MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 8 1 



Who trusted God was love indeed, 

 And love Creation's final law, 

 Though Nature, red in tooth and claw 



With ravine, shrieked against his creed — 



Who loved, who suffered countless ills, 

 Who battled for the True, the Just — 

 Be blown about the desert dust, 



Or sealed within the iron hills ? 



No more ? — A monster, then, a dream, 

 A discord ! Dragons of the prime. 

 That tare each other in their slime. 



Were mellow music, matched with him ! 



The profound feeling which Tennyson has here 

 so memorably expressed, gives your question of this 

 year a significance as wide as all mankind, as deep 

 as man's unfathomable heart, and makes its interest 

 surpass the interest of every other ; for every other 

 quickest question is involved in this. Let us not 

 fail to realise that pantheism means, not simply the 

 all-pervasive interblending and interpenetration of 

 God and other life, but the sole causality of God, 

 and so the obliteration of freedom, of moral life, and 

 of any immortality worth the having ; in a word, of 

 the true being of God himself. 



VII 



It is urgent to ask, then, whether there is any- 

 thing in the nature of modern science that really 

 gives colour to a pantheistic philosophy. Obviously 



G 



