e centre, and there are cases when it
is of the greatest importance to discern which of them is nearer and
which more remote from the truth. In the present instance we have
insisted all along that of the two possible extremes of Deism and
Pantheism the former, with its exclusive insistance upon God's
transcendence, is not only more intelligible but far more true than the
latter, with its one-sided stress on His immanence; for, as we previously
expressed it, in the exercise of religion it is the transcendent God
{193} with whom we are concerned. In fact, Deism may be a very faulty
type of religion, theoretically considered; but Pantheism is religion's
practical annihilation. It is not for nothing that in Persia, _e.g._,
the name of _Sufi_--in theory a pantheistic believer in the identity of
the worshipper with his Deity--signifies in current use not a mystic, but
a freethinker!

So far as the religious _life_ is concerned, we repeat that Deism is the
lesser error and the lesser danger; and nowhere is this more closely
brought home to us than when we consider the reality and the meaning of
prayer. For however far-off God may be thought to be, it has never been
suggested that the voice of prayer is not able to travel across the
distance--He may "hear us in heaven, His dwelling-place, and when He
heareth, forgive;" but if His presence is so universally diffused that we
ourselves form part of it, we shall hardly know to whom or to what to
address ourselves in the act of adoration. We can pray to a Deity
conceived as solely transcendent, but not to a Deity conceived as solely
immanent, _i.e._, as the Sum of Being. A vague "cosmic emotion" differs
_toto coelo_ from worship; we cannot worship that which includes us, for
if we did we should be indulging in self-worship, and as for prayer, we
could no more seriously offer it to the universe than to the atmosphere.
This point cannot be too clearly realised. Prayer is the soul's
communion with God; but if the soul is an {194} integral constituent of
God, a mode or phase of the Divine Being, then this communion, being
already an accomplished and unalterable fact, cannot be so much as
desired, still less does it need to be brought about by prayer or any
other means whatsoever. Nothing could be more instructive in this
connection than what is apparently a favourite illustration with those
for whom immanence is only a synonym for Monism, and which likens the
relation of God to