58 £SSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



I 



Of all the questions, perhaps none is surrounded 

 with more vagueness than the first — What /j pan- 

 theism? The recognised defenders of religion, the 

 theologians who speak with the hoary authority and 

 the presumptive weight that naturally belong to his- 

 toric and instituted things, are indeed in the habit 

 of drawing a sharp verbal distinction between theism 

 and pantheism, as they also do between theism and 

 deism ; but when the unbiassed thinker, anxious for 

 clearness and precision, inquires after the real dis- 

 tinction intended by these names, he hardly finds it 

 in any sense at once intelligible and reasonable. We 

 constantly hear that theism is contradicted by both 

 deism and pantheism : by deism, through the asser- 

 tion of God's distinctness at the expense of divine 

 revelation and providence; by pantheism, through 

 the assertion of the divine omnipresence at the 

 expense of the distinctness of God from the world. 

 We hear constantly, too, that theism, to be real, 

 must teach that there is a being who is truly God : 

 that the Principle of existence is a Holy Person, who 

 has revealed his nature and his will to his intelligent 

 creatures, and who superintends their lives with a 

 providence which aims to secure their obedience to 

 his will as the only sufficient condition of their 

 blessedness. Yet all this is but an abstract and very 



