him: the Infinite was his beginning and his end: the
Universe his only and eternal love.... He was full of religion and of
the Holy Spirit, and therefore he stands alone and unreachable, master
in his art above the profane multitude, {77} without disciples and
without citizenship.'[7] Dean Stanley went so far as to say that 'a
clearer glimpse into the nature of the Deity was granted to Spinoza,
the excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam, than to the combined forces of
Episcopacy and Presbytery in the Synod of Dordrecht.'[8] Such a
judgment is rather hard upon the divines who took part in that
celebrated Synod, but at any rate it indicates that the great
philosopher, misunderstood and persecuted, was elaborating in his own
way, this great truth, 'In him we live and move and have our being.'
'Of Him, and through Him are all things.'

V

In their loftiest moments, contemplating the marvels of the heavens
above and the earth beneath, devout souls have, wherever they looked,
been confronted with the Vision of God. 'What do I see in all {78}
Nature?' said Fenelon, 'God. God is everything, and God alone.'
'Everything,' said William Law, 'that is in being is either God or
Nature or Creature: and everything that is not God is only a
manifestation of God; for as there is nothing, neither Nature nor
Creature, but what must have its being in and from God, so everything
is and must be according to its nature more or less a manifestation of
God.'

It is the thought which has inspired poets of the most diverse schools,
which has been their most marvellous illumination and ecstasy.

Now it is Alexander Pope:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

Now it is William Cowper:

There lives and works
A soul in all things and that soul is God.

Now it is James Thomson of _The Seasons_:

These, as they change, Almighty Father! these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of Thee.

{79}

Now it is William Wordsworth:

I have felt
A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
A motion and a spirit which impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Now it is Lord Tennyson: