the flames of the French Revolution, the other originating in the nineteenth and continuing to the present day. But alike of the English and the Indian movements it must be said, that however true or however false they may be in themselves, they are both failures so far as their purpose is concerned. That purpose is to establish an object of worship upon a basis above the world, to unveil the statue of a God whose nature shall be free from all the limits of humanity. It is to present to the eyes of men the portrait of a Being dwelling not in tabernacles of clay but enthroned in the highest heavens a Being omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal, full of all benevolence, rich in all wisdom, pervaded by all love. Yet, what is this conception but an incarnation, a God manifest in the flesh? It is the wildest delusion to imagine that a man escapes either Christianity or Brahmanism by running into deism. He has simply lifted his God on to a higher physical platform. The attributes which he reverences in the object of his worship are essentially human attributes; his God is still in his own image, though the image is placed in heaven. When you attribute to the object of your worship a sense of omnipotence, what else have you done than to assign Him a human limit? What is a sense of omnipotence but the consciousness that one has power to overcome any obstacle? When I say "I can do this," do I not express the

fact that I feel a force within me which is capable of overcoming a force that I perceive without me? The very statement implies the idea of an effort on my part, and the idea of an effort is inseparable from the idea of a limit. To attribute to the object of your worship the power to say "I can," is to clothe your God in the likeness of a human environment. As long as you reverence that which is personal you can no more escape the idea of incarnation than you can escape your own shadow. It does not matter where you place the personality; you may lay it in the heavens above, or you may deposit it in the depths beneath. Assign it what locality you please, it is an incarnation still, and an incarnation equally. It is an incarnation because it is personal. It is a manifestation of the human not because it inhabits a human locality but because it is local anywhere. The moment I have said of my God, "Lo here," or "Lo there," I have given Him a special habitation, and the moment I have given Him a special habitation I have embodied Him in a material form. The effort of deism to transcend humanity has only ended in the old ideal of a God walking in the garden.

The second attempt to get rid of a God in the human image is Pantheism. It seeks to avoid the human image by imaging God everywhere. Instead of seeing Him in the likeness of a human form, it proposes to see Him in the aspect of the

united universe. It looks upon Him not as a life circumscribed within a particular space, but as a life pervading all space and filling everything with its presence-an intelligence that sleeps in the plant, dreams in the animal, wakes in the man, vibrates in the wind, and throbs in the star. By this means pantheism hopes to emancipate the world from the original and primitive conception of a Ruler of the universe whose motives and whose attributes are analogous to the soul of man.

Yet a deeper reflection will convince us that this hope of the pantheist is also a dream. Remote as his conception seems from the idea of a God in the human image, it is really neither more nor less than a repetition of that thought in another form. Where does the pantheist get his conception of an all-pervading life? Is it not from the contitution of man himself? Has not man been called

And why has man

a microcosm of the universe? received this name? Is it not simply because he exhibits on a small scale the features of the collective whole? Man is a union of all the elements of the world. He unites within himself matter and spirit, personality and impersonality; the vegetable, the animal, and the rational. The idea of an all-pervading life is essentially a human conception, a conception derived from man's observation of his own inward nature. The existence which I call the soul is distinguished specially by this,

that it seems to concentrate into a focus things which in space and time are vastly apart. It gathers into one picture stars and systems separated by millions of miles; it combines into one thought times and seasons between which ages roll. It is from this perception of unity in diversity that man has arrived at the notion of a life which shall include all other lives. It is because he feels within himself the influence of a power which makes the past present and the distant near, that he conceives in the universe the existence of an agency which shall be equally diffused through every form. The question is not whether this conception be or be not just; that is a matter for the apologist. The point for us to observe is that, whether it be true or false, the thought is distinctively human, derived from human nature and suggested by human analogy. Pantheism is no revolt from the primitive conception of the race. It is simply the reaffirmation, in a new form, of that ancient belief which from the beginning has regulated the rise of religions-the belief that man is made in the image of God.

The third attempt by which it has been sought to set aside the primitive conception is the modern doctrine of Scientific Evolution. It may seem strange that I should rank it amongst the systems of religion. But in truth it has been nearly always represented as a new form of reverence.

The

scientific evolutionist proposes to substitute the veneration of nature for the veneration of powers above nature, and he is quite willing to print "nature" with a capital letter. He is willing to recognise the fact that we are in the presence of a Force which is perfectly inscrutable, and to express his sense of its mystery by calling it the "Unknowable." All he insists on is the fact that it is unknowable, and therefore incapable of being imaged in a human form. He asks us to substitute the study of natural law for the study of things which are believed to be supernatural, and to occupy in the observation of physical phenomena that time which used to be spent in the investigation of unseen things.

Now we have no quarrel whatever with the printing of the word "nature" with a capital letter, nor do we see anything irreligious in transferring our veneration from the things which are unseen to the things which are visible. But we must point out here once more, that in putting the natural in the place of the human we have not, as we imagine, transcended the human. We are really on the lines of the same primitive conception which dictated the religious faith of our fathers. The transition from the belief in a Power above nature to the belief in a Power which is identical with nature may appear at first sight to be a revolt from the old conception of man in the image of God. But, in the light