Religion can no more attain to its proper development in pantheism than in polytheism. For pantheism denies that the One Infinite Being is a person--is a free, holy, and loving intelligence. It denies even that we ourselves are truly persons. It represents our consciousness of freedom and sense of responsibility as illusions. God, according to pantheism, alone is. All individual existences are merely His manifestations,--all our deeds, whether good or bad, are His actions; and yet, while all is God and God is all, there is no God who can hear us or understand us--no God to love us or care for us--no God able or willing to help us. Such a view of the universe may have its attractions for the poet and the philosopher in certain moods of mind, but it assuredly affords little foundation for religion, if religion be the communion of the worshipper and the worshipped. What communion of reason can a man have with a being which does not understand him, or of affection with a being which has no love, or of will with a being which has no choice or freedom, and is the necessary cause both of good and evil? Pantheism represents absorption in Deity, the losing of self in God, as the highest good of humanity; but this is a mere caricature of that idea of communion with God in which religion must find its realisation, as pantheism leaves neither a self to surrender, nor a personal God to whom to surrender it. The absorption of the finite in the infinite which pantheism preaches is as different from that surrender of the self to God, which is the condition of God dwelling in us and we in God, as night is from day, as death is from life. We find ample historical confirmation of what has just been said in the very instructive fact, that widespread as pantheism is, it has never in itself been the religion of any people. It has never been more than the philosophy of certain speculative individuals. India is no exception, for even there, in order to gain and retain the people, pantheism has had to combine with polytheism. It is the personal gods of Hindu polytheism and not the impersonal principle of Hindu pantheism that the Hindu people worship. The Sankhya and Vedanta systems are no more religions than the systems of Spinoza, Schelling, or Hegel. They are merely philosophies. Buddhism has laid hold of the hearts of men to a wonderful extent; not, however, in virtue of the pantheism, scarcely dis-tinguishable from atheism, which underlies it, but because of the attractiveness of the character and teaching of the Buddha Sakyamuni himself, of the man-god who came to save men. The human heart cries out for a living personal God to worship, and pantheism fails miserably as a religion because it wholly disregards, yea, despises that cry. * * * * *