nimagined.

And truly such a God is not far from every one of us; for if we survey
the broader and deeper currents of men's thoughts during the last three
thousand years, we may observe two great and steady sets as having
carried away with them the more eligible races of mankind. The one is
a tendency from Polytheism to Monotheism; the other from Polytypism to
Monotypism of the earliest forms of life-all animal and vegetable forms
having at length come to be regarded as differentiations of a single
substance-to wit, protoplasm.

No man does well so to kick against the pricks as to set himself against
tendencies of such depth, strength, and permanence as this. If he is
to be in harmony with the dominant opinion of his own and of many past
ages, he will see a single God-impregnate substance as having been the
parent from which all living forms have sprung. One spirit, and one form
capable of such modification as its directing spirit shall think fit;
one soul and one body, one God and one Life.

For the time has come when the two unities so painfully arrived at must
be joined together as body and soul, and be seen not as two, but one.
There is no living organism untenanted by the Spirit of God, nor any
Spirit of God perceivable by man apart from organism embodying and
expressing it. God and the Life of the World are like a mountain, which
will present different aspects as we look at it from different sides,
but which, when we have gone all round it, proves to be one only. God
is the animal and vegetable world, and the animal and vegetable world is
God.

I have repeatedly said that we ought to see all animal and vegetable
life as uniting to form a single personality. I should perhaps explain
this more fully, for the idea of a compound person is one which at first
is not very easy to grasp, inasmuch as we are not conscious of any but
our more superficial aspects, and have therefore until lately failed
to understand that we are ourselves compound persons. I may perhaps be
allowed to quote from an earlier work.

"Each cell in the human body is now admitted by physiologists to be a
person with an intelligent soul, differing from our own more complex
soul in degree and not in kind, and, like ourselves, being born, living,
and dying. It would appear, then, as though 'we,' 'our souls,' or
'selves,' or 'personalities,' or by whatever name we may prefer to
be called, are but the consensus and full-flowing stream of countless
s