The false belief as to what really constitutes life so detracts from God's character and nature, that the true sense of His power is lost to all who cling to this falsity. — Science and Health, p. 283.
THERE'S a sage bit of old-fashioned philosophy to the effect that one can't get anywhere without: going all the way, and the recent utterances of a well known leader of so-called "liberal thought within the churches," makes it clear that this homely truism is quite as suited to the progress of religious ideas as to any other line of advance. In arguing for the divine immanence, he deals severely with the teaching that is "deistic in its conception of the relation of God to the universe." The materialism "which concedes indeed that God is necessary to explain the beginning" of things, but practically denies His immediate and essential relation to nature and to life,—this he condemns unsparingly, and for the reason that according to both Scripture and philosophy "there is one omnipresent and eternal energy on which all things forever depend and from which all things forever proceed. The causality and the cause are alike eternal and unending. This is the doctrine of the divine immanence in its essential meaning."
The author of this impressive statement accepts the teaching of Jesus, that this "omnipresent energy" and only cause is Spirit, and that He is infinitely good. He would also undoubtedly accept the axiomatic proposition that like begets like, and yet upon this solid basis of judgment he proceeds to say that the nature and so-called law about us which is known to human experience, must be related to God and explained by him. "Things in experience," he says, "are what they are and hang together as they do, whatever we call them; . . . We are not to think that the doctrine of the divine immanence changes the contents of experience or the general laws of life." For a solution of the problem of life we can only "fall back on the indications of experience."
