imes of admiration, sometimes
of awe, sometimes of duty, sometimes of love" (p. 236). And as in the
individual religion is identified with culture, so, "in its public
aspect" "it is identical with civilization" (p. 201), which "expresses
the same threefold religion, shown on a larger scale, in the character,
institutions, and ways of life of nations" (p. 202). "The great
civilized community" is "the modern city of God" (p. 204).

But what God? Clearly not that God spoken of by St. Paul--or the author
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, whoever he was--"the God of Peace that
brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, that Great Shepherd
of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant;" for that
God, the Creator, Witness, and Judge of men--is assuredly _Deus
absconditus_, a hidden God, belonging to "the supernatural;" and the
hypothesis upon which the author of "Ecce Homo" proceeds in his new work
is that men have "ceased to believe in anything beyond Nature" (p. 76).
The best thing for them to do, therefore, he suggests, if they must have
a God, is to deify Nature. But "Nature, considered as the residuum that
is left after the elimination of everything supernatural, comprehends
man with all his thoughts and aspirations, not less than the forms of
the material world" (p. 78). God, therefore, in the new Natural
Religion, is to be conceived of as Physical "Nature, including Humanity"
(p. 69), or "the unity which all things compose in virtue of the
universal presence of the same laws" (p. 87), which would seem to be no
more than a Pantheistic expression, its exact value being all that
exists, the totality of forces, of beings, and of forms. The author of
"Natural Religion" does not seem to be sanguine that this new Deity will
win the hearts of men. He anticipates, indeed, the objection "that when
you substitute Nature for God you take a thing heartless and pitiless
instead of love and goodness." To this he replies, "If we abandoned our
belief in the supernatural, it would not be only inanimate Nature that
would be left to us; we should not give ourselves over, as is often
rhetorically described, to the mercy of merciless powers--winds and
waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, and fire. The God we should believe in
would not be a passionless, utterly inhuman power." "Nature, in the
sense in which we are now using the word, includes humanity, and
therefore, so far from being pitiless, includes all the pity that
belongs