beyond a one-sided spiritualism or a merely abstract Theism towards a conception of God more real, more full, more complete-an all-sided conception which takes perfect cognisance of the results of the empirical sciences, and treats spirit and nature no longer in the former fashion, as distinct and separate layers, but as together bodying forth the fulness of the Deity in their close connection and harmonious agreement. It has not forgotten Goethe's advice that, if you would penetrate into the Infinite, then must you press on every side into the finite; in his own words

"Willst du ins Unendliche schreiten,

Geh nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten."

It holds, with Trendelenburg, in his Logische Untersuchungen,' that now the infinite appears to us in the glass of the finite (im Endlichen wie im Spiegel). It has found a true knowableness of the infinite and absolute Being advocated by Ulrici, I. H. Fichte, Pfleiderer, Lotze, and others in Germany; by Ferrier, Martineau, Caird, Seth, Flint, Balfour, Matheson, Calderwood, Bruce, Iverach, Upton, among the many British writers; and by H. B. Smith, Diman, Harris, Littlejohn, Morris, Abbot, Welch, Porter, and others in the American phalanx. It sees God to be self-existent for us in a way which the world-no self-caused entity-is not, for that He, as Being not Becoming, is its cause. It takes Him not to be the First Principle

THE ABSOLUTE BEING.

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of all things merely in virtue of any abstract a priori conception, but because it is driven to Him as the ultimate and the presupposition of all that makes experience possible to us, in the way we actually find it. Its Absolute is "not mere indifference, or substance homogeneous and indiscrete, but infinite differences belong to His nature." Herein it differs from Agnosticism, whose Deity cannot but be unknown when it is so very abstract and unreal. Shunning a self-destructive pantheism, theistic philosophy has been pressing beyond idealistic representations that would reduce God to an empty abstraction by making Him the mere unifying principle of Nature's multiplicity, or would merge His Absolute Personality in that created whole of the universe from which He still stands distinguished. It feels the futility of the recent attempts to explain the world as the self-evolution of Absolute Being, for it sees that an Absolute which should so evolve itself could evolve only the absolute, and would be incapable of explaining why the universe is relative. It has, we think, clearly seen that, so far as God may be conceived, in a metaphysical manner, to be the Ground of all existing things, He must possess, as attributes, power, self-consciousness, self-existence. More than this metaphysics, as the philosophy of the real, may not give, but the importance of what is so given is in our time often too little realised. To rob spirit as absolute of its distinctive charac

teristics in the interests of a unitary consciousness or an abstract spiritual substance is plainly to carry through a procedure in disregard of the truth that God has no right to be thus practically identified with the principle of unity. Distinct and real individualities and consciousnesses are not to be denied or dismissed or undervalued in the interests of a unitary bond by which the dualism of subject and object may be transcended.

Our recent theism has, without doubt, in its best essays taken braver hold of the conception of Force which pervades the universe everywhere, and manifests itself in an infinite variety of forms, and it has thus gained, we may say, a more scientific conception of God. A result, we say, not unimportant in view of there being those whose mingled attitude towards theism might be voiced in the words, Nec tecum vivere possum nec sine. We believe it has been helped to this by the increasing recognition, with certain great scientific investigators themselves, of the impossibility of natural science understanding matter and force, on the one hand, or comprehending spiritual processes, on the other. "The forces of nature," as has said Le Conte, “I effluence from the Divine Person-an ever-present and all-pervading Divine energy. The laws of nature are but the regular modes of operation of that energy; universal because He is omnipotent, invariable because he is unchanging." The uniformity of nature, as shadowing forth the steadfast

regard as an

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purposes of a reasonable Being, theism now more clearly apprehends as pointing to the existence of an infinite and immanent Deity. It has brought

the immanence of God, then, more clearly to light, so that He is seen to be an ever-present and all-inspiring Force in the universe, in which He is not yet pantheistically dissolved. Not "pantheistically dissolved," we say, for the philosophy of theism courageously discerns and declares pantheism to be logically as disastrous to religion and morality as atheism itself. In all this, it must be clearly kept in view that theistic philosophy, in its conception of being in God, has shown itself ill content to rest in the Hegelian translation of the entire activity of being in terms of monistic and immanent self-evolution-being, under Hegel's disrobing hand, appearing but as a naked abstraction, from which every attribute of reality has been stripped. It has paused to consider how little the imprisoned Deity of immanence can do for us in respect of our spiritual needs, how little His pure immanence can satisfy the demands of the spiritual nature, in its cravings for grace and guidance, forgiveness, help, and superintendence. It finds, with Chalybäus, that Hegel assumes "a pantheistical identity of man and God, in which, at least if strictly and conscientiously carried out, the Deity attains consciousness only by virtue of human agnition - a solution which indeed perfectly accounts for absolute knowledge in us, but comes up

so much the less to the religious representations, and, let us add, the philosophical idea, of the Deity." It has sought to escape the contradictions of a pantheism that supposes there can remain to us a Supreme Being after all things have, as Professor Caldwell has very recently remarked, been taken to be one and to be God. It has also more unhesitatingly ascribed to Him certain attributes in keeping with the properties of the one protean Force behind all nature-manifestations, and which serve to purge our conception of God of anthropomorphic elements of objectionable character. In so doing, it has not been without even a quickened sense of the justice also needful to that matter, which is everywhere the basis of such energy. Recent theistic thought has, in fact, continuously advanced in its idea of God towards less anthropomorphic notions, a most warrantable result not without its parallels in the history of modern science.

Not, of course, that all anthropomorphism is done away, for recent theistic philosophy, more openeyed, has with truer discernment, in reasoning up to the Divine Attributes, ranked man, with mind and conscience, first among the manifestations of the great World-Force. That philosophy has not made God so much a God of mere "attributes,' in the sense of casual increments, as was the former wont, but has, as we conceive, dwelt in less external ways on God as He in His essence is, and as He in the multiplicity of His attributes is construc