m
would term it, is the greatest manifestation of the divine essence. Yes!
DIVINE ESSENCE! for, with Pantheists, there is no _personal_ hereafter.
This system of Pantheism is an old, worn-out theory; it has putrefied
and rotted with the worshippers of cats, monkeys, and holy cows and
bulls, and pieces of sticks and stones on the Ganges more than two
thousand years ago. It is now dragged up from the dung-hill and
presented as a new discovery of modern philosophy, sufficient to
supplant the Ruler of the universe. How strange it is that men of
ordinary intelligence will embrace the idea, rather than submit to the
dictates of conscience and the Bible! This world of ours is not an
abstraction in philosophy that consists of one simple substance called
matter, nor yet of one substance, for there are many different material
substances, such as oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, aluminum and
iron, and more than fifty others already discovered.

Now, let us suppose that all these elements or substances existed as a
cloud of atoms millions of ages in the past; are we, then, any nearer
the solution of the great problem of world making than we were before?
The atoms must be material, for a material world is to be made of them;
and they must have extension; each one of them must have length, breadth
and thickness; and, as inertia is a property of each and every atom, the
Pantheist has only multiplied the difficulty by millions, for matter can
not begin, _of itself_, to move. Did the dead atoms dance about and
jumble themselves together as we now find them? Is the one substance
theory correct? Monotheistic Pantheism _is scientifically false in
fact_. Some of these men who tell us of a world without an intelligence
in the past, who have such implicit confidence in the powers of matter,
tell us, that "millions of ages" in the past the world existed as a
great cloud of fire mist, which, after a long time cooled down into
granite; and this, by dint of earthquakes, broke up on the surface, and
washed with rain until, after ages upon ages had passed, clays and soil
were formed, from which plants, of their own accord, sprang up without a
germ; in other words, germs came into being spontaneously and grew up,
as we see them, developed in all their grandeur. This chance life,
somehow, chanced to assume animal form and fashion until, in the
multitude of its changes it reached the fashion of the monkey; and then,
at last, the fashion of man, both