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 anything in the nature of modern science that really gives colour to a pantheistic philosophy. Obviously
