f religious belief, fetishism, animism, serpent
worship, demon worship, the case is still worse. The only deities that
are practically recognized in these rude faiths are generally supposed
to be malevolent beings, who have not only fixed an evil fate upon men,
but whose active and continued function it is to torment them. Though
there is a lingering belief in a Supreme Being who created all things,
yet he is far off and incomprehensible. He has left his creatures in the
hands of inferior deities, at whose mercy they pass a miserable
existence. Looking at the dark facts of life and having no revelation of
a merciful God they form their estimates of Deity from their trials,
hardships, fears, and they are filled with dread; all their religious
rites have been devised for appeasing the powers that dominate and
distress the world. And yet a pronounced agnostic has asked us to
believe that even this wide-spread horror, this universal nightmare of
heathen superstition, is more humane than the Calvinistic creed.

If we inquire into the tendency of all types of ancient or modern
pantheism in this particular phase, we shall find them, without
exception, fatalistic. They not merely make God the author of sin--they
make Him the sinner. Our misdeeds are not our acts, but God's. Thus the
vaunted Bhagavad Gita, uniting the Sankhyan and the Vedanta
philosophies, makes Krishna say to Arjuna: "All actions are incessantly
performed by operation of the qualities of Prakriti (the self-existing
Essence). Deluded by the thought of individuality, the soul vainly
believes itself to be the doer. The soul, existing from eternity, devoid
of qualities, imperishable, abiding in the body, acts not, nor is by any
act polluted. He who sees that actions are performed by Prakriti alone,
and that the soul is not an actor, perceives the truth."[199] Such is
Hindu pantheism. Yet this most inconsistent system charges man with
guilt. It represents his inexorable fate as pursuing him through endless
transmigrations, holding over him the lash of retribution, while it
exacts the very last farthing. Still, from first to last, it is not he
that acts, but some fractional part of the One only Existence which
fills all space.

The philosophy of Spinoza was quite as fatalistic as the Hindu Vedanta.
He taught, according to Schwegler, that "The finite has no independent
existence in itself: it exists because the unrestrained productive
energy of the (infinite) Substan