true
astronomical philosophy, the heavens display no other glory than that of
Hipparchus, or Kepler, or Newton, and of all who have helped to
establish these laws." "Establish these laws!" They were laws governing
the planets thousands of years before these astronomers were born.

Pantheists often express very high respect for the Christian religion.
Some of the more vulgar sort, however, speak of it as a superstition.
But the wiser ones have reached the perfection of Jesuitism, that is to
say, they indulge in hypocrisy and deception to effect a purpose. They
grant that the Christian religion is the highest development of humanity
yet attained by a majority of the race. The heathen of every grade of
character, and the Christian, with all others who may not be classified
by us with either, are all, in their scheme, so many successive
developments of humanity. It is a trick of their trade to clothe their
abominations in Bible language by wresting the Scriptures. They speak of
the "beauty of holiness in the mind, that surmounted every idea of a
personal God;" and of "God dwelling in us, and his love perfected in
us," when they maintain that he dwells in every creature and thing. They
say they can accept the Bible--that is their phrase--notwithstanding it
pronounces death upon the fools who, "professing to be wise, change the
truth of God into a lie, and worship and serve the creature more than
the Creator," as a mystic revelation of the Pantheism which leaves us to
"erect everything into a God," provided it is none, inasmuch as "every
product of the human mind is a development of Deity." So the Bible, in
the conclusion of their system, is on a level with Thomas Paine's
writings as respects inspiration and origin. The great Pantheistic
divinity is spoken of by Pantheists as the great soul of the universe,
while the more materialistic look upon it as the universe itself, body
and soul. With them the soul is the fountain of all the imponderable
forces, vegetable and animal life, the mesmeric influences, galvanism,
magnetism, electricity, light and heat; and the body the sum of all the
ponderable substances; in one word, "God is everything, and everything
is God." This system is called "Monotheistic Pantheism." It is a vast
generalization of everything into a higher unity, which exalts men and
paving stones, and cats, dogs and reptiles, and monkeys, to the same
level of God-head, or divinity. Man, the soul of men, as the syste