sum of Life and Matter, it may be in a pious trust in the general good of all things, be the things human and moral, or be they physical and unconscious.

Now Pantheism in this sense is a very wide-spread frame of thought. Many a subtle intelligence, shrinking from the logical difficulties of an Omnipotent Providence, seeks in the sum of all things that type of Beauty and universality which it can no longer gather from the Bible. Many a sympathetic heart that would feel pain in frankly rejecting the possibility of religious hopes, and yet finds the religious hope of Humanity too definite, earthly, and prosaic for its ideal, falls back on some half-uttered vision of Beauty, Goodness, Mystery—a vision which admits nothing so formal as a Person, and nothing logical enough to make a proposition. Some of the best brains and hearts float in this dream; impatient of Theism, indifferent to Humanity; cherishing in their souls this transcendental possibility of a something beyond, that is neither some one nor any actual thing at all: merely a promise of Good, or Fair.

There are all kinds of degrees and modes in this tendency we call Pantheism, from the artist's thirst for nature, to the thinker's rest in the Unity of Law, and so on to the practical man's respect for external force, and the mystical theologian's habit of seeing God in everything and everything in God. These are, no doubt, very different types of mind; but they agree in this:-they all find not only a religious value to the human spirit in the mystery and majesty of the World without; but the Supreme Power and Truth. The physical beauty of a sunset touches some; the range of physical law touches others; these are the happy natures of constitutional optimism; those are the mystics to whom the definite is the vulgar and the logical is the misleading. All are alike in this, that they yearn to pass far beyond the range and realm of Man; and yet they will not face the Person of a living God.

We are all familiar with that fine temper-man's love for the unfathomable glories of the scene around him. How many a sensitive nature has gazed deeper and deeper into the firmament of stars, till the imagination seemed, like the watchman on the halls of Agamemnon at Mycenæ, to see new lights burst out; as if worlds. were being born unto worlds in myriads. Then the exhausted spirit feels almost on the threshold of immensity; and half believes that each instant the heavens are about to break open to their highest, and these human eyes are about to behold the reality of the Unseen. We have all known that moment; but the veil has never been parted, and we have lain down with aching eyes and a delicious void in our hearts: feeling that there is something, we know not what, in Space; but that we are as far off from it as ever. And the next morning we go to work and the Universe fades away in the noontide. light, and the clear voice of our children, and the emergencies of our

daily anxieties, the care of our fortunes, or our public duties, move us with ten times the force and reality of the Milky Way.

I know no passage which better expresses the religious value of Nature than these words of Wordsworth :

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear; both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

This is poetry. Is it religion? It is exquisitely touching and inspiring to the spirit. Is it enough to guide lives, to curb passions, to give light to despair, unconquerable force to societies, nations, races? Can it do what the law of Moses did, or the law of Christ; because, if it cannot do this, it is not religion?

Certainly it is poetry, and more than poetry; it is fresh and vital truth, in the form of immortal art. No one of us would willingly let die a note of it, or lose a verse from that magnificent Psalter of Nature, which, from Homer to Walter Scott, is one of the best gifts that genius has bestowed on Man. Why need we lose it; why need we cease to cherish it and extend its power? I take that passion for Nature, that worship of Nature, in all its forms and range, that sympathy with all the inner teaching of Nature, that Cosmic Emotion that Wordsworth called in the rhapsody of joy, 'the soul of my moral being '—and I ask—is that enough?

Poetry is one thing. Science, Action, Life, Religion, are far other--all much wider and more continuous. Poetry is but one mode of Art, and Art is but one side of one of the elements of Human Nature. Poets are not. (for all that some people say) the guides of life; their business is to beautify life. And after all, this Worship of Nature, this poetry of Pantheism, is but one side even of Poetry, and not its grandest. No poets have surpassed in this field the greatest in the ancient and in the modern world: Homer the poet of the sea, Shakespeare the poet of the air, he who saw the floor of

heaven thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. And yet in Homer as in Shakespeare the worship of Nature holds but a subordinate place. To these great brains the folds of many-fountained Ida, the waste of hoary brine, the moonlight sleeping on the bank, the morn walking over the dew of some high eastern hill-these are but the frame wherein are set their pictures of men, and women, and societies; of passions, sufferings, character; of hope, despair, love, devotion.

Poetry, taken as a whole, presents us with an image of man, not of Nature; the drama of real life, not a dream of the Universe. And if the starry night is beautiful, it may be nothing to the smile of a child. One speech of Prometheus, or of Hamlet, or Faust, teaches us more than ten thousand sunsets.

And this poetic idealisation of Nature is a choice of certain facts for the sake of their beauty and their majesty. It deliberately excludes myriads of other facts that are not beautiful, and yet are very real and act potently on us. Deep is our debt to the magicians who have shown us how to see the world radiant and harmonious. It is an ideal, infinitely precious and invigorating. But it is not the real truth, or rather not the whole truth,-far from it. The world is not all radiant and harmonious; it is often savage and chaotic. In thought we can see only the bright, but in hard fact we are brought face to face with the dark side. Waste, ruin, conflict, rot, are about us everywhere. If tornadoes, earthquakes, glacier epochs, are not very frequent, there is everywhere decay, dissolution, waste, every hour and in every pore of the vast Cosmos. See Nature at its richest on the slopes of some Andes or Himalayas where a first glance shows us one vision of delight and peace. We gaze more steadily, we see how animal, and vegetable, and inorganic life are at war, tearing each the other every leaf holds its destructive insect, every tree is a scene of torture, combat, death; everything preys on everything; animals, storms, suns, and snows waste the flower and the herb; climate tortures to death the living world, and the inanimate world is wasted by the animate, or by its own pent-up forces. We need as little think this earth all beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness; of harmony and chaos; of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth.

And if beauty and harmony are ascendant in these spots of earth which we fill, are they in the South Pole and the North Pole and the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific; or in the extreme. icy heavens and in the fiery whirlwinds of the Sun, and in those regions of Space where they tell us Suns explode and disappear, annihilating whole solar systems at once? The Moon of the poets is an image of peace and tenderness; but the Moon of science makes the imagination faint with the sense of a lifeless, motionless, voiceless,

sightless solitude. What a mass is there in Nature that is appalling, almost maddening to man, if we coolly resolve to look at all the facts, as facts!

Nay, has this wandering speck of dust, that we call ours, one of the motes that people the sun systems, has it always been beautiful ? Parts of it now are. But in the infinite ages of geologic time, even in the vast glacier epochs, and the drift, and the like, or when this island lay drenched in a monotonous ooze-was beauty, or what man thinks beauty, the rule then? The flowers, the forests, the plantations, the meadows, the uplands waving with corn and poppies, are the work of man. The earth was a grisly wilderness till man appeared; and it had but patches of beauty here and there, until after man had conquered it. Man made the country as much as he made the town; the one out of organic, the other out of inorganic materials. And what is beauty, and harmony, and majesty in Nature? Nothing but what Man sees in it and feels in it. It is beautiful to us; it has a relation to our lives and our nature. Absolutely, it may be a wilderness or a chaos. The poets indeed are the true authors of the beauty and order of Nature; for they see it by the eye of genius. And they only see it. Coldly, literally examined, beauty and horror, order and disorder seem to wage an equal and eternal war. Morally, intellectually, truly, Man stands face to face with Nature-not her inferior, not her equal, but her superior, like the poet's last man confronting the Sun in death. The laws of Nature are the ideas whereby Man has arranged the phenomena offered to his senses; the beauty of Nature is the joy whereby he grasps the relations of his environment to his own being. When we think we worship Nature, we are really worshipping Homer and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley, Byron and Scott. As Comte said in a bold but not irreverent moment the Heavens declare the glory of Galileo and Kepler and Newton; for the ceaseless spectacle of mysterious movement they present recalls to us the minds which first saw unity and law therein.

There is, as we say, another and a far deeper spirit of Pantheism, more subtle and more philosophical than any Nature worship, than this love of the beauty and life in the world. It has forms infinite, that cannot be numbered: the sense of immensity in the sum of things-not-ourselves: the sense of stupendous Order around us, of convoluted Life around us, or of Force around us or it may be a trust that things are tending towards good around us: or that intoxication with the fumes of Godhead reduced to vapour which marked the metaphysical Pantheism of Spinoza. There are some whose faith is sustained on even more ethereal food; who idealise the Universe as such, the Good, the Beautiful, the True.

What are all these, if we take them to be quite independent of God, and yet outside of and sovereign over Man? I know what is meant by the Power and Goodness of an Almighty Creator; I know

what is meant by the genius, and patience, and sympathy of Man. But what is the All, or the Good, or the True, or the Beautiful? What is the Anima Mundi, if it is neither God nor Man, neither animate nor inanimate, but both or neither? And what is the Eternal that makes for righteousness, if only Philistines can take it to be Providence? If God and Universe are identical expressions, we had better drop one or other. If the 'Universal Mind' is nothing so grossly anthropomorphic as the old idea of God, but really is the cause of all things and is indeed all things, if being and not being are identical and the identity of being consists in its being the union of two contradictories, let us, in the name of sense, get rid of these big vague words, and having get rid of God as a term of a narrow dogmatism, and Mind and Soul, as a verbal spiritualism, let us say simply Things, and have the courage of our opinions, and boldly profess as our creed I believe in nothing except in Things in general.'

For, what this metaphysical Pantheism gains in breadth and philosophic subtlety over the mere poet's worship of Nature, it loses in distinctness, even in meaning, till it becomes a phrase, with as little reality in it as the Supreme' of the latest school of unutterables. The All' is a very big thing, but why am I to fall down before it? The Good is very precious, but good for what, to whom? Cobras and mosquitoes are good at biting; volcanoes are good to look at from a safe distance; and bloody battle-fields are good for the worms underground. The All' is not good nor beautiful; it is full of horror and ruin. And Truth is simply any positive statement about the ‘All.' When people decline to be bound by the cords of a formal Theology, and proclaim their devotion to these facile abstractions, they are really escaping in a cloud of words from giving their trust to anything; for Things in general as understood by myself' is a roundabout phrase for that good old rule, the simple plan viz. :- what I like.'

There lies this original blot on every form of philosophic Pantheism when tried as a basis of Religion, or as the root idea of our lives, that it jumbles up the moral, the immoral, the non-human and the anti-human world: the animated, and the inanimate; cruelty, filth, horror, waste, death; virtue and vice; suffering and victory; sympathy and insensibility. The dualism between moral being and material being is as old as the conscience of man. It is impossible to efface the antagonism between them; their disparate nature is a consequence of the laws of thought and the fibres of the brain and the heart. No force can amalgamate in one idea tornadoes, earthquakes, interstellar space, pestilences, brotherly love, unselfish energy, patience, hope, lust, and greed. No single conception at all can ever issue out of such a medley; and any idea that is wide enough to relate to the whole must be a mere film of an idea, and one as little in contact with the workings of the heart or the needs of society as the undulatory theory of Light or the Music of the Spheres.