re, has been
called forth by one-sided and extravagant statements of the idea of
Divine immanence on the part of ill-balanced advocates; and in this
book we shall be almost continually occupied with the task of
disengaging the truth of immanence from what appear to us mischievous
travesties of that truth. That such a task is a necessary one, we are
firmly convinced; for if, as Principal Adeney says, "among all the
changes in theology that have been witnessed during the last hundred
years this"--_i.e._, the re-discovery of the principle of Divine
immanence--"is the greatest, the most revolutionary," it must certainly
be of paramount importance that we should understand and apply that
principle aright. Confessedly, it denotes a great and far-reaching
change; can we, then, in the first instance, briefly and plainly state
what this change is from, what it involves, and in what respect it is
supposed to help us in dealing with the problem of religion?

It has to be borne in mind, to begin with, that the very term
"immanence" had for a long time ceased to be in current use, and had
thus become strange to the average believer; it has equally to be
remembered that in theology as {13} in other matters we have not yet
altogether passed the stage where _hostis_ means both "stranger" and
"foe"--that, in fact, to many minds, the unfamiliar is, as we said, _eo
ipso_ the suspect. But immanence means nothing more abstruse than
"indwelling"; and the renewed emphasis which, from the time of
Wordsworth onward, began to be laid upon the Divine indwelling, the
presence of God in the Universe, represented in the first place the
reaction of the human spirit against the cold and formal Deism of the
eighteenth century, which thought of God as remote, external to the
world, exclusively "transcendent." According to the deistic notion,
God was known to man only by reason of a revelation He had given once
and for all in the far-off past--a revelation which in its very nature
excluded the idea of progress; as against this conception that of the
immanence of God declares that He is not far from each one of us, that
in Him we live and move and have our being, that He is over all and
through all and in all--the Life of all life, the Energy behind all
phenomena, the Presence from which there is no escaping, unceasingly
and progressively--though by divers portions and in divers
manners--revealed in the universe, in nature and in man.

Thus expresse