The unity which is superior to minds,’ says the Areopagite, ‘transcends minds, the unity which transcends the subject is incapable of being made the object of thought, the goodness which is infinite cannot be compared to any other.’18

It was on this type of thought that Spencer fastened as that which, while conserving the deepest thought of religion, might also be accepted by Science as a fit tribute to the creative and sustaining power which is so far manifest in the processes of the world, though it is itself clothed with darkness as with a garment.

‘Have we not seen,’ he says, ‘how utterly unable our minds are to form a conception of that which underlies all phenomena? Does it not follow that the Ultimate Cause cannot be conceived because it is in every respect greater than can be conceived? And may we not therefore rightly refrain from assigning to it any attributes whatever, on the ground that such attributes, derived as they must be from our own natures, are not elevations but degradations?’… ‘By continually seeking to know and being continually thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the unknowable’19

II

Having examined the ideas which have prevailed about God, we have next to consider their value. And in judging them it has to be borne in mind that ideas have two aspects, and that in each aspect they fall to be tested by different criteria. ‘An idea,’ says Adamson, ‘may be regarded as a natural fact, an occurrence with natural antecedents and consequences. It may also mean the central apprehension in and through any process of the under standing.’20 In the first point of view an idea is contemplated as an entity which has the same footing in the world of empirical reality as a plant or an animal. In the second point of view the idea is viewed as something which seizes and represents some reality or event of the external or the internal world, and which, according as it succeeds or fails, is declared to be true or false. We may ask if a tree or a flower is true to type, but there is no sense in asking if it is true in the other sense, while this last is the all-important question that is inevitably raised about the mental entity which is known as an idea. We are at present concerned with man’s visions of God in their character of mental and historical facts, and as such they may first be tested by the criteria of value that are furnished by the religious idea and the history of religion.

In this respect, as has been said, theological ideas resemble the things of the vegetable kingdom. They have germinated, struck root and grown in the minds of individuals and of societies, they have developed a great variety of forms, they have flourished in profusion and confusion, they have been engaged in a struggle for existence with one another and with the environment, and as the result of this some have withered and died, some have lost ground and are threatened with extinction, and some have gone on from strength to strength, and have spread over the face of the earth. And further, they lend themselves to the same kind of judgment that is passed on species and varieties of plant-life. The plants are valued in accordance with a standard of excellence which is immanent in themselves, and which is chiefly the criterion of utility or serviceableness to mankind, but also in part aesthetic—embodying the elements of beauty in form and colour which have been observed in the various classes. And the various conceptions of the Divine Being may be similarly valued, according to the measure in which they meet the demands which are made upon God for the satisfaction of man’s spiritual life. It is taken for granted, by the believing and the unbelieving alike, that there is some standard of excellence by which worthy and unworthy ideas of God are to be distinguished, and this standard may be somewhat definitely fixed in the light of what we have found to be the fundamental types of religious experience and endeavour. The first and chief criterion is spiritual utility—whether and in what degree a conception of the Divine Being has ascribed to Him the power, the wisdom and the benevolence which are needed as the basis and the guarantee of a substantial salvation. The second is goodness—whether and in what degree a Being proposed as divine is one before whom a moral being can bow in reverence, and in whose behests his conscience can acquiesce. The third is beauty—whether and in what degree the Divine Being is resplendent with qualities that take captive the heart, and win from it the tribute of love and devotion. Finally, there is the criterion of light—whether and how far a doctrine of God gives the mental satisfaction of clearly showing forth the Supreme Being, and of making the universe and the human situation seem intelligible in the light of the Lord. Some use has already been made of these criteria in the arrangement of the ideas in each theological series, and it remains to apply it in the comparison of the ideas which have emerged as the mature result in each series. And first of Materialism and Agnosticism, which as tested by the religious standard are at the bottom of the scale.

1. The religious claims of the materialistic series need not detain us. The Supreme Being of the materialistic system possesses one attribute of divinity—the attribute of immeasurable power; but as it works in blind mechanical fashion, and without any reference to spiritual ends, it makes a mockery of man’s highest hopes, and it substitutes for salvation such amount of well-being and happiness as can be extracted out of earthly conditions by the ephemeral visitants of the planet. The materialistic creed further outrages the moral sense by asking us to revere as the Supreme Being a colossus on the sub-ethical plane, while it flouts the religious affections with the Vision of a Juggernaut which ruthlessly destroys the children of men, and overwhelms the good and the evil in a common doom. The most that might be claimed is that Materialism brings light into a realm of darkness—a service which religious thought has regarded as an element of the chief good; and that, however painful it may be to accept the situation which the philosophy reveals, it at least gives the opportunity of practising the virtue of submission on which the religious mind has set high store. But the system has proved quite unable to fulfil the promise of intellectual satisfaction which was offered as compensation for the spiritual loss. The material substance which was declared to be the ultimate and permanent reality has turned out to be itself a very elusive and dubious entity. From the empirical standpoint the atoms of Lucretius have been replaced by a succession of atoms of different kinds, and the ‘one sole solid in the world’ has been melted into mass-points or electrons. From the epistemological side the knowledge professed by Materialism seems to be highly suspect: matter as known presupposes a knowing mind, and to say that it is also the cause of mind seems as incredible as to say that the son who was begotten by his father was also the progenitor of his father, or that the horse-shoes which have been hammered by the blacksmith on the anvil were also the anterior and superior power that brought the blacksmith into being.

2. The religious value of Agnosticism may not be rated much higher. Spencer’s proposal was to end the conflict between Science and Religion by a concordat under which the one should concede the existence of a First Cause, and the other should concede that its nature is unknown and unknowable, but to these overtures it was very naturally replied that this was like purchasing life at the cost of what makes life worth living. There would still remain an Infinite Being to evoke a sentiment of awe, and it would be some gratification to the religious mind to be allowed to pass beyond the things that are seen to a transcendental cause; but causal explanation is only an inconsiderable portion of the blessings which have been expected from communion with God; and in general it may be said that the notion that this conserves the substance of religion could only commend itself to those for whom religion had previously meant little or nothing. The unknown and unknowable God of Agnosticism has indeed been the God of certain mystics, and has supported their piety in secret ways, but to the general mass of mankind it must seem that such a God is little better than a nonentity, and under His reign their spiritual life would certainly languish and wither. The agnostic idea is in conflict with the normal demands of the religious nature, since it is impossible to build upon the unknown the hope of a salvation, impossible to render obedience to one who has made no clear revelation of His will, and at least very difficult to love when the object is credited with no beauty and goodness that may delight the eye and lay their spell on the heart.

3. Pantheism has made bold religious claims, and has supported them by strong credentials. The organic type of Pantheism, in which the supreme reality is thought to be of the nature of the live thing, is, however, little superior, as tested by religious standard, to the materialistic doctrine. The higher Pantheism, on the other hand, which affirms that the one real being is of the nature of spirit, offers much in satisfaction of the religious demands. For if it be the case, as Pantheism teaches, that I am a mode or a part of God, there is no need to feel any anxiety about salvation, since I am in possession of it now and eternally, in virtue of my Identification with the one Being that truly exists, and before whom all the evils and terrors of the world of appearance are dissipated as a vain show and an empty menace. I can surely reckon, it may be thought, on God doing the best for me, since what He does in and for me He achieves for Himself. But from this boon large deductions fall to be made. The finite personality is destroyed by being merged in God, and it is impossible to set much store on a salvation when no persons properly so-called are left to appropriate it. If Materialism is a rock, Pantheism is a whirlpool; and as Professor Clement Webb has observed, ‘if the religious nature will not be content to see its God dashed to pieces on the one, no more will it suffer its own self, which it knows to be God’s darling, to be overwhelmed in the other.’21 Nor does the pantheistic doctrine meet the other conditions of the religious criterion. It appeals, indeed, to the sense of obligation, and disposes the soul to utter resignation; but it provokes the moral nature to protest and revolt since most people find it impossible to pay reverence to a Being that is equally at home in the soul of the saint and of the libertine. If I may well think too highly of myself to consent to be obliterated in God, much more may I think too highly of God to make Him entirely responsible for me. Nor does Pantheism adequately meet the aspirations of the heart. It is true that, as we saw, pantheistic Mysticism is associated with a love of God which could become a veritable intoxication of the soul, but the general mass of mankind have found it beyond their power to love a God who, being impersonal, cannot know and love and truly care. It is evidence of this inadequacy that Pantheism has usually allied itself with Polytheism, and so has provided deities who, notwithstanding their limitations and moral defects, had at least an eye to see, a heart to sympathise, and an arm outstretched to save. Nor does Pantheism satisfy the religious demand for knowledge of God. Its strength, it is often claimed, lies on the intellectual side, and as a fact the pantheistic idea has been the core of some of the great philosophical systems. And it is undeniable that there is an intellectual satisfaction in thinking of the universe and its contents as possessing the unity of a system in which there is one Being only, and in which all that happens is directly referable to the divine causality. There are, however, other systems—for example, Calvinism—which have found it possible to ascribe a real unity to the total scheme of things without the necessity of sacrificing to this ideal the personality of man and the honour of God. But whatever be the merits of Pantheism on the theoretical side, it at least fails to provide the illuminating conception of God which is demanded by the religious mind. For the pantheistic schools have only been in agreement in their negation of the personality of God and of doctrines which are governed by this conception, and when it has been affirmed that God in Spirit, there has been further controversy, as was observed, as to whether His essence is to think or to will. And in neither ease does this idea bring much enlightenment; for while it is easy to grasp the notion of a person who does not think, or of a Person who has no will-power, the notion of a process of thought or of a series of volitions without a person to whom they belong is one which may well seem to ordinary persons to be bewildering, if not absurd.

4. There should be little doubt as to the religious pre-eminence of the doctrine of the one God, who is both the Infinite Being and a personal Being, and who in the manner of a self-conscious being is the almighty, the all-wise and the all-good. If religion Be the quest of a salvation, the perfect guarantee of its attainment is given by faith in the God who, as infinite in power, is able to overcome all opposition, to ward off all danger, and to bestow the greatest blessings; who, as infinite in wisdom, can employ effectual means for the accomplishment of His ends; and who, as the all-good, is disposed to use His wisdom and His omnipotence for the highest well-being of His creation and of the children of men. He can be wholly revered, since He possesses all moral perfections; and since His will is a holy and loving will, His laws can be obeyed with all the energy of the moral nature, while the hard task of resignation is made easier by the assurance of His goodness. And love has naturally been interwoven with reverence and obedience. Theism, finally, has undertaken, as no other theology has done, to enrich the religious mind with treasures of wisdom and of knowledge. While Materialism, though claiming real knowledge of the Supreme Being, robs Him of the character of God, while Agnosticism professes invincible ignorance, and Pantheism is at odds with itself, it has been generally characteristic of the theistic school that it has pro-pounded to the world an elaborate doctrine of the being, the attributes and the works of God that was at once luminous and coherent. And it is to be observed that the criteria have been most fully satisfied by the form which the theistic doctrine has assumed in the Christian system. For Christianity not only re-published as axiomatic the doctrine of the infinite attributes which is the foundation of the hopes of salvation, but it gave new views of the wondrous ways of God in history which deepened man’s confidence in His wisdom, while by the proclamation of the incarnation of God in Christ it deepened the confidence in His love. Moreover, ever since God was seen and worshipped in Christ it has been made easier for men to cast their lives in the moulds of duty to the holy God, while with the vision of the God of self-sacrificing love and of unmerited grace it was made possible even for the commonplace soul to love the God of the infinite attributes with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and with all the mind. And lastly, the religious demand for a satisfying knowledge of God has been uniquely met in the religion which was enriched by the self-disclosure of God in Christ, and which in its Theology has set forth a systematic body of doctrine concerning the being, the purposes and the ways of the Infinite God. It may, indeed, be thought that the doctrine of the Trinity involved Theism in difficulties, and that instead of enlightening the general mind it laid on it the burden of an impenetrable mystery; but there are aspects of the doctrine, notably the divinity of Christ, which are full of light to the popular mind, while to the Christian gnostic it may well seem to be a great addition to his knowledge to believe that God has an adequate object which he eternally knows and loves because of the subsistence in the unity of the Godhead of the distinctions of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

The judgment that the theistic doctrine best meets the religious wants of man is supported by the preponderant testimony of the human race. A Theism of a rudimentary type is commonly met with as an alternative to the idolatrous faiths of the animistic culture; in more developed form it has been the latent theology of multitudes who acknowledged the many Gods of the polytheistic systems; and it has been the core of the teaching of the religions which have entered into the main stream of the history of the race during the last two thousand years. In its Mohammedan form it gave a creed, an ideal, and religious enthusiasm to dominant races of Asia and Africa; and in its Christian form it took captive the mind of the Western world, was professed by the nations which assumed the leadership in the march of civilisation, and was accompanied by the corroborative signs of the deepening and the enrichment of the moral life. It is true that India has on the whole stood sponsor for the pantheistic doctrine, but it has also had its succession of theological schools which have resolutely reaffirmed the personality and the moral attributes of the Infinite Being; and it may be conjectured that if the Christian Church as a whole had had the same confidence as Augustine and Calvin in the sovereignty of God, and had put in the forefront the doctrine of the divine decrees, and of the entire dependence of man for salvation on the prevenient and irresistible grace of God, it would nave made much greater progress than has been so far achieved in the conversion of India to the Christian faith.

We have thus passed in review man’s visions of God, and we have given reasons for holding the theistic doctrine to be the best after its kind in respect of spiritual utility, goodness, beauty, and luminousness. And it is at the least probable that all of the ideas about God have had some value, and that the ideal which has emerged as the greatest must have been of the highest value. But ideas, as was observed, are distinguished from mere biological entities by the circumstance that they take hold of the world or of parts of it in a peculiar way which gives them the characters of truth and falsehood; and there is a prima facie probability that a mental fact which has indubitable excellences of the utilitarian, aesthetic and ethical order has also a title to respect in the intellectual or theoretical aspect. That any idea of the Divine Being which has found a lodgment in the devout mind, and nourished the spiritual life, should be baseless, and especially that the purest and noblest form of the idea should be utterly false, is a view which seems to me to be ruled out by the unity of the system within which the human race has arisen, and by the unity of the power which is manifest and operative in the general scheme of things. For if it should turn out that an idea has emerged in the historical process which man has been constrained to value as supremely useful, beautiful and good, while yet on testing it by his powers of reason he was compelled to declare it false, this would mean that the power which has revealed itself in the world is at odds with itself, and that what it has accredited in one way it has laboured to discredit in another. The actual position rather take to be that the human mind, approaching the question under the impulse of the religious instinct and with the equipment of the religious tendencies, and also as subject to the play of vitalising spiritual energies, came into possession of ideas of the Divine Being which culminated in the sublime theistic conception; and that when reason in the name of Philosophy undertook the examination of the subject, it found indeed matter enough to reject in the imperfections of the lower theological forms, but it also found that the best work had been done, and that its chief work was to reproduce, expand and justify what had been first given to mankind from the religious side in the highest vision of God. In any case it may well be held—as a presupposition of the discussion of the truth of theism—that the doctrine of God which is the richest result of the religious life of the race on the theoretical side, and which has been interwoven with the highest development of the intellectual and the moral life of the race, is entitled to be regarded as true unless and until an over whelming proof can be offered from the rational side to the effect that it is either self-contradictory or that it comes into collision with some other realm of indisputable reality.

• 1.

  Theism, ³, 1880, p. 32.

• 2.

  This classification may be given in tabular form as follows:

  A. THINGS. Sensible Objects.
  1. Inanimate. (a) Artificial; (b) Natural. Fetishism, Nature-worship. Materialism.		2. Animate. Plant-worship, Animal-worship. Organic Pantheism.
  B. FORCES. Invisible Energies.
  1. Sporadic. Mana. Forces and Laws of Nature. Idolatry. Naturistic Polytheism. Dynamistic Pantheism.		2. Universal. The Principle of the Universe. Spiritual Pantheism.
  C. SELVES.
  1. Human and Subhuman. Souls, Ghosts, Demons. Animism. Poly-daemonism.	2. Superhuman. Gods. Humanistic Polytheism. Dualism.	3. Infinite. God. Monotheism.
  D. MYSTERIES.
  The Unknown Deity. Agnosticism.

• 3.

  Origin and Growth of the Conception of God, 1892, p. 97.

• 4.

  The Principles of Sociology, 1885, vol. i. pp. 346 ff.: ‘Plant-worship.’

• 5.

  Lectures on Heroes, i.

• 6.

  Anti-Theistic. Theories, 1879, p. 417.

• 7.

  The Melanesians, 1891, pp. 118 ff.

• 8.

  Das Werden des Gottesglaubens, 1916, pp. 33 ff.

• 9.

  Khandogya-Upanishad, S.B.E., 1900, i. pp. 5, 104.

• 10.

  Goethe, Gott und Welt, Proænion.

• 11.

  Erl. Ausg., vi. 23.

• 12.

  xi. 194, 2.

• 13.

  ii. 591. Drews, Deutsche Spekulation, 1895, i. pp. 265 ff. A different interpretation of Hegel’s theology is given by Hutcheson Stirling, The Secret of Hegel, 1898, pp. 720 ff.

• 14.

  Condensed from Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, i. 140.

• 15.

  Primitive Culture, ii. p. 113.

• 16.

  Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899.

• 17.

  Brih. Upanishad, iv. 5, 16, 65.

• 18.

  De Divinis Nominibus, passim.

• 19.

  First Principles ⁶, 1904, pp. 83, 84.

• 20.

  The Development of Modern Philosophy, 1903, i. pp. 113–14.

• 21.

  Group Theories of Religion, 1916, p. 178.