Moncure Daniel Conway

“ Pantheism, though a sequel of Deism, was, in its recovery of these excluded mystical and devotional elements, a reaction against it. If. as Science said, God created matter, or, if co-existing with him, endowed it with motion and other laws, then all the laws were his laws, all events his events; the Whole is God; and emotion in the Soul, like motion in matter, is an efficient secondary cause in carrying out the eternal purpose hid in the depths of the Universe. ”

“ James Martineau’s latest work, “The Source of Authority in Religion,” we may learn the ultimate word which Theism can utter in this direction. It is not necessary to Theism to believe that God created the universe. The deity is a supreme Will, (p. 18) which, though intrinsically omnipotent, has seen fit, by an exertion of will, to limit itself. It has withdrawn far enough to give human will freedom for its exercise, and, within certain universal laws, assigned an “objective datum “on which the divine Will chooses to act as an influence rather than by coercion. ”

“ Theology (p. 19) has long been holding the deity for damages; its “judgment-day” is rather for God than for man to give account for the evils wrought in time, all preventible by Omnipotence.
Dr. James Martineau asserts that Theism does not depend on the belief that God created the universe. I venture to add that it will hereafter depend on his not having created it. It is Atheism that depends on the ascription of creation to God. In Theism, fifty years ago, Emerson recognised “the purification of the human mind “; Atheism will hereafter be memorable as the purification of the human heart. ”

“ To excite religious enthusiasm a deity must have personality, a personal name and history. No vague cosmical essence, or first cause, or universal mind, can have any religious or moral value except what it may have appropriated from the personal deities. This was proved by the history of English Deism, which passed away because it was a scientific hypothesis, and, when it ceased to be adequate as such, was without any religious value or emotional life to continue. ”

“ There have been many attempts to make out the existence under the divine government of a sort of Home Rule for the earth, but they have all failed through the admission of imperial Omnipotence and Omniscience. It “passes the wit of man “to relieve Omnipotence from responsibility for delegated powers whose outcome it foresees in every detail. Nor is the divine morality saved by assuming that the evil results will be redressed in another life or world. For, in the first place, it is an assumption : the evils are real, the compensations speculative. ”

“ As it is criminal in a man to delegate to another a power he knows will be abused, or start into action a force he knows will work disaster, it does not (to my mind) appear morally conceivable that Omnipotent Benevolence should withdraw from any part of its realm, or suffer any mortal will, or any natural force, to work wrong and agonies which supreme Will could render impossible. ”

“ The true lover has his own bride. The tendency to consolidate deities — the sovereign, the ruling, the forgiving, the unforgiving, the maternal, the paternal, the incarnate, the glorified, the suffering — is a spiritually atheistic tendency. The majority of educated people who maintain belief in deity really have in their minds a hypothesis about nature, a conception of force, or of causal and evolutionary agency, with little more religious or moral connotation than a theory about electricity. Professor Fiske of Massachusetts has written a book defending the hypothesis of deity ”

“ Agnosticism is especially the euphemistic retreat of scientific thinkers unwilling to be thought Nature-worshippers, and of cultured freethinkers escaping the vulgar connotations of “Atheism”, while maintaining their criticisms on all Theistic theories. ”

“ As an organised sect Unitarianism never amounted to much, because the conglomeration of ideals, sentiments, and moral forces related to it was too vast for any such enclosure. The revolutions of the last century were Unitarian movements. The Fatherhood of God meant the equality of men, the rights of man ”

“ Martineau adopted the opinion that God did not create the universe, instead of merely saying that Theism is consistent with that opinion, and admitted the Zoroastrian principle of limitations on the divine Will not self-imposed, the moral conditions of the problem would have been better satisfied. If the existence of deity is proved at all, it must be by the existence of a moral and rational nature in man ”

“ He admits that God had killed her son, and she was simply saving Jesus from being involved in that cruelty. Had she given up Jesus too, what were left her in the universe? Theism offers her only the gracious God that slew her son.”
“In God our Father,” says Mr. Voysey, “who rules and orders all we see, one who blesses no less in taking away than in giving; who makes tears to flow and hearts to ache, out of love to those whom he chastens ”

“ The Anglican, Catholic, Calvinist, Quaker, Unitarian, Theistic deities, so far as they are really religious conceptions, and inspire religious emotions, are as different as Zeus, Apollo, Mars, and the other ancient Gods. They are also chiefs of large varieties : probably no two really devout souls ever had the same God. ”

“ Martineau’s work is probably the ablest ever issued by a scholar of advanced age, and there is a certain injustice in giving an interpretation of the conclusions of a writer so subtle and exact instead of a full quotation. He deals, however, slightly and cautiously with the existence of physical evil, which is the real question that Theism has to meet. ”