rees yielded fruit all the year round.
At that time the only deity was Venus, who was worshipped with bloodless
offerings alone. Still, it must be remembered that, whether consistently
or not, Empedocles produced an elaborate work on the Nature of Things,
to which Lucretius makes eloquent and earnest acknowledgments. But that
very approval of Lucretius forbids us to regard the older poet as a
Pantheist in our sense of the term. For certainly to him the Universe
cannot have been a living God.

[Sidenote: Genesis of Modern Religious Pantheism.]

Between this philosophical idea of a Oneness, not thought of as God, and
the spiritual contemplation of a universal Life of which all things are
modes, the highest thoughts of men hovered during the process by which,
in some measure under extraneous influences, Greek speculation finally
produced Neo-platonism--or, as we might say in the current phraseology
of our time--a restatement of Plato's teaching. Of this school, arising
in the early Christian centuries, some leaders were undoubtedly
Pantheists. But we cannot say this of Plato himself, nor of his master
Socrates. For though these great men were more profoundly interested in
the moral order of the world than in any questions of physical nature,
or even of metaphysical subtleties, they were never given to the kind of
contemplation suggested above in extracts from the Classical Books of
the East, the contemplation which educes the moral ideal from
unreserved subordination of self to the Universe as of the part to the
Whole. Doubtless the inspiration imparted by Socrates to a disciple in
mere intellect his superior, and the resulting moral and religious
suggestions abounding in the Dialogues, did much to impel the current of
religious evolution toward that spiritual aspect of the Infinite All
which fascinated some of the Neo-Platonists, and received its most
splendid exposition from Spinoza. But the conditions imposed by
necessary brevity compel me to pass by those classic names with this
acknowledgment, and to hasten toward the fuller revelation of Pantheism
as a religion.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Some scholars think they can trace Christian, influences in
the exceptionally late Bhagavad Gita, hereafter quoted. But it is a
disputed point; and certainly in the case of the Vedas and pre-Christian
literature arising out of them even Jewish influence was impossible.]

[Footnote 3: As imperious brevity excludes full explanatio