to merge all the life of the physical
universe in Him, and leave Him as the inner and sustaining Power of it
all. It is Pantheism to rest in this conception: to merge Him in the
universe and see Him only there: and not rather to dwell with Him as
the Living, Holy, Sympathising Will, on Whose free affection the
cluster of created things lies and plays, as the spray upon the
ocean.'[11]

VI

God is _not_ as we are, and yet He _is_ as we are. God is not made in
the image of man, but man is made in the image of God. It is through
human goodness and human purity and human love that we attain our best
conceptions of the Divine Goodness and Purity and Love. 'If ye being
evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more will
your Heavenly Father {83} give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?'
Picture to yourself what is highest and best in the human relationship
of father and child: be sure that the Heavenly Father will not fall
below, but will infinitely transcend, that standard. All the justice
and goodness which we have seen on earth are the feebler reflection of
His. It is by learning that the utmost height of human goodness is but
a little way towards Him that we learn to think of Him at all aright.
But the justice and the love by which he acts are different only in
degree, and not in kind, from ours. When we think of God as altogether
such as we are, we degrade Him, we have before us the image of the
imperfect; when we try to think of Him under no image and to discard
all figures, He vanishes into unreality and nothingness, but when we
see Him in Christ, we have before us that which we can grasp and
understand, and that in which there is no imperfection.

{84}

If there is no God but the universe, we have a universe without a God.
Worship is meaningless, Faith is a mockery, Hope is a delusion. If the
universe is God, all things in the universe are of necessity Divine.
The distinction between right and wrong is broken down. In a sense
very different from that in which the phrase was originally employed,
'Whatever is, is right.' Nothing can legitimately be stigmatised as
wrong, for there is nothing which is not God. 'If all that is is God,
then truth and error are equally manifestations of God. If God is all
that is, then we hear His voice as much in the promptings to sin as in
the solemn imperatives of Conscience. This is the inexorable logic of
Pantheism, however disguised.'[12] 'I k