ANTHEISM is that perversion of reason and language which denies God's personality, and calls some imaginary soul of the world, or the world itself, by his name. While Pantheists are fully agreed upon the propriety of getting rid of a God who could note their conduct, and call them to account for it hereafter, and who would claim to exercise any authority over them here, they are by no means agreed, either in India, Germany, or America, as to what they shall call by his name. Public opinion necessitates them to say they believe in a God, but almost every one has his own private opinion as to what it is. We shall speak of it as we hear it pronounced from the lips of its prophets, here, as well as in the writings of its expounders, in Europe and Asia. Some of them declare that it is some absolutely unknown cause of all the phenomena of the universe; and others, that it is the universe itself. A large class speak of it as the great soul of the world, while the more materialistic regard it as the world itself, body and soul; the soul being the source of all the imponderable forces, -such as gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, vegetable and animal life, and especially the mesmeric influence, of which many of them regard intellect as a modification; and the body being the sum of all the ponderable substances, such as air, water, earth, minerals, vegetables, and bodies of animals and

men.

This creed is popularly expressed in the sentence so often heard, "God is everything, and everything is God." But this vast generalization of all things into the higher unity—this exalting of monkeys, men, snails, and paving-stones to the same level of divinity-by no means meets the views of the more unphilosophical and aspiring gods and goddesses, for the very reason that it is so impartial. To deify a man and his cat by the same process, is not much of a distinction to the former; and of what advantage is it to be made a god, if he does not thereby obtain some distinction? This levelling apotheosis is generally confined to the German Pantheists.

versal does not attract us till housed in the individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mere egotism vanishes. The currents of the universe being circulate through me, I am part or particle of God." "I stand here to say, 'Let us worship the mighty and transcendent soul."" "God attains to self-consciousness only in the human soul." "Honour yourself." "Reverence your own individuality." "The soul of man is the highest intelligence in the universe." Such are the dogmas which, under the name of Positive Philosophy, are poured forth oracularly, unsupported by reason or argument, by the prophets of the new dispensation-the last and highest achievement of the human intellect.

It is very unfortunate, however, for the honour of the prophets of the nineteenth century, that this profound discovery was invented and illustrated, patented and peddled, by the Hindus, among the people of India, two thousand years before the divinity had struggled into self-consciousness in the souls of Schelling, Hegel, and Strauss-of Atkinson, Parker, or Emerson. We mean to show, in this paper, that it is an antiquated, hypocritical, demoralizing Atheism.

I. PANTHEISM IS AN ANTIQUATED HERESY.

It has rotted and putrified among the worshippers of cats and monkeys, and holy bulls, and bits of sticks and stones, on the banks of the Ganges, for more than two thousand years; yet it is now hooked up, out of its dunghill, and hawked about among Christian people, as a prime new discovery of modern philosophy, for getting rid of Almighty God. As the Hindu Shasters are undoubtedly the sources from which French, German, and American philosophers have borrowed their dogmas, without leave or acknowledgment; and, as is generally the case with depredators, they have not had time to take the whole system, we shall gratify and edify the public by a view of this sublime theology, as exhibited in the writings of the Positive Philosophers of India.

own divine substance a multiform universe. By the spontaneous exertion of this energy he sends forth, from his own divine substance, a countless host of essences, like innumerable sparks issuing from the blazing fire, or myriads of rays from the resplendent sun. These detached portions of Brahm-these separated divine essences-soon become individuated systems, destined, in time, to occupy different forms prepared for their reception; whether these be fixed or movable, animate or inanimate, forms of gods or men, forms of animal, vegetable, or mineral existences.

"Having been separated from Brahm in his imperfect state of Sagun, they carry along with them a share of those principles, qualities, and attributes that characterize that state, though predominating in very different degrees and proportions; either according to their respective capacities, or the retributive awards of an eternal ordination. Amongst others it is specially noted, that as Brahm at that time had awakened into a consciousness of his own existence, there does inhere in each separated soul a notion, or a conviction, of its own distinct, independent, individual existence. Labouring under this delusive notion, or conviction, the soul has lost the knowledge of its own proper nature-its divine origin, and ultimate destiny. It ignorantly regards itself as an inferior entity, instead of knowing itself to be what it truly is, a consubstantial, though it may be an infinitesimally minute portion of the great whole, a universal spirit.

"Each individual soul being thus a portion of Brahm, even as a spark is of fire, it is again and again declared that the relation between them is not that of master and servant, ruler and ruled, but that of whole and part! The soul is pronounced to be eternal a parte ante; in itself it has had no beginning or birth, though its separate individuality originated in time. It is eternal a varte post; it will have no end—no death; though its separate individuality will terminate in time. Its manifestation in time is not a creation; it is an effluence from the eternal fount of spirit. Its disappearance from the stage of time is not an extinction of essence a reduction to nonentity; it is only a refluence into its original source. As an emanation from the supreme, eternal spirit, it is from everlasting to everlasting. Neither can it be said to be of finite dimensions; on the contrary, says the sacred oracle, 'being identified with the Supreme Brahm, it participates in his infinity.'

"After having enumerated all the elementary principles, atoms, and qualities successively evolved from Brahm, one of the sacred writings states, that though each of these had distinct powers, yet they existed separate and disunited, without order or harmonious adaptation of parts; that until they were duly combined together, it was impossible to produce this universe, or animated beings; and that therefore it was requisite to adopt other means than fortuitous chance for giving them an appropriate combination, and symmetrical arrangement. The Supreme, accordingly, produced an

suns.

egg, in which the elementary principles might be deposited, and nurtured into maturity." "All the primary atoms, qualities, and principles-the seeds of future worlds-that had been evolved from the substance of Brahm, were now collected together, and deposited in the newly-produced egg. And into it, along with them, entered the self-existent himself, under the assumed form of Brahma; and then he sat vivifying, expanding, and combining the elements, a whole year of the creation, or four thousand three hundred millions of solar years! During this amazing period, the wondrous egg floated like a bubble on the abyss of primeval waters, increasing in size, and blazing refulgent as a thousand At length the Supreme, who dwelt therein, burst the shell of the stupendous egg, and issued forth under a new form, with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, and a thousand arms. Along with him there issued forth another form, huge and measureless. What could that be? All the elementary principles having now been matured, and disposed into an endless variety of orderly collocations, and combined into one harmonious whole, they darted into visible manifestation under tl.e form of the present glorious universe! A universe now finished, and ready made, with its entire apparatus, of earth, sun, moon, and stars. What then is this multiform universe? It is but a harmoniously arranged expansion of primordial principles and qualities. And whence are these? Educed or evolved from the divine substance of Brahm. Hence it is that the universe is so constantly spoken of, even by mythologists, as a manifested form of Brahm himself, the supreme, invisible spirit. Hence, too, under the notion that it is the manifestation of a being who may assume every variety of corporeal form, is the universe often personified, or described as if its different parts were only the different members of a person, of prodigious magnitude, in human form. It is declared that the hairs of his body are the trees of the forest; of his head, the clouds; of his beard, the lightning. His breath is the circling atmosphere; his voice, the thunder; his eyes, the sun and moon; his veins, the rivers; his nails, the rocks; his bones, the lofty mountains!"*

"Interminable as are the incoherencies, inconsistencies, and extravangancies of the Hindu writings, on no subject, perhaps, is the multiplicity of varying accounts and discrepancies more astonishing than on the present. Volumes could not suffice to contain them all. Brahma's first attempts at the production of the forms of animated beings, were as eminently unsuccessful as they were various. At one time he is said to have performed a long and severe course of ascetic devotions, to enable him to accomplish his wish-but in vain; at another, inflamed by anger and passion at his repeated failures, he sat down and wept; and from the streaming tear-drops sprang into being, as his first boon, a progeny of ghosts and goblins, of an aspect so loath

* Duff's India, pp. 99-114.

There, now, reader, you have the original of the Development Theory, with vestiges of creation enough to make half-a-dozen new infidel cosmogonies, besides the genuine original of Pantheism, from its native soil. Our western Pantheists will doubtless reverence their venerable progenitors; and, should the remainder of the family find their way here in a year or two, via Germany, the public will be better prepared to give a fitting reception to such distinguished visitors, including their suite of divine bulls and holy monkeys-their ecstatic hook swingings, burning of widows, and drowning of children, and other Positive Philosophies, from the banks of the Ganges. What an outrage on decency for such men to call themselves philosophers and Christians!

II. PANTHEISM IS A SYSTEM OF DECEPTION AND
HYPOCRISY.

Has any man a right to pervert the English language by fixing new meanings to words, entirely different from, and contrary to, those in common use? If he knows the meaning of the words he uses, and uses them to convey a contrary meaning, he is a deceiver. The name God, used as a proper name, in the English tongue, means "the Supreme Being; Jehovah; the Eternal and Infinite Spirit, the Creator and Sovereign of the Universe."+ If, then, a man says he believes in God, but when forced to explain what he means by that name, says he means steam, heat, electricity, galvanism, magnetism, mesmeric force, odyle, animal life, the soul of man, or the sum of all the intelligencies in the universe, he is a deceiver and vain talker, abusing language to conceal his impiety. Pantheism is simply Jesuitical Atheism. Willing to dethrone Jehovah, but unable and unwilling to place any other being in his stead as Creator and Ruler of the universe, yet conscious that mankind will never embrace open Atheism, Pantheists profess to believe in God, only that they may steal his name to cloak their Atheism. We, in common with all who believe in God, demand that, as their divinity is, by their own confession, essentially different from God, they shall use a different word to describe it. Let them call it Brahm, as their brethren in India do, or any other name not appropriated to any existing being in heaven or earth, or under the earth; and let them cease to profane religion, and insult common sense, by affixing the holy name of the Supreme to their thousandheaded monster.

But the very perfection of Jesuitism is reached when Pantheists profess their high respect for the Christian religion. They do not generally speak of it as a superstition, though some of the vulgar sort do; nor do they

decry its mysteries, as Deists are in the habit of doing; nor, as Socinians, and Unitarians, and Rationalists, attempt to reduce it to a mere code of morals. They grant it to be the highest development of humanity yet reached by the majority of the human race. The brute, the savage, the polytheistic idolater, the star-worshipper, the monotheist, the Christian, are all, in their scheme, so many successive developments of humanity in its upward progress. There is only one step higher than Christianity, and that is Pantheism. Well knowing that Christianity is diametrically opposed to their falsehoods, and that the Bible everywhere teaches that the progress of man has ever been down from a state of holiness to idolatry and barbarism, they have yet the hardihood to profess respect for it, as a system of concealed Pantheism, and to clothe their abominations in Scripture language. They speak, for instance, of the "beauty of holiness in the mind that has surmounted every idea of a personal God;" and of "God dwelling in us, and his love perfected in us," when they believe that he dwells as really in every creature; in that hog, for instance.

There is nothing, however, in this vast system of monstrosities which fills the soul of a Christian with such loathing and detestation, as to hear Pantheists profess their veneration for the Lord Jesus, and claim him as a teacher of Pantheism. If there is one object which they detest with all their hearts, it is the Judge of the quick and dead, and the vengeance which he shall take upon them that know not God, and obey not the gospel. Any allusion to the judgment-seat of Christ fills them with fury, and causes them to pour forth awful blasphemies. They know that the Lord Jesus repeatedly declared himself the judge of the living and the dead; that "the hour is coming in which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation"; and that the very last sentence of his public discourses is, “And these [the wicked] shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal." When they drop the mask for a moment, they can accuse apostles and disciples with "dwelling with noxious exaggeration about the person of Christ."* Christ, as revealed in the gospel, they hate with a perfect hatred. But when it be comes necessary to address Christians, and beguile them into the deceitfulness of Pantheism, the tune is changed. Christ becomes the model man-"one conceived in conditions favourable to the highest perfectibility of the individual consciousness; and so possessed of powers generalization far in advance of the age in which he lived. They can listen to and honour one of the best expounders of God and nature in the Man of Nazareth."+

of

* Emerson's Address to a Senior Class in Divinity. Hennell's Christian Theism, which shows how Theists of every nation-Christian, Jew, Mahommedan, or Chinese-can meet upon common ground.

The vilest falsehoods of Pantheism are ascribed to Jesus, that those who, ignorant of his doctrine, yet respect his name, may be seduced to receive them. Of him who declared, "Out of the heart of man proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, thefts, false witness, blasphemies," they have the hardihood to declare," He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul; alone, in all history, he estimated the greatness of man." Calculating upon that ignorance of the teaching of Christ which is so general among their audiences, they dare to represent the only begotten Son of God as teaching Pantheism: "One man was true to what is in you and me: be saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am divine. Through me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God? see me; or see thee when thou also thinkest as I now think.' Because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury." Yes, truly the divine nature is emphatically denied to all unregenerated men, and denied too by that divine Teacher thus eulogized. Hear him: "Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God. Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me; for I proceeded forth, and came from God: neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil; and the works of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh it of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."

Let Pantheists, then, cease to wind their serpent coils around Christianity, and to defile the Bible with their filthy lickings. The Lord Jesus will not suffer such persons to bear even a true testimony to him; and his followers will not permit them to ascribe their falsehoods to him, without reproof. Let them stand out, and avow themselves the enemies of Christ and his gospel-as they are-and cease their abominable pretences of giving to the world the ultimate development of Christianity. What concord hath Christ with Belial?

IL-PANTHEISM IS A SYSTEM OF IMMORALITY.

It loosens all the sanctions of moral law. If there is any one point upon which all Pantheists are agreed, it is in the denial of the resurrection, the judgment, and the future punishment of the wicked. Their whole system, in all its range, from Spiritualism to Phrenology, is expressly invented to get rid of God's moral government. If man is the highest intelligence in the universe, to whom should he render an account of his conduct? Or who would have any right to call him to account? Then, if we are developments of deity, deity cannot

offend against itself. Further if our development, both of body and mind, be the inevitable result of the laws of nature—of our organization and our positionman is but the creature of circumstances, and therefore, as is abundantly argued, cannot be made responsible for laws, and their results, over which he has no control. "I am what I am. I cannot alter my will, or be other than what I am, and cannot deserve either reward or punishment."* Before hundreds of the citizens of Cincinnati, a lecturer publicly denied the right of either God or man to invade his individuality, by taking vengeance upon him for any crime whatever. Thousands, who are not yet Pantheists, are so far infected with the poison that they utterly deny any right of vindictive punishment to God or man.

But this is not all. Again and again have we listened with astonishment to men, declaring that there was no moral law-no standard of right and wrong, but the will of the community. Of course it was quite natural, after such a declaration, to assert that a wife who should remain with a husband of inferior intellectuality, or unsuitable emotions, was committing adultery; that private property is a legalized robbery; and that, when a citizen becomes mentally or physically unfit for the business of life, he confers the highest obligation on society, and performs the highest duty to himself, by committing suicide, and thus returning to the great ocean of being!

We might think that confusion of right and wrong could not be worse confounded than this; yet there is a blacker darkness still. The distinction between good and evil is absolutely denied. The Hindu Pantheists declare that they cannot sin, because they are God, and God cannot offend against himself. There is no sin; it is all maya-delusion. So the American and English school tells us it lives only in the obsolete theology. "Evil, we are told, is good in another way, we are not skilled in." So says the author of "Representative Men." "Evil," according to old philosophers, "is good in the making. That pure malignity can exist, is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent. It is Atheism; it is the last profanation." "The divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself into grass and flowers; and man, though in jails or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true." Were these only the ravings of lunatics, or the dreamings of philosophers, we should never have hunted them from their hiding-places to scare your visions; but these doctrines are weekly propounded in your own city, and throughout our land, from platform and press, to thousands of your children and their school-teachers, of your workmen and your lawgivers, to your wives and daughters. Again and again have our ears been confounded in the squares of New York, and the streets of Philadelphia,