Worshippers of the one God can scarcely fall into the same extravagance of error in this respect as the Greeks and Romans did, as all polytheists do; but they can, and often do, fall into the error, and think of God as subject to limits and defects, which are only in themselves. For instance, what is called deism, as distinguished from theism, rests wholly on the conception that the presence and power of God are limited, and that He acts in the manner to which man as a finite creature is restricted. The deist thinks of God as outside of and away from the universe; he thinks of the universe as a mechanism which God has contrived, and which He has endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which it is able to sustain itself in existence, and to perform its work so as to save God, as it were, all further trouble and labour concerning it. It is a great gain for us to have a machine doing what we desire without our needing to pay any attention to it or even to be present where it is, because we cannot give our attention to more than one object at one and the same instant of time, and cannot be present at the same time in more places than one; but those who liken God to man in this respect, divest Him of His omnipresence and omnipotence, and represent Him as characterised in some measure by their own impotency. There is a truth which Pantheism often claims as peculiarly and distinctively its own,--the truth that in God we and all things live, and move, and have our being--that of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things,--but which theism must sincerely and fully appropriate as one of its simplest and most certain elements, otherwise the charge against it of being a false and presumptuous likening of God to man will be warranted. We must not think of Him as "an absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of His universe, and 'seeing it go'"--as a God at hand but not afar off, or afar off but not at hand--as here, not there, or there, not here; but we must think of Him as everywhere present, everywhere active--as at once the source of all order, the spring of all life, and the ground of all affection and thought.