THAT a very great change is taking place in the thought of mankind respecting God's relation to the world about us, is indicated by the fact that whereas fifty years ago the dominant word in theological writings regarding the matter was sovereignty, today the dominant word is immanence. The mechanical concept and explanation of the universe, in which the creator is thought of as simply the supreme ruler whose will is law, has very naturally found its parallel, and in large part its explanation, in the controlling lordship which men, and especially kings, have exercised over the things which they have instituted or made, and this point of view was given distinction for long years by the fact that Paley built his famous and impressive argument for design upon it.
Of late years, however, the sense of incongruity pertaining to the separation it involves between the creator and His creation has grown more and more burdensome to religious thought, and when, therefore, the doctrine of the divine immanence was brought forward by progressive theologians, it came as a measure of great relief to many. The theory that God made the world as the artizan makes a machine, fashioning every part and adjusting each in its relations to every other, so that a given course of action should be run, a given end achieved,—all this not only smacks too much of the shop, but it precipitates questions as to the metaphysical nature of the power-factor in the machine, and as to the possibility of a self-repairing and self-continuing organism or instruments, apart from God, which have become so troublesome as to bring the theory into merited disfavor among all liberal theologians, and even among some otherwise stanch scholastics.
In opposition to this mechanical concept, a prominent religious writer has recently defined the universe as "a vitalized mechanism pervaded by intelligence and directed in its every movement to a predetermined end. It is. in other words, far more like a human body than a watch;" and he quotes approvingly Alfred Russel Wallace's statement that "not man alone, but the whole world of life, in almost all its varied manifestations, leads us to the conclusion that to any radical explanation of its phenomena we require to postulate the continuous action or guidance of higher intelligences." This is the later concept of the universe in the light of the doctrine of divine immanence, and its identification of the persistence of the activity of intelligence with creation marks a very significant advance step. It recognizes the tremendous truth that creation is not a consummated fact, but a continuous manifestation of the creator.
