the thought-form through which
the individuality finds expression on our present limited plane; the
soul is a man's consciousness of himself as apart from all the rest of
existence and even from God--it is the bay seeing itself as the bay and
not as the ocean; the spirit is the true being thus limited and
expressed--it is the deathless divine within us. The soul therefore is
what we make it; the spirit we can neither make nor mar, for it is at
once our being and God's. What we are here to do is to grow the soul,
that is to manifest the true nature of the spirit, to build up that
self-realisation which is God's objective with the universe as a whole
and with every self-conscious unit in particular.

Where, then, someone will say, is the dividing line between our being
and God's? There is no dividing line except from our side. The ocean
of consciousness knows that the bay has never been separate from
itself, although the bay is only conscious of the ocean on the outer
side of its own being. But, the reader may protest, This is Pantheism.
No, it is not. Pantheism is a technical term in philosophic parlance
and means something quite different from this. It stands for a
Fate-God, a God imprisoned in His universe, a God who cannot help
Himself and does not even know what He is about, a blind force which
here breaks out into a rock and there into Ruskin and is equally
indifferent to either. But that is not my God. My God is my deeper
Self and yours too; He is the Self of the universe and knows all about
it. He is never baffled and cannot be baffled; the whole cosmic
process is one long incarnation and uprising of the being of God from
itself to itself. With Tennyson you can call this doctrine the Higher
Pantheism if you like, but it is the very antithesis of the Pantheism
which has played such a part in the history of thought.

+Its relation to free will.+--But then, another will remonstrate, it
does away with the freedom of the will. Well, here is a slippery
subject sure enough, and one upon which more nonsense has been talked
probably than any other within the range of philosophical or
theological discussion. Have I anything new to say about it? Probably
not, but I think I can focus the issue and show what we must recognise
in order to have a rational grasp of the subject. Thinkers have talked
too much in the past about the separate faculties of human nature as
though they could be divided into Reason, Feeli