vague formula, after all. Of how the contradiction whose extremes are represented by deism and pantheism is to be transcended and reconciled, it has nothing to say. How the divine personality is to be thought consistently with the divine omnipresence, or how the omnipresent providence of God is to be reconciled with his distinctness from the world, this merely general proclamation of orthodox theism does not show, and in itself has no power to show. When we pass from the general formula to the attempted supply of the desired details, we are too often made aware that the doctrine professedly theistic is encumbered with a mass of particulars profoundly at variance with its own principle. We notice that confusion or contradiction reigns where consistent clearness ought to be; that faultily anthropomorphic or really mechanical conceptions usurp the place of the required divine and spiritual realities.
We too often discover, for instance, that every doctrine is construed as deism which refuses its assent to a discontinuous and special providence, or to an inconstant, localised, and miraculous revelation. On the other hand, we find every theory condemned as pantheism that denies the literal separation of God from the world and asserts instead his immanence in it.[1] We find that in the hands of such
- ↑ This apparent assent, en passant, to the expression of theism in terms of immanence is liable to great misinterpretation; but I think it best to leave the statement standing as originally written and printed, and to guard the reader by a warning not to take the word “immanence” literally. Most theories of the divine immanence are unquestionably pantheistic, and all that is meant in the text above is to indicate there may be a way of conceiving immanence which would not be so. But of this further, when we reach the point of settling the distinction between genuine theism and pantheism. See the foot-note on p. 74, below, and the text corresponding. Cf. also pp. 61, 69, and 72.
