That Christianity should thus have retained names and symbols and rites belonging to heathen antiquity was inevitable. The system of Christian theism was the work of some of the loftiest minds that have ever appeared upon the earth; but it was adopted by millions of men and women, of all degrees of knowledge and ignorance, of keenness and dullness, of spirituality and grossness, and these brought to it their various inherited notions and habits of thought. In all its ages, therefore, Christian theism has meant one thing to one person, and another thing to another. While the highest Christian minds have always been monotheistic, the multitude have outgrown polytheism but slowly; and even the monotheism of the highest minds has been coloured by notions ultimately derived from the primeval ghost-world which have interfered with its purity, and have seriously hampered men in their search after truth. In illustration of this point we have now to notice two strongly contrasted views of the divine nature which have been held by Christian theists, and to observe their bearings upon the scientific thought of modern times. V. _The Idea of God as immanent in the World._ We have seen that since the primitive savage philosophy did not distinguish between the human ghost and the elemental demon or deity, the religion of antiquity was an inextricable tangle of ancestor-worship with nature-worship. Nevertheless, among some peoples the one, among others the other, became predominant. I think it can hardly be an accidental coincidence that nature-worship predominated with the Greeks and Hindus, the only peoples of antiquity who accomplished anything in the exact sciences, or in metaphysics. The capacity for abstract thinking which led the Hindu to originate algebra, and the Greek to originate geometry, and both to attempt elaborate scientific theories of the universe,--this same capacity revealed itself in the manner in which they deified the powers of nature. They were able to imagine the indwelling spirit of the sun or the storm without help from the conception of an individual ghost. Such being the general capacity of the people, we can readily understand how, when it came to monotheism, their most eminent thinkers should have been able to frame the conception of God acting in and through the powers of nature, without the aid of any grossly anthropomorphic symbolism. In this connection it is interesting to observe the characteristics of the idea of God as conceived by the three greatest fathers of the Greek church, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius. The philosophy of these profound and vigorous thinkers was in large measure derived from the Stoics. They regarded Deity as immanent in the universe, and eternally operating through natural laws. In their view God is not a localizable personality, remote from the world, and acting upon it only by means of occasional portent and