sness consist.
No philosopher, whether Christian or Rationalist, has attempted this
without discomfiture; but I can, I hope, do two things: Firstly, I can
demonstrate, perhaps more clearly than modern science is prepared to
admit, that there does exist a single Being or Animator of all living
things--a single Spirit, whom we cannot think of under any meaner name
than God; and, secondly, I can show something more of the persona or
bodily expression, mask, and mouthpiece of this vast Living Spirit than
I know of as having been familiarly expressed elsewhere, or as being
accessible to myself or others, though doubtless many works exist in
which what I am going to say has been already said.

Aware that much of this is widely accepted under the name of Pantheism,
I venture to think it differs from Pantheism with all the difference
that exists between a coherent, intelligible conception and an
incoherent unintelligible one. I shall therefore proceed to examine
the doctrine called Pantheism, and to show how incomprehensible and
valueless it is.

I will then indicate the Living and Personal God about whose existence
and about many of whose attributes there is no room for question; I will
show that man has been so far made in the likeness of this Person or
God, that He possesses all its essential characteristics, and that it is
this God who has called man and all other living forms, whether animals
or plants, into existence, so that our bodies are the temples of His
spirit; that it is this which sustains them in their life and growth,
who is one with them, living, moving, and having His being in them; in
whom, also, they live and move, they in Him and He in them; He being
not a Trinity in Unity only, but an Infinity in Unity, and a Unity in an
Infinity; eternal in time past, for so much time at least that our minds
can come no nearer to eternity than this; eternal for the future as long
as the universe shall exist; ever changing, yet the same yesterday, and
to-day, and for ever. And I will show this with so little ambiguity that
it shall be perceived not as a phantom or hallucination following upon
a painful straining of the mind and a vain endeavour [sic] to give
coherency to incoherent and inconsistent ideas, but with the same ease,
comfort, and palpable flesh-and-blood clearness with which we see those
near to us; whom, though we see them at the best as through a glass
darkly, we still see face to face, even as we are oursel