much thunder, thou, if there be any soul left in thee, canst know of a truth. The Universe, I say, is made by Law; the great Soul of the world is just and not unjust... Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai thunder: I know more or less the history of these; the rise, progress, decline and fall of these. Can thunder from all the thirty-two azimuths, repeated daily for centuries of years, make God's Laws more Godlike to me? Brother, no. Perhaps I am grown to be a man now; and do not need the thunder and the terror any longer! Perhaps I am above being frightened; perhaps it is not fear, but reverence alone, that shall now lead me!-Revelations, Inspirations? Yes; and thy own god-created soul; dost thou not call that a 'revelation ?'" He tells us that religion is "no Morrison's Pill from without," but a clearing of the Inner Light or Moral Conscience, a reawakening of our ownselves from within; the world has looked to the revelation without, but it was "when its beard was not grown as now." And, with a sneer at the old churches and the old creeds, he says: "What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible,-that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that."2 Where such talk as this is indulged in, the law and the testimony is very little valued. Mr. Carlyle, accordingly, is disposed to make sincerity or earnestness the test of truth and moral greatness. Christianity is thus reduced from its high position as the only true religion, to a level with the other religions of the earth, and what a man honestly believes, and really practises, is counted a good orthodox creed. The revelation is made within the man, and the Outer Light is respected only in so far as it agrees with the Inner Light. All this comes from a dreamy, exaggerated notion about the human soul. Mr. Carlyle does not say, with Proudhon and Emerson, that the highest being is man, and thus make theology anthropology, but much of what he does say looks in that direction. And his style of expression is frequently such as to lead many of his indiscriminating admirers to that position, or to strengthen those in it who already occupy it. He does not stop with scowling upon the formalism of the age, and calling upon men to be honest, earnest, and active, but the scowl seems to be turned towards Christianity and its evidences as a body of fact lying without. He is not satisfied with a natural reverence for what is great and good in any of our race, but the great with him becomes Divine or Godlike. In a mighty intellect we recognize the presence and power of the Divinity. And for such he claims something like worship or religious admiration. His hero-worship is just a kind of intellectual pantheism. It is preaching up, though in a somewhat different way from the men of the Emerson school, the doctrine of the divinity of the soul. Much as Mr. Carlyle is to be admired for his original vigorous thinking, his liberal and independent cast of mind, and his wish to raise up among us an earnest race of men, we cannot but deprecate the religious tendency of a great deal that he has written, as pantheistical. 1 "The result," says Professor Garbett, "is briefly this. The human mind has wakened into a mighty thrilling consciousness of its collective capacity; it has gathered up into one great unity and organized humanity, all individual intellects and hearts, all genius and all inspiration; and exulting in this great corporate life, and bounding pulse, thus identified with it, it is drunk with pride and worships itself. In its own depths it believes all life and knowledge to lie; the meaning of all outward utterances and phenomena, and the self-evolved solution of all mysteries in heaven and earth. Before the chancery of its own subjective laws and arbitrary requirements, all objective truth is called to judgment. It is itself God in fact, and the universe is its product and its mirror." We are reminded of Tennyson's truthful and beautiful description of mere intellectual knowledge: "What is she, cut from love and faith, But some wild Pallas from the brain "Of Demons? fiery hot to burst All barriers in her onward race For power. Let her know her place; She is the second, not the first. "A higher hand must make her mild, "For she is earthly of the mind, But Wisdom heavenly of the soul." 'See an admirable sermon on the Personality of God, preached In Memoriam, p. 177 before the University of Oxford. We conclude by taking a bird's-eye view of some of the bearings of this form of infidelity, and with some remarks in disproof of it. The doctrine of an impersonal God, as we have seen, lies at its basis. The universe is the divinity, and men themselves, as "God-intoxicated," mingle with it. Out of this fundamental idea rise the following: 1. Creation, with the pantheist, is not a free act, but an inevitable necessity. It is not a complete effect, but a process that is going on eternally. Hegel says, God did not create the world, he is eternally creating it. Creation is God passing into activity, but neither suspended nor exhausted in the act. Anaximander said substantially the same thing ages before him. And Victor Cousin has repeated it after him. "The distinguishing characteristic of the Deity," says the French philosopher, "being an absolute creative force, which cannot but pass into activity, it follows, not that the creation is possible, but that it is necessary. And the men of the Emerson school tell us, that the world is "a projection of God in the unconscious." Pantheism is thus fatalistic. We, according to enlightened reason and Scriptural truth, have been wont to believe that God existed independently, from eternity, in a state of absolute perfection, and that, of his own good pleasure, he called the universe into being. Moses began his historical narrative by declaring, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth;" and he sung, "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to ever lasting, thou art God." The pious in all ages, on looking over the creation, have said, "Our God made the heavens." And the heavenly inhabitants cry, "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." But, according to the pantheist, this is all a delusion. The Divine free-will is a nonentity. Creation is but the inevitable development of the one Being that is beneath all and in all. Thus are falsified all those clear marks of design in the universe on which men have looked for ages, the world is robbed of all its moral grandeur, the holy emotions of man's religious nature are repressed, and he has nothing to behold but a creation that has sprung from fate and necessity, and nothing to think of behind the whole, but an absolute creative force ever passing, not from a moral but a physical necessity, into activity. We may theoretically distinguish pantheism from atheism, but assuredly the man who looks upon the universe, and says that it is "a remoter and inferior incarnation of God," or that it is God necessarily passing into action, is as much without God in the world, as the man who ascribes everything to mechanical forces, and says there is no God. 2. Pantheism inevitably destroys all moral distinctions, and makes man irresponsible. "Evil and good are God's right hand and left," is the doctrine of some of our popular literature. And if the whole phenomena of the universe be one chain of necessary develop |