periority to all other animals, nor for his possession of a knowledge of God.

Its tendency, moreover, is inevitably to degrade man, to destroy that sense of his dignity which is the principal security of human life, to obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and so to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of men to the level of brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal instincts. For all these reasons we reject the theory as unscientific, absurd, degrading to man, and offensive to the God who made him.

CHAPTER III.

JS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD?

PANTHEISM 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 sum 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 ani

mals 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 impar- . tial. 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 leveling apotheosis is generally confined to the German Pantheists; their more ambitious American brethren ascribe the contented humility which accepts it to the continual influence of the fumes of tobacco and lager beer.

Man is the great deity of the other class. Renan boldly says: "For myself, I believe there is not in the universe an intelligence superior to that of man; the absolute of justice and reason manifests itself only in humanity; regarded apart from humanity that absolute exists only as an abstraction. The infinite exists only when it clothes itself in form."* And as the soul of man is, rather inconsistently for people who believe everything God, supposed to be superior to the rest of him, they go off into great rhapsodies of adoration of their own souls.

"The doctrine of the soul-first soul, and second soul, and evermore soul"-is the doctrine which is to regenerate the world. God, in their view, is nothing till he attains selfconsciousness in man. "The universal 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

*Cited in Pressense's Jesus Christ, His Life and Times. †Emerson.

Page 10.

mere egotism vanishes. The currents of the universal 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." "Honor 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 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 honor of the prophets of the nineteenth century, that this profound discovery was invented, and illustrated, patented, and peddled, by the Hindoos, among the people of India, two thousand years before the divinity had struggled into self consciousness in the mighty and transcendent souls of Schelling, Hegel, and Strauss, of Atkinson, Parker, or Emerson. We mean to show in this lecture, that it is an Antiquated, Hypocritical, Demoralizing Atheism.

1. Pantheism is an Antiquated Heresy.-It has rotted and putrefied among the worshipers 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 Hindoo Shasters are undoubtedly the sources from which French, German, and American philosophers have borrowed their dogmas, and as they have not had time to take the whole system, we shall edify the public by a view of this sublime theology as exhibited in the writings of the Pantheistic philosophers of India, as follows:

"When existing in the temporary imperfect state of Sagun, Brahm (the Pantheist deity) wills to manifest the

universe. For this purpose he puts forth his omnipotent energy, which is variously styled in the different systems now under review. He puts forth his energy for what? For the effecting of a creation out of nothing? 'No,' says one of the Shasters, but to 'produce from his 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. Among 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. Laboring 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