now,' says Mr. Frederic
Harrison, 'what is meant by the Power and Goodness of an Almighty
Creator. I know what is meant by the genius and patience {85} and
sympathy of man. But what is the All, or the Good, or the True, or the
Beautiful? ... The "All" is not good nor beautiful: it is full of
horror and ruin.... There lies this original blot on every form of
philosophic Pantheism when tried as the basis of a religion or as the
root-idea of our lives, that it jumbles up the moral, the unmoral, the
non-human and the anti-human world, the animated and the inanimate,
cruelty, filth, horror, waste, death, virtue and vice, suffering and
victory, sympathy and insensibility.'[13] Where these distinctions are
lost, where this confusion exists, what logically must be the
consequence? Honesty and dishonesty, truth and falsehood, purity and
impurity, kindness and brutality, are put upon a level, are alike
manifestations of the One or the All.

It is said that in our day the sense of sin has grown weak, that men
are not troubled {86} by it as once they were. There is a morbid,
scrupulous remorsefulness for wrong-doing, a desponding conviction that
repentance and restoration are impossible, which may well be put away.
But that sin should be no longer held to be sin, that evil should be
wrought and the worker experience no pang of shame, would surely
indicate moral declension and decay. Were the time to come when,
universally, mankind should commit those actions and cherish those
passions which, through all ages in all lands, have gone by the name of
sin, should become so heedless to the voice of conscience, that
conscience should cease to speak, the time would have come when men,
being past feeling, would devote themselves with greediness to anything
that was vile, so long as it was pleasant, the bonds of society would
be loosened and destruction would be at hand. The Religion of the
Universe ignores the facts of life, the sorrow, the struggle, {87} the
depravity, the need of redemption. Fortunately, human beings in
general are still inclined to mourn because of imperfection or of
baseness: still they are inclined at times to cry out, 'Who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?' and still they have the
opportunity of joyfully or humbly saying, 'I thank God through Jesus
Christ our Lord.'

'And now at this day,' listen to the ungrudging admission of perhaps
the most earnest English apostle of Pantheism, Mr. Allanson