ating the truth that He is "through all and in all," the
complementary and equally necessary truth that He is also God over all.
Because something of His Mind and Will is expressed by the universe,
they not only, as we saw in the previous chapter, conclude that the
universe is identical with Him, but that He is no other than the
universe which reveals Him. "All is God, and God is All," they
exclaim, adding the doctrine of the Godness of all to that of the
allness of God; the universe, in their view, is the one Divine and
Eternal Being of which everything, including ourselves, is only a phase
or partial manifestation; as it is the Divine life which pulses through
us, so it is the Divine consciousness which our consciousness
expresses, the Divine nature which acts through ours. Here we are face
to face with Pantheism full-grown: let us see what is involved in its
assumptions, and why the Christian Church must resolutely refuse to
make terms with this teaching.

No one would deny that the pantheistic theory, which identifies God
with the universe and ourselves with God, has its fascination and {45}
glamour--a fascination which is not ignoble on the face of it. The
modern founder of Pantheism, Benedict Spinoza, was a man of pure and
saintly character, a gentle recluse from the world, lovable and
blameless. Nevertheless, we have no hesitation in avowing our belief
that the glamour of Pantheism is utterly deceptive; that those who set
foot on this inclined plane will find themselves unable--in direct
proportion to their mental integrity--to resist conclusions which mean
the practical dissolution of religion, in any intelligible sense of
that word; and that in the present transitional state of religious
opinion it is particularly necessary that the truth about Pantheism
should be clearly stated. The test of a theory is not whether it looks
symmetrical and self-consistent in the seclusion of the study, but
whether it works. If it fails in actual life, it fails altogether; and
the one fatal objection to this particular system is that it does not
work. Nothing could be more significant than the admission of so
representative an exponent of Pantheism as Mr. Allanson Picton, who
tells us that one, if not more, of Spinoza's fundamental conceptions
"have increasingly repelled rather than attracted religious people."
[1] It is the object of the present chapter to show why this must be
the case, wherever the implications of his