h the goods and evils of this world as sanctioned and
required by providence.

[Sidenote: Hebraism, if philosophical, must be pantheistic.]

The horror which pantheism has always inspired in the Church is like
that which materialism inspires in sentimental idealists; they attack it
continually, not so much because anybody else defends it as because they
feel it to be implied unmistakably in half their own tenets. The
non-Platonic half of Christian theology, the Mosaic half, is bound to
become pantheism in the hands of a philosopher. The Jews were not
pantheists themselves, because they never speculated on the relation
which omnipotence stood in to natural forces and human acts. They
conceived Jehovah's omnipotence dramatically, as they conceived
everything. He might pounce upon anything and anybody; he might subvert
or play with the laws of nature; he might laugh at men's devices, and
turn them to his own ends; his craft and energy could not but succeed in
every instance; but that was not to say that men and nature had no will
of their own, and did not proceed naturally on their respective ways
when Jehovah happened to be busy elsewhere. So soon, however, as this
dramatic sort of omnipotence was made systematic by dialectic, so soon
as the doctrines of creation, omniscience, and providential government
were taken absolutely, pantheism was clearly involved. The consequences
to moral philosophy were truly appalling, for then the sins God punished
so signally were due to his own contrivance. The fervours of his saints,
the fate of his chosen people and holy temples, became nothing but a
puppet-show in his ironical self-consciousness.

[Sidenote: Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.]

The strangest part of this system, or what would seem so if its
antecedents were not known, is that it is only half-conscious of its
physical temper, and in calling itself an idealism (because it makes
perception and will the substance of their objects), thinks itself an
expression of human aspirations. This illusion has deep historical
roots. It is the last stage of a mythical philosophy which has been
earnestly criticising its metaphors, on the assumption that they were
not metaphorical; whereby it has stripped them of all significance and
reduced them at last to the bare principle of inversion. Nothing is any
longer idealised, yet all is still called an idealism. A myth is an
inverted image of things, wherein their moral effects