Very different is the doctrine of Immanence, as it appears in the _Theologia Germanica_, in Eckart, in Jacob Behmen, and afterwards in some forms of modern speculation. The emanation theory supposes a radiation from above; the theory of immanence, a self-development, or manifestation of God from within. A geometrician would declare the pyramid the symbol of the one, the sphere the symbol of the other. The former conception places a long scale of degrees between the heavenly and the earthly: the latter tends to abolish all gradation, and all distinction. The former is successive; the latter, immediate, simultaneous. A chemist might call the former the sublimate, the latter the diluent, of the Actual. The theory of immanence declares God everywhere present with all His power—will realize heaven or hell in the present moment—denies that God is nearer on the other side the grave than this—equalizes all external states—breaks down all steps, all partitions—will have man at once escape from all that is not God, and so know and find only God everywhere. What are all those contrasts that make warp and woof in the web of time; what are riches and poverty, health and sickness; all the harms and horrors of life, and all its joy and peace,—what past and future, sacred and secular, far and near? Are they not the mere raiment wherewith our narrow human thought clothes the Ever-present, Ever-living One? Phantoms, and utter nothing—all of them! The one sole reality is even this—that God through Christ does assume flesh in every Christian man; abolishes inwardly his creature self, and absorbs it into the eternal stillness of His own ‘all-moving Immobility.’ So, though the storms of life may beat, or its suns may shine upon his lower nature, his true (or uncreated) self is hidden in God, and sits already in the heavenly places. Thus, while the Greek Dionysius bids a man retire into himself, because there he will find the foot of that ladder of hierarchies which stretches up to heaven; the Germans bid man retire into himself because, in the depths of his being, God speaks immediately to him, and will enter and fill his nature if he makes Him room.