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It is difficult to say to what degree this notion has been formed and cherished from intercourse for ages with Muhammadans, and how far it comes from the demand of the human spirit for the living God. Some eminent Sanscrit scholars tell us that the Vedas teach Pantheism, while others assert that in their most ancient teaching they assert the doctrine of a living, personal God.
And he asks: "What was to hinder the rise of a sort of refined Pantheism, and the overthrow of Dogmatism pari passu with the multiplication of heavenly intercessors and patrons? If what is called in reproach 'Saint-worship' resembled the Polytheism which it supplanted, or was a corruption, how did Dogmatism survive?
If there be even in Epictetus some passing and occasional touch of Stoic arrogance and Stoic apathy; if there be in Marcus Aurelius a depth and intensity of sadness which shows how comparatively powerless for comfort was a philosophy which glorified suicide, which knew but little of immortality, and which lost in vague Pantheism the unspeakable blessing of realizing a personal relation to a personal God and Father there is yet in both of them enough and more than enough to show that in all ages and in all countries they who have sought for God have found Him, that they have attained to high principles of thought and to high standards of action that they have been enabled, even in the thick darkness, resolutely to place their feet at least on the lowest rounds of that ladder of sunbeams which winds up through the darkness to the great Father of Lights.
English Churchmen, high and broad, were content to condone the grim Calvinism still infiltrating Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at worst, at his idolatry of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall die the death." But the reproach of "Pantheism" was for long fatal to his reception across the Tweed.
Returning to this ancient "pantheism," after so long a reign of a seemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts "the vision of all things in God" to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as of all inquiry into nature: the Spirit of God, in countless variety of forms, neither above, nor, in any way, without, but intimately within, all things really present, with equal integrity, in the sunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the wandering drop of water as it evaporates therein.
The Stoics, on the other hand, with their strong conviction of providence working in the world, were rather inclined to deny the validity of this argument from common consent, and rested their belief in the gods, as Cicero makes his Stoic do in De Natura Deorum, on the evidence of design and purpose in the universe, but by this process succeeded only in proving to their own satisfaction that the world is divine a fatalistic pantheism which roused the ire of the Epicurean and Sceptic alike, and which even Cicero seemed hardly to be able to accept.
Is it necessary to point out how none of these conclusions can satisfy the enlightened religious sentiment? How pantheism, increasing God at the expense of man, wipes out the fundamental difference of true and false, calls bad “good in the making,” and virtually extinguishes the sense of duty and the permanence of personality?
The queer thing was that none of them seemed to think the truth could possibly matter on its own account, or that anything mattered besides being happy or miserable. Yet everybody, except Aunt Lavvy, was determined that everybody else should be happy in their way by believing what they believed; and when it came to Pantheism even Aunt Lavvy couldn't live and let live.
Religion, taken subjectively, in its loosest sense, is a man's mental and moral attitude in regard to real or imaginary superhuman beings a definition which includes pantheism, polytheism, monotheism; moral, non-moral, and immoral religions; which prescinds from materialist or spiritualist conceptions of the universe.
Mithras is the Good, his name is Love. In relation to the Eternal he is the source of grace, in relation to man he is the life-giver and mediator. He brings the 'Word, as Brahma brings the Vedas, from the mouth of the Eternal. Hyde's 'De Religione Vet. Pers., ch. 22; see also 'Essay on Pantheism, by Rev. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
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