CHAPTER II

COMMON GROUND

I HAVE now, perhaps, sufficiently proved my sympathy with thereluctance felt by many to tolerate discussion upon such asubject as the existence and nature of God.I trust that I mayhave made the reader feel that he need fear no sarcasm or levityin my treatment of the subject which I have chosen.I will,therefore, proceed to sketch out a plan of what I hope toestablish, and this in no doubtful or unnatural sense, but byattaching the same meanings to words as those which we usuallyattach to them, and with the same certainty, precision, andclearness as anything else is established which is commonlycalled known.

As to what God is, beyond the fact that he is the Spirit and theLife which creates, governs, and upholds all living things, I cansay nothing.I cannot pretend that I can show more than othershave done in what Spirit and the Life consists, which governsliving things and animates them.I cannot show the connectionbetween consciousness and the will, and the organ, much less canI tear away the veil from the face of God, so as to show whereinwill and consciousness consist.No philosopher, whether Christianor Rationalist, has attempted this without discomfiture; but Ican, I hope, do two things: Firstly, I can demonstrate, perhapsmore clearly than modern science is prepared to admit, that theredoes exist a single Being or Animator of all living things - asingle Spirit, whom we cannot think of under any meaner name thanGod; and, secondly, I can show something more of thepersona or bodily expression, mask, and mouthpiece of thisvast Living Spirit than I know of as having been familiarlyexpressed elsewhere, or as being accessible to myself or others,though doubtless many works exist in which what I am going to sayhas been already said.

Aware that much of this is widely accepted under the name ofPantheism, I venture to think it differs from Pantheism with allthe difference that exists between a coherent, intelligibleconception and an incoherent unintelligible one.I shalltherefore proceed to examine the doctrine called Pantheism, andto show how incomprehensible and

valueless it is.

I will then indicate the Living and Personal God about whoseexistence and about many of whose attributes there is no room forquestion; I will show that man has been so far made in thelikeness of this Person or God, that He possesses all itsessential characteristics, and that it is this God who has calledman and all other living forms, whether animals or plants, intoexistence, so that our bodies are the temples of His spirit; thatit is this which sustains them in their life and growth, who isone with them, living, moving, and having His being in them; inwhom, also, they live and move, they in Him and He in them; Hebeing not a Trinity in Unity only, but an Infinity in Unity, anda Unity in an Infinity; eternal in time past, for so much time atleast that our minds can come no nearer to eternity than this;eternal for the future as long as the universe shall exist; everchanging, yet the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.And Iwill show this with so little ambiguity that it shall beperceived not as a phantom or hallucination following upon apainful straining of the mind and a vain endeavour [sic] to givecoherency to incoherent and inconsistent ideas, but with the sameease, comfort, and palpable flesh-and-blood clearness with whichwe see those near to us ; whom, though we see them at the best asthrough a glass darkly, we still see face to face, even as we areourselves seen.

I will also show in what way this Being exercises a moralgovernment over the world, and rewards and punishes us accordingto His own laws.

Having done this I shall proceed to compare this conception ofGod with those that are currently accepted, and will endeavour[sic] to show that the ideas now current are in truth efforts tograsp the one on which I shall here insist.Finally, I shallpersuade the reader that the differences between the so-calledatheist and the so-called theist are differences rather aboutwords than things, inasmuch as not even the most prosaic ofmodern scientists will be inclined to deny the existence of thisGod, while few theists will feel that this, the naturalconception of God, is a less worthy one than that to which theyhave been accustomed.