Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more intimate point of view; but the statement needs some explanation.  So far as theism represents the world as God’s world, and God as what Matthew Arnold called a magnified non-natural man, it would seem as if the inner quality of the world remained human, and as if our relations with it might be intimate enough—­for what is best in ourselves appears then also outside of ourselves, and we and the universe are of the same spiritual species.  So far, so good, then; and one might consequently ask, What more of intimacy do you require?  To which the answer is that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with it; and that pantheistic idealism, making us entitatively one with God, attains this higher reach of intimacy.

The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the universe.  God is from eternity complete, it says, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a free act and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a third substance, extraneous to both the world and himself.  Between them, God says ‘one,’ the world says ‘two,’ and man says ’three,’—­that is the orthodox theistic view.  And orthodox theism has been so jealous of God’s glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness.  Page upon page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no sense implicated by his creative act, or involved in his creation.  That his relation to the creatures he has made should make any difference to him, carry any consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as a pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness.  I said a moment ago that theism treats us and God as of the same species, but from the orthodox point of view that was a slip of language.  God and his creatures are toto genere distinct in the scholastic theology, they have absolutely nothing in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute to him any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing.  There is a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, his connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal.  His action can affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction.  Our relation, in short, is not a strictly social relation.  Of course in common men’s religion the relation is believed to be social, but that is only one of the many differences between religion and theology.