Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. DEFECTS OF OTHER THEORIES SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHIC. Subject now to the same brief test the principal scientific and philosophic substitutes for Christianity. i. Modern Pantheism. This acknowledges as its father, Benedict Spinoza, a German Jew, born at Amsterdam, A. D. 1632. Spinoza himself was a man of irreproachable life and morals. He believed in a state religion as part of a proper governmental order: but denied the right of the state to interfere with anything save the externals. Belief and feeling were to be left free. The system of pantheism teaches that textit{all existence is but a manifestation of the one, or the all, which lies back of it. Stars, planets, trees, waters, animals, and man are, all and each, but differing manifestations of this one that comprehends the whole. They emerge from, and sink back into, the one. And since God is everything and everything is God, there is no such thing as individualfreedom. We are but links of a chain, drawn along by the one ahead of us, and drawing after us another. And as freedom is an essential part of any right or wrong, in denying freedom, pantheism denies any virtue or vice. It allows no moral distinction between them any more than between light and darkness, or between an agreeable and an offensive odor. It allows the right of human government to punish and reward for its own protection, and to secure social order. But it punishes a criminal, not with any moral indignation, but for the same reason that one would kill a snake in his yard, or fill up a bog-hole in his neighbourhood, for fear of malaria and disease. It believes in the world’s growing better and higher: but nobody has anything in particular to do about it, more than grass has about growing. As its prominent defects I mark t…
