ation seem as foreign to its successor as if
it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological
machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age
of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and
eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of
God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,'
sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage
religion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened,
and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the type
of our imagination, and the older monarchical theism is obsolete or
obsolescent. The place of the divine in the world must be more organic
and intimate. An external creator and his institutions may still be
verbally confessed at Church in formulas that linger by their mere
inertia, but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling on them, the
sincere heart of us is elsewhere. I shall leave cynical materialism
entirely out of our discussion as not calling for treatment before
this present audience, and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic
theism for the same reason. Our contemporary mind having once for all
grasped the possibility of a more intimate _Weltanschauung_, the only
opinions quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall within the
general scope of what may roughly be called the pantheistic field of
vision, the vision of God as the indwelling divine rather than the
external creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep
reality.

As we have found that spiritualism in general breaks into a more
intimate and a less intimate species, so the more intimate species
itself breaks into two subspecies, of which the one is more monistic,
the other more pluralistic in form. I say in form, for our vocabulary
gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish between form and substance
here. The inner life of things must be substantially akin anyhow to
the tenderer parts of man's nature in any spiritualistic philosophy.
The word 'intimacy' probably covers the essential difference.
Materialism holds the foreign in things to be more primary and
lasting, it sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy. The brutal
aspects overlap and outwear; refinement has the feebler and more
ephemeral hold on reality.

From a pragmatic point of view the difference between living against
a background of foreignness and one of intimacy means the diff