ves seen.

I will also show in what way this Being exercises a moral government
over the world, and rewards and punishes us according to His own laws.

Having done this I shall proceed to compare this conception of God with
those that are currently accepted, and will endeavour [sic] to show that
the ideas now current are in truth efforts to grasp the one on which
I shall here insist. Finally, I shall persuade the reader that the
differences between the so-called atheist and the so-called theist are
differences rather about words than things, inasmuch as not even the
most prosaic of modern scientists will be inclined to deny the existence
of this God, while few theists will feel that this, the natural
conception of God, is a less worthy one than that to which they have
been accustomed.

CHAPTER III. PANTHEISM.

THE Rev. J. H. Blunt, in his "Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, etc.,"
defines Pantheists as "those who hold that God is everything, and
everything is God."

If it is granted that the value of words lies in the definiteness and
coherency of the ideas that present themselves to us when the words
are heard or spoken-then such a sentence as "God is everything and
everything is God" is worthless.

For we have so long associated the word "God" with the idea of a Living
Person, who can see, hear, will, feel pleasure, displeasure, etc., that
we cannot think of God, and also of something which we have not been
accustomed to think of as a Living Person, at one and the same time, so
as to connect the two ideas and fuse them into a coherent thought. While
we are thinking of the one, our minds involuntarily exclude the other,
and vice versa; so that it is as impossible for us to think of anything
as God, or as forming part of God, which we cannot also think of as a
Person, or as a part of a Person, as it is to produce a hybrid between
two widely distinct animals. If I am not mistaken, the barrenness of
inconsistent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species or
genera of plants and animals, are one in principle-sterility of hybrids
being due to barrenness of ideas, and barrenness of ideas arising from
inability to fuse unfamiliar thoughts into a coherent conception. I have
insisted on this at some length in "Life and Habit," but can do so no
further here. (Note: Butler returned to this subject in "Luck, or
cunning?" which was originally published in 1887.}

In like manner we have so long associated the word "P