message
concerning the future? This, that when we die there is an end even of
our seeming self-hood; we are once more immersed in the All, the
Whole--like a thimbleful of water drawn from the ocean and poured back
into the ocean again. This is what Mr. Picton calls "the peace of
absorption in the Infinite"; would it not be simpler to call it
annihilation, and have done with it? Dissolve a bronze statue and
merge it in a mass of molten metal, and it is gone as a statue;
dissolve a soul and merge it in the sum of being, and as a soul it is
no more. That is not immortality, but a final blotting out--a fit
conclusion from those pantheistic premises which, consistently worked
out, mean the end of religion, the end of morality, the end of
everything.

Pantheism goes about under a variety of aliases to-day, and therein
lies an additional danger; for whatever its assumed name or disguise,
its essence is always the same, and its very speciousness calls for all
our vigilance and {52} determination to fight it. We must not weary of
challenging its root-assumption, or of exposing its insidious
tendencies; we must not weary of reiterating the truth that God is not
identical with the universe, but to be worshipped as the One who is
over all; we must insist that His nearness to us and our likeness to
Him are not identity with Him--nay, that it is His otherness from us
which makes us capable of seeking and finding Him, of experiencing His
love, and loving Him in return. From the inhuman speculations of
Pantheism we turn with unspeakable gratitude to the revelation of the
personal God in the Person of Jesus Christ His Son, whom having seen,
we have beheld the Father, and whose are the words, not of
annihilation, but of eternal life.

[1] _Pantheism_, p. 15.

[2] Parerga, vol. ii., pp. 101-102.

[3] _The True God_, p. 118.

[4] _Op. cit._, p. 15.

[5] _Ibid_, p. 69.

[6] J. Allanson Picton, _Spinoza_, p. 213.

{53}

CHAPTER III

THE ETHICS OF MONISM

To say that religious thought is passing to-day through a period of
peculiar stress is to utter a commonplace so threadbare that one
apologises for repeating it. Even the man in the street--or perhaps we
ought to say even the man in the pew, the average member of a Christian
Church--is aware that certain potent forces have been for some time
past directing a series of sustained assaults upon what were until
recently all but unquestioned beliefs; nor, if h