128 



E. WALTER MACNDEE, F.R.A.S., ON 



Still more striking, if possible, is the condeiiinatioii of 

 pantheisiii. We are often told that the progress of religion has 

 been from fetishism to animism, thence to polytheism, and 

 finally to monotheism. But this last step is not in the order of 

 evolution ; the natural heir and successor of polytheism is not 

 monotheism, but pantheism. Nature worship is still nature 

 worship, even though the worshipper no longer discriminates 

 between the deities of air and earth, of mountain and plain, Init 

 in order to satisfy an intellectual syncretism, prefers to 

 integrate the whole. 



Monism is a late form of pantheism ; like it, yet to be 

 distinguished from it. Pantheism seeks to be philosophical, 

 monism to be scientific ; with the result that pantheism is 

 unscientific monism, and monism is unphilosophic pantheism, 

 both being integrated forms of paganism ; the first from the 

 more spiritual side, the second from the more material. 



No such thought can be reconciled with the first chapter of 

 Genesis. If God made light first, saw it and pronounced it 

 good, and proceeded to make the firmament and so through a 

 succession of distinct acts, the pantheistic or monistic position 

 is impossible. God is Light, it is true, but light is not God : 

 He transcends it. 



The fourth truth revealed in this chapter is that God made 

 man in His own image. Were it not for this, there could be no 

 revelation of God to man. We have seen that man's science is 

 essentially anthropomorphic, not because nature is human, but 

 because man is the percipient. So man's knowledge of God is 

 also necessarily anthropomorphic, not because God is human, 

 but because man is the recipient of God's Eevelation of 

 Himself. Just as we arrive at some dim apprehension of the 

 distance of the stars from knowing the length of our stride, so 

 if man is to know God, there must be something in man that 

 answers to God, and can therefore respond to Eevelatioii, and 

 lead man to an apprehension of what is in God. 



The fifth truth is that God gave man dominiofi over all the 

 earth. Here we have the charter of science : the right to that 

 freedom of research which the n^an of science demands. 

 Whether man exercises this dominion wisely and rightly or not, 

 is not the question we are debating now ; suffice it to say that 

 in nothing is man's dominion over the earth more clearly shown 

 than in the progress which he has made in the various 

 departments of science. 



Sixthly, God rested from creation on the seventh day. The 

 significance of this fact from the scientific point of view is 



