d, because it is set
around with limitations, is necessarily obnoxious to all sorts of
miseries. Its pleasures are only "honey drops scarce tasted in a
sea of gall." This conviction, with its accompanying sentiment,
runs through the sacred books of the East, is the root and heart
of their theology, the dogma that makes the cruelest penances
pleasant if a renewed existence may thus be avoided. The sentiment
is not alien to human longing and surmise, as witnesses the night
thought of the English poet who, world sated, and sadly yearning,
cries through the starry gloom to God,

"When shall my soul her incarnation quit, And, readopted to thy
blest embrace, Obtain her apotheosis in thee?"

Having stated and traced the doctrine of absorption, it remains to
investigate the justice of its grounds. The doctrine starts from a
premise partly true and ends in a conclusion partly false. We
emanate from the creative power of God, and are sustained by the
in flowing presence of his life, but are not discerptions from his
own being, any more than beams of light are distinct substances
shot out and shorn off from the sun to be afterwards drawn back
and assimilated into the parent orb. We are destined to a
harmonious life in his unifying love, but not to be fused and lost
as insentient parts of his total consciousness. We are products of

God's will, not component atoms of his soul. Souls are to be in
God as stars are in the firmament, not as lumps of salt are in a
solvent. This view is confirmed by various arguments.

In the first place, it is supported by the philosophical
distinction between emanation and creation. The conception of
creation gives us a personal God who wills to certain ends; that
of emanation reduces the Supreme Being to a ghastly array of laws,
revolving abysses, galvanic forces, nebular star dust, dead ideas,
and vital fluids. According to the latter supposition, finite
existences flow from the Infinite as consequences from a
principle, or streams from a fountain; according to the former,
they proceed as effects from a cause, or thoughts from a mind.
That is pantheistic, fatal, and involves absorption by a logical
necessity; this is creative, free, and does not presuppose any
circling return. Material things are thoughts which God
transiently contemplates and dismisses; spiritual creatures are
thoughts which he permanently expresses in concrete immortality.
The soul is a thought; the body is the word in which