does not triumph?
How associate it unless in triumph with Nature? But Nature is not
triumphant; she seeks, combines, remodels, dies, and is born again; she
is even more convulsed when creating than when all was fusion; Nature
suffers, groans, is ignorant, degenerates, does evil; deceives herself,
annihilates herself, disappears, and begins again. If God is associated
with Nature, how can we explain the inoperative indifference of the
divine principle? Wherefore death? How came it that Evil, king of
the earth, was born of a God supremely good in His essence and in His
faculties, who can produce nothing that is not made in His own image?

"But if, from this relentless conclusion which leads at once to
absurdity, we pass to details, what end are we to assign to the world?
If all is God, all is reciprocally cause and effect; all is _One_ as God
is _One_, and we can perceive neither points of likeness nor points of
difference. Can the real end be a rotation of Matter which subtilizes
and disappears? In whatever sense it were done, would not this
mechanical trick of Matter issuing from God and returning to God seem
a sort of child's play? Why should God make himself gross with Matter?
Under which form is he most God? Which has the ascendant, Matter or
Spirit, when neither can in any way do wrong? Who can comprehend the
Deity engaged in this perpetual business, by which he divides Himself
into two Natures, one of which knows nothing, while the other knows all?
Can you conceive of God amusing Himself in the form of man, laughing at
His own efforts, dying Friday, to be born again Sunday, and continuing
this play from age to age, knowing the end from all eternity, and
telling nothing to Himself, the Creature, of what He the Creator, does?
The God of the preceding hypothesis, a God so nugatory by the very power
of His inertia, seems the more possible of the two if we are compelled
to choose between the impossibilities with which this God, so dull a
jester, fusillades Himself when two sections of humanity argue face to
face, weapons in hand.

"However absurd this outcome of the second problem may seem, it
was adopted by half the human race in the sunny lands where smiling
mythologies were created. Those amorous nations were consistent;
with them all was God, even Fear and its dastardy, even crime and its
bacchanals. If we accept pantheism,--the religion of many a great human
genius,--who shall say where the greater reason lies? I