what short of a mere abstraction, you do succeed in maintaining a tolerably decent limit of spiritual notions and moral requisitions; still you have no advantage over Pantheism, which responds to every want that is really moral, and displaces a far-off Providence only to bring it more intelligibly near, and to re-establish it in another form. In short, it is useless renouncing theistic idolatry by halves; the purifying process carries us involuntarily onwards to the idea of pantheistie immanency, which properly considered effaces unworthy notions at their root, and irrevocably places the reward of virtue in itself.1 It should, however, be noticed that the idea satisfying the scientific or intellectual, answers also to the moral craving, only on condition that faith regards the universe teleologically beyond the view of science as a system of wisely beneficent though inflexible order,—caring for the least while overruling and subordinating the greatest; inwardly endowing and directing as well as outwardly imparting and controlling; a special Providence, but not by special acts of interference; and better providing for the individual through the perfect arrangements of the general than by responding to the short-sighted appeals of selfish devotion. The attitude of modern pantheism is one of hopeful resignation, adding to belief in unbending law a by no means irrational faith in beneficent purpose. It is this which distinguishes it from Spinoza's, which, in discarding egoism, abandoned faith, and treated final causes as human fictions.2 แ 1 "Beatitudo non est virtutis premium, sed ipsa virtus." * Pantheism is more moral than theism, as affording the only plausible explanation of freedom and of evil. For what becomes of free will-the very basis of all morality-when confronted with eternal Omnipotence? How can permissive evil" consist with a ruler assumed to be omnipotent as well as good? What avails it to distinguish two or more wills in the divine mind, the antecedent, subsequent, or permissive, when the whole is covered by Omnipotence? Theism was thus obliged either to make a partial surrender of omnipotence to a satanic rival, or else to deny the substantial existence of evil. "Malum est bono carere ;"-"Nihil est malum," says Augustin, "nisi boni privatio." And yet the main charge against pantheism is that of ob The idea of divine immanency was popularised by the great German poets, formed into a poetical philosophy by literating moral distinctions, and proclaiming the indifferency of human action under the plea of necessity. Indeed the same consideration which partly induces the theist to deny the unity of the world by separating God from it, led Spinoza, in restoring the unity, to deny moral distinctions. And, unquestionably, pantheistic as well as theistic ideas have sometimes been immorally applied; for instance by the Libertines of Geneva and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. But these aberrations were really a dereliction of pantheism, a subordination of the universal to the individual, making God a mere excuse for human passions and perversities; and the paradoxes of Spinoza result not so much from pantheism, as from the abstract and imperfect character of a pantheism which absorbs all differences, and leaves no room for individuality and freedom. Difficulties arise from insisting on the incessant and unseasonable use of the (relatively speaking) insane language of the absolute in a life made up of relativities. For who avers the absolute perfection of the universe here or now, as contemplated within given limits of space or time? Who justifies crime or loves imperfection? In the moral dialectics of the universe every wrong comes into inevitable conflict not only with right, but with other wrong; each evil act implies another's wrongful suffering, inevitably leading to a reaction by which evil, a thing essentially self-refuting and self-defeating, is continually disappointed and extruded. For instance, the despot who pretends to exercise unlimited control over the will of others, contradicts himself by subverting the only ground on which any government can stand; and so it is of evil generally, which destroys itself in the same proportion in which it undermines the conditions of social well-being. Perfection is humanly to be conceived only as an approximation or evolution. All may be divine, yet not always and alike divine; as the colourless beam consists of indefinitely multitudinous pulsations and refractions emanating from one luminary, so the infinite unity ceases to be paradoxical if we allow for its infinite differences and gradations; the universal may be as the microcosm of the human, that "mingled yarn of good and ill together," in which weakness and imperfection are at first the more prominently conspicuous, the better nature of the "inward man" realizing its inherent excellence only in slow processes of development, assimilation, extrusion, etc.; often exhibiting symptoms of disease, and undergoing pain or even amputation, yet still evolving a better life, and on the whole evincing unceasing tendencies to good. In theism evil is admittted to be inexplicable, and human freedom is incompatible with divine absoluteness;* in Spinoza's pantheism, too, freedom disappears with evil, because the "infinite substance" is a dead abstraction, an unreal necessity, still refusing to coalesce with the actual however you may insist on combining them. Think of it as the "self-subsisting," and the several members of the great organism become conceivably susceptible of approximate perfectibility and also of a relative freedom far more real than the severed freedom of the theist, though of course subject to general conditions; a freedom, too, implying a dignity unknown to the theist, who is startled by the sentiment unhesitatingly versified by Angelus Silesius from Eccart, claiming the individual as the essential Now of the Eternal: "Ich weiss dass ohne mich Gott nicht ein Nun kann leben, If these considerations be unsatisfactory, it will be vain to apply to theism Schelling, and reduced to a system of world-evolution by Hegel. And assuredly it were a narrow piety which, under entirely altered circumstances of opinion and philosophy, should insist on limiting religion to the mere contemplation of the Infinite, while disparaging as unworthy the higher name all that we know or hope to know of the forms and arrangements of natural order. Only superstitious prejudice or professional jealousy can wish to continue the nominalistic severance of nature from God and science from religion. The latter reclaims only its proper right when, instead of dwelling apart in a remote corner of the soul, and sitting with folded arms and straining eyes before inexplicable mystery, it takes a free range throughout the dominion of the intellect, and confers a higher dignity on science by making it its own. "Quo magis rerum naturam cognoscimus, eo magis Deum cognoscimus." Science may be truly religious even when theologically silent, and conscientiously holding itself aloof from teleological ideas. We are indemnified for the seeming blank encountered at the verge of the horizon by the beauties of the country traversed, and though unable to discern the source of light, see it indirectly refracted in the manifold colours of the transparency. The area of Natural theology has been properly extended beyond the limit which once made it the preface or appendix to a larger treatise, the mere preparatory introduction to revealed, or the repository of supplementary analogies to be invoked in its defence. The first of the "two books," now better understood, leaves us less dependent on the second; and the notion of Deity, detached from its niche outside the universe, enriches the entire circumference of nature and of thought. Nor can there be any reason. why free idealism, emancipated from the embarrassing responsibilities of the dogmatist, should be scared by fears of inconsistency into restricting itself in these high matters to the contemplation of a single theory or system. Every system occupying a place in history may, in spite of Voltaire's ridicule, suggest something of instruction or of warning; either as prescribing the aim and order of human existence, as marking out more carefully the limits of thought, or as illustrating the hazards of speculative extremes; such as that which forgot the world in Spinoza, encountered an "infinite atom" in Leibnitz,' or verged to atheism and dogmatism in Hegel. But, apart from uncertainties of speculation, reflection finds a firm basis of faith and guide of practice in the moral order of the Universe, superseding vain questionings about the nature of Deity, as intimated by Schiller in the lines,— General Severance of Natural from Artificial Belief. From the attempt to trace summarily the restorative work of philosophical theology, attention reverts to the general course of the negative or critical process which was constantly and intimately connected with it. The contest between faith and reason was from the earliest times a struggle for exclusive supremacy. But its form was a series of compromises, in the course of which, in proportion as the importance of natural religion was recognised, supernatural was more and more displaced as superfluous or impossible. No natural religion was recognised by the Reformers; yet their admission of a 1 The inconsistencies of the Monadology in its last issues are pointed out by Kuno Fischer, Leibnitz und seine Schule, pp. 407, 505. 2 The many phenomenal perplexities interfering with the theory of a moral theodicæa are well discussed by E. Zeller in three papers in the Tübingen Journal (Vols. 5 and 6).—“ Über die moralische Weltordnung.” "notitiæ scintillula," of an internal as well as external revelation, contained the germ of important changes. The inner light became more prominently self-reliant and also more obviously inconsistent in Socinianism, which, while making revelation the sole source of religious knowledge, recognized in human nature independent germs of morality, and acknowledged this morality to be religious, even without the religious knowledge only to be got supernaturally. The Arminians admitted the possibility of a natural origination even of religious knowledge through due cultivation of the faculties; but they thought revelation necessary, if not to render the impossible possible, at least to make what was practically very difficult comparatively easy. Hesitation seems to vanish in Spinoza; to him reason was the sole revelation; yet even he admitted the provisional utility at least of that picturesque Biblical form of it in which it is brought near to common understandings by aid of narrative and imagery. The incompatibility of reason and traditional faith was for the first time distinctly asserted, though still with a different sort of reservation, by Bayle. But before the contrariety could be clearly seen, and the ancillary relation of reason effectually obliterated and reversed, attempts to reconcile the jarring elements by forced artificial expedients were renewed in various forms. A new system of dogmatical scholasticism, similar in kind to that which had so signally failed already, was formed by the Protestant orthodoxy of the 17th century in the hands of Quenstedt, Calovius, and Voet. The path of compromise and equivocation was initiated by Socinianism, which like an open doorway became the avenue to better things, though in 1 See "Ulrich Zwingli," by Chr. Sigwart, p. 44. 2 The incompatibility was virtually recognised by the Nominalists; Luther hesitated; the Sorbonne anathematized the notion that a thing could be true in philosophy and at the same time false in theology; Protestant theology treated revealed truths as necessarily contradictory to unregenerate reason; Bayle as contradictory to man's reason generally. |