CONCLUSION.

IT now only remains to conclude our subject, by deducing “from the whole the inferences most necessary for, and useful to, mankind.” It appears to us that we will best do this by briefly pointing out the essential connection of Theism both with a true worship and a true morality. There are no inferences which can possibly be more necessary and useful than these, and both seem to spring directly out of the whole course of our thought and reasoning in the present Essay.

Theism, in its full and consistent interpretation, as set forth in these pages, is the doctrine of one almighty, wise, and loving Will. Personality is the central and most essential element of the doctrine. It is only this fact, expressed in our deepest consciousness, that contains for us at once the beginning and the completion of the theistic argument. Around this the whole doctrine gathers in its manifold significance and interest. From the same fact springs all its distinctive character of difficulty. For the final view unfolded by it is that of one creative Will in relation to created wills, which, while proclaiming their immediate dependence upon the former—”from whom, and by whom, 370and through whom, are all things”—yet really possess a life of their own, which may oppose itself to the supreme Source of life. In this antinomy Theism finds at once all its meaning and all its mystery. Herein is the one comprehending problem of creation; and yet herein, as it has been the whole aim of our argument to show, is the only key to an explanation of creation, which does not contradict equally the demands of reason and the promptings of conscience.

In this doctrine of a personal God, to whom man holds a free personal relation, there is, we now assert, the only basis for a real and intelligent worship. A divine Being, in whom man lives, and yet from whose life he is, in a true sense, separate, is, and can be, alone an object of pious interest and devotion. Only towards such a Being can there be any impulse of solemn conviction—of reverent feeling. Let the fundamental theistic conception of will disappear, and there is no more any living Spirit to receive, or any living spirits to render worship. Substitute for this conception either the materialistic notion of law, or the pantheistic dream of a vast nature-life, and piety becomes a nonentity. For where there is no self-sacrifice, there can be no spiritual offering. There may be organic unity, but there cannot be moral harmony. In seeking to preserve the idea of life in contrast to what it calls “mechanical conceptions” of the Deity, our modern unbelief really empties life of all its noblest essence. It finds its highest expression in mere nature-growth, whereas this growth is only the dim shadow and type of the true life of the soul. It is only, as it were, the rippling play mirroring afar off the true depths of life, self-centred 371in God and in man, made in God’s image. This element of self, as something wholly distinct and peculiar in creation, alone enables us to reach the genuine meaning of life; and in the interchange between the finite and the Infinite self, the free happy offering up of the one into the all-embracing bosom of the other, we have alone the realisation of worship.

There may, indeed, be much beautiful talk of the worship of Nature, of the homage rendered by the whole round of impersonal existence as it fulfils with a grand uniformity the behests of its divine Author; but the face of nature, we know, as it thus fulfils its course, is turned to God with no smile of intelligent recognition, or of holy meaning. There is no free conscious response in its ever-circulating movements to the great Being from whom cometh all its change and beauty. It is the very glory of man, on the other hand, that in all he does he knows and wills what he is doing. And it is only in this element of intelligent and spontaneous action, of living and hearty surrender, that worship becomes a reality. It is only in the conception of a finite will yielding itself in free and loving obedience to the infinite Will, that piety finds its essential meaning. A theistic faith, therefore, alone recognises the condition of true worship. Pantheism in its very conception destroys it, and leaves man, whatever may be its pretensions, with no higher life than that of nature. Whether materialistic or ideal, it equally takes away from man any reality of existence distinct from the general existence of the universe. He is merely, in his whole being, a phase of the 372world-life—its highest point of development in the one case, its self-creating centre in the other. In either case there is and can be nothing higher than himself. The worship of humanity is, therefore, not only logically but avowedly the only possible worship to the Pantheist,—positive or speculative.

M. Comte expressly propounds such a worship as the appropriate terminus of Positivism. Humanity, as the collective life of human beings, is in his system the être suprême the only one we can know, therefore the only one we can worship.¹⁷⁶¹⁷⁶   COMTE’S Philosophy of the Sciences, pp. 341, 342. By G. H. LEWES. Hegelianism, in the later representations to which it has been consistently reduced by the “Young Germany” school, bears the same import, and utters the same language. We have, therefore, in these systems, something avowed as the only possible worship, which in its very conception contradicts the essential meaning of worship. Instead of self-prostration, we have self-exaltation—instead of self-sacrifice, self-idolatry. Worship becomes a phantasy, or, still worse, a profanity.

In the more vulgar forms of materialistic unbelief all reality of worship is still more expressly destroyed. Secularism is the most recent form in which such unbelief has put itself forward in this country; and its most positive and distinguishing feature, it is instructive to notice, is the abnegation of all worship. Man, it is declared, has nothing to do with any life beyond the present visible one which is before him daily. Any hopes or fears for the future do not concern him. Every possible basis of religion is thus 373uprooted. Impiety, in such a system, becomes a creed, and animalism its constant and infallible tendency.

It will be found, indeed, no less clear that morality only finds a valid basis in a theistic doctrine. It is only in such a personal relation between man and God as Theism implies that responsibility emerges, and the very conception of duty arises. Supposing man to have not merely the ground of his being in Deity, but to be actually, as Pantheism teaches, a part of Deity, so that the natural flow of his life is merely a phase or transitional expression of the All-life, it is plain that, in such a view, the very possibility of right and wrong vanishes. If man, in all the modes of his being, be nothing else than an expression of the divine Life which lives through all, there cannot be for him any morality. One species of action must be as good to him, because as divine to him, as another. And this is a conclusion from which modern Pantheism has not shrunk. In the figured speech of one, all whose writings are more or less pantheistic sermons, we are told “that the Divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself into grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is true and good.”¹⁷⁷¹⁷⁷   EMERSON’S Representative Men, p. 68. We have here a genuine expression of Pantheism, which, notwithstanding its lofty prate of spiritualism, is still always, in the necessity of the case, falling back into the slough of sensualism, to which there is nothing higher than mere nature-life. Man is to it necessarily nothing else than “nature’s noblest production.” He is a more complex and beautiful 374outgrowth than the grass and the flowers, but this is all. There is no further spring of being in him than in them, and morality is therefore in its idea a mere figment. He is subject to no higher law than that by which nature works. And there is nothing, therefore, that can be false or wrong in his life, nor any more, indeed anything, that can be right. Such terms can have no meaning in such a system. Truth can only be a dream to it, and love an accident, finely as it may discourse of the imperishableness of both.¹⁷⁸¹⁷⁸   EMERSON’S Representative Men, p. 69.

It is not to be denied, indeed, that Pantheism is often pure and lofty in its moral language. In minds of exalted bias and refined culture the mere life of nature is conceived of as something noble and elevating; and the writer from whom we have already quoted, betrays sufficiently in all his works his sense of such a life, in which the higher tendencies of humanity are supposed to receive exercise and satisfaction. But, lofty as may be the moral tone in which Pantheism sometimes speaks, it bears in its bosom no moral strength or vitality, and cannot do so. It may tell man to be a hero, but it has no voice of encouragement, of warning, or of help to him. It may bid him live purely as reason dictates; but man, in his common life, is not governed by the clearness of his intellect, but by the rectitude of his affections and will. Pantheistic intellectualism has accordingly shown itself to be the coldest and least potent creed that has ever sought to sway man. Some minds there may always be, as in the old Roman world, that can find in it a degree of moral nurture, but to the common mind 375and heart it is destitute of all moral meaning and power; nay, to them its sternest stoicism interprets itself by clear logical consequence as moral indifferentism, which readily passes over into any species of immorality, and theoretically legitimatises it. The only genuine moral elements of personality and conscience find no place in it, and in the denial of these we have in the end the sure destruction of all moral life and happiness.

It is only a doctrine which preserves these elements in their full integrity that furnishes a consistent basis for man’s religious and moral culture. As spiritual life only takes its rise in them, so it can only flourish where they are clearly acknowledged. The more deeply our whole being is studied, the more, we feel assured, will freedom and conscience, and, in a word, reason, as forming the comprehensive spiritual element in man, be acknowledged as realities,—and Theism hence be found the ennobling complement of all human study, no less than the direct expression of Divine Revelation.

THE END.