substance we call a stone? Nor do
matters grow simpler when we ascend in the scale: we may trace the
immanent Deity in all that is good and fair in nature, in all its
smiling and beneficent moods--but what of nature's uglinesses and
cruelties? Is God expressing Himself in the ferocity of the tiger, the
poisonous malice of the cobra, the greed of every unclean carrion-bird?
If He is such as religion represents Him, how can He be present in
these? We may quote with rapture the familiar lines in which the poet
tells us:--

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts. . .

{34} But the world which is the dwelling of that something "far more
deeply interfused" of which Wordsworth sings, does not consist
exclusively of

the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky. . .

--it contains also dismal, fever-breeding swamps, dreadful deserts,
dreary wastes of eternal ice, plunged into darkness half the year; are
we going simply to ignore these realities when we speak of the Divine
indwelling in the world? And, once more, shall we assert this doctrine
when we remember the cold cunning of the spider, or the delight in
torture displayed by the domestic cat?

It depends, we answer, what we mean by "this doctrine"; if we construe
immanence to signify "allness," we may as well admit first as last that
there is no way of escape from the difficulties which these queries
suggest. In that case it is not for us to pick and choose--to say that
God is the beauty of the beautiful, but not the ugliness of the ugly;
the compassion of the compassionate, but not the cruelty of the cruel:
if He is _all_, He is _both_, and for that very reason is _neither_.
That is the real inwardness of a conception of the Deity which
represents Him, with Omar Khayyam, as One--

Whose secret Presence, through Creation's veins
Running, Quicksilver-like eludes your pains;
Taking all forms from Mah to Mahi; and
They change and perish all--but He remains.

{35} Such a doctrine can only mean that the Divine Substance, under a
myriad-fold variety of appearances, is equally diffused through all
creation, like the universal ether of science; and such a conception of
the Eternal, whatever else it may be, ceases _ipso facto_ to be
religiously helpful. The counterpart of the theoretical allness would
be the practical nothingness of God.[2] But having qui