teaching are understood.

{46} Pantheism declares--it practically begins and ends with the
declaration--that the universe is God, and that God is the totality of
being. Now, try as we will, such a conception can never take the place
of the thought of God as our Father, and that for the simple reason
that the universe is not even what we mean by personal. As
Schopenhauer shrewdly remarked, "To call the universe 'God' is not to
explain it, but merely to burden language with a superfluous synonym
for the word 'universe.' Whether one says 'the universe is God' or
'the universe is the universe' makes no difference." It is when people
no longer know what to do with a Deity, he continues, that they
transfer His part to the universe--"which is, properly speaking, only a
decent way of getting rid of Him." [2] A totality of being is not the
same as a personal God, but the very contrary. Nor is it any
consolation to be told that this totality, though not personal, is
"super-personal." Such a super-personal Absolute or Whole, to quote
Dr. Ballard's penetrating criticism, "is devoid of just those elements
which for human experience constitute personality. To our power of
vision it matters nothing whether we say that the ultra-violet rays of
the spectrum are super-visible or invisible. The pertinent truth is
that they are not visible. So, too, that which is not 'merely'
personal is not really personal. {47} If the Absolute of philosophy be
the super-personal, it is not, in plain truth, personal at all." [3]

Now, a God who is not what we mean by personal can be of no help to us
in our religious life. When a congregation of modern worshippers is
appealed to in these terms--"Do not, I beseech you, think of God any
more as a personal being like yourself, though immeasurably
greater"--they are really being asked to commit spiritual suicide. For
we cannot hold communion except with a person; we cannot pray to the
universe. We can neither give thanks to the universe, nor supplicate
it, nor confess to it, nor intercede with it. But a God to whom we
cannot pray, with whom we cannot enter into communion, is for all
practical purposes no God at all. The only God with whom we can stand
in personal, conscious, spiritual relationship must be one who is not
identical with the universe, but One in whom, on the contrary, the
universe has its being. It is the transcendent God with whom we have
to deal in religion; such a God Pant