MORE ABOUT THE STARS AND THE EARTH-PANTHEISM-WHETHER ANY THING CAN BECOME SO SMALL AS TO BECOME NOTHING AND YET REMAIN SOMETHING-TIME AND SPACE-MRS. OLDHAM'S TWO GREAT QUESTIONS AGAIN, AND THE WAY THEY WERE ANSWERED.

"HERE is that little book about the Stars and the Earth,' which I was reading to-day,” said Mrs. Oldham, as we drew around the library-table; "there are a great many beautiful and wonderful things in it about the distance of the stars, and the time the light takes to come from them to our eyes: but there are some speculations about time and space that seemed to me very strange, and far from true. But I don't think I understood the reasoning at all.”

"No matter, my dear, about what you did not understand," replied the Doctor; "you understood all that was much worth your understandingthose facts about the stars and light; and as to the speculations, your impressions were quite correct. Have you read it, Professor ?"

The Professor had never seen it.

"It contains some novel and striking, some ingenious and beautiful things," continued the Doctor, “but it is full of absurd confusions of thought, and of false assumptions grounded on them-leading to the strangest contradictions. The writer regards the universe as God's thought a beautiful idea, and rightly taken, true enough."

“But it is Pantheism, is it not?" said Professor Clare.

"What is Pantheism ?" asked the Doctor.

“Well, it is every thing God and God every thing," was the Professor's reply.

"Both at once, do you mean, Professor ?"

The Professor confessed he did not see any difference.

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Well, you are not the only one that does not : but we will not go into that now," said the Doctor; "I had rather ask you in what way that expression about the universe being God's thought strikes you as Pantheistic ? "

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'Why, it makes the universe exist in God," answered the Professor.

"In Him we live and move and have our being -saith St. Paul," rejoined the Doctor.

The Professor looked puzzled.

"How do you mean?" said he.

"Nothing," returned the Doctor, "except that you should not press upon figurative or ambiguous expressions a bad construction, simply because it is possible. St. Paul was no Pantheist, yet you might in that way easily make him out one."

By the way, this remark of the Doctor's strikes upon a vice, which I, the Doctor's editor, cannot help here remarking upon. It is the vice of a great many persons, especially of bigoted religious people with only a certain degree of education-half instructed preachers—who hold a certain number of accredited formulas without any insight-who do not think, but only think they think, and are particularly mistaken in thinking they are philosophical thinkers. Such persons are very prone to raise an outcry against any thing that jars with their habitual notions, and to put the worst construction upon every thing that is not expressed after the fashion of their formulas.

There is almost no amount of absurd mistake, or moral enormity of unjust censure which bigotry and prejudice, combined with ignorance or insufficient instruction, may not commit. It is wonderful and pitiful there should be, in the highest eccle

siastical quarters, such a degree not only of the bigotry you might expect, but of the ignorance you would not expect. I recollect the case of a passage out of John Calvin's Institutes being denounced as rank popery, by one of the chief doctors at the oldest fountain head of the theological instruction of one of the great religious communions that claims John Calvin as its founder and guide, and the persons who had reprinted an old tractate in which that passage occurred (but without reference, and so the source of it was not indicated), were held up to the odium of all the old women in the land! If the chief shepherds of the people—the teachers of the teachers can do this, how will it be with the under teachers and the people they teach!

But Professor Clare was not a bigot, and the Doctor had no thought of intimating he was. But to go on with the talk.

"You are right, as well as not right, in what you observed," continued the Doctor. It is possible to construe the expression about the universe being God's thought, so as to imply the immanence of all things in God,—either as a mode of God's being-taking God as an infinite, impersonal substance, or as a mode of His activity-making Him the only personal being; the former destroying

God's personality, the latter ours, and both of them incompatible with the idea of any proper moral government. But it is not necessary to construe the expression in that way; it may regard the universe as God's productive thought, the projection of His activity, distinct and separate from Himself, just as the artist's picture is; which I take to be this writer's idea, and so not implying any thing wrong in his way of thinking about God. And as to the rest, the spirit of his little book is thoroughly religious-its whole purpose being (as he says) to help us 'imagine and completely understand the universe to be the work of a single Creator.'

"But the oddity of the thing is, that the author thinks the only possible way to do this is to show that 'a point of view is conceivable, from which the universe no longer requires the expansion of time and space in order to exist and to be intelligible to us'! And so he undertakes to establish this point of view, by denying the reality of time and space, or by proving that successions of events can take place in no time, and bodies can co-exist in no space! And his reasoning is equally odd. He takes an indefinitely small time or space to be the