It has to be borne in mind, to begin with, that the very term "immanence" had for a long time ceased to be in current use, and had thus become strange to the average believer; it has equally to be remembered that in theology as { 13} in other matters we have not yet altogether passed the stage where _hostis_ means both "stranger" and "foe"--that, in fact, to many minds, the unfamiliar is, as we said, _eo ipso_ the suspect. But immanence means nothing more abstruse than "indwelling"; and the renewed emphasis which, from the time of Wordsworth onward, began to be laid upon the Divine indwelling, the presence of God in the Universe, represented in the first place the reaction of the human spirit against the cold and formal Deism of the eighteenth century, which thought of God as remote, external to the world, exclusively "transcendent." According to the deistic notion, God was known to man only by reason of a revelation He had given once and for all in the far-off past--a revelation which in its very nature excluded the idea of progress; as against this conception that of the immanence of God declares that He is not far from each one of us, that in Him we live and move and have our being, that He is over all and through all and in all--the Life of all life, the Energy behind all phenomena, the Presence from which there is no escaping, unceasingly and progressively--though by divers portions and in divers manners--revealed in the universe, in nature and in man.
Thus expressed, the doctrine of God's nearness and indwelling will probably commend itself to most thoughtful religious people; but in { 14} re-emphasising an aspect of truth there is always the danger of over-emphasising it, of claiming it as the whole and sole truth--of falling, in a word, from one extreme into the other. To that rule the present case offers no exception; it is, on the contrary, very distinctly one of the pendulum swinging as far in one direction as it previously swung to the other. Let us then at once state the thesis which many of the following pages will serve to elaborate: when the _indwelling_ of God in the universe is interpreted as meaning His _identity_ with the universe; when the _indwelling_ of God in man is taken to mean His _identity_ with man, the whole structure of religion is gravely imperilled. For in the identity of God with the world and with man--which is the root-tenet of Pantheism--there is inevitably involved the surrender of both the Divine and the human personality. We shall have occasion to see how much such a surrender signifies; for the moment it suffices to say plainly that Pantheism, the doctrine which denies the transcendence of God, is by no means the same as that which affirms His immanence, nor does it logically follow from that affirmation. The mistake so frequently made lies in regarding the Divine immanence and the Divine transcendence as mutually exclusive alternatives, whereas they are complementary to one another. A one-sided insistence on the immanence of God, to the exclusion of His transcendence, leads to { 15} Pantheism, just as a one-sided insistence upon His transcendence, to the exclusion of His immanence, leads to Deism; it is the two taken together that result in, and are necessary to, Theism. Thus it cannot be too well understood, and it should be understood at the very outset, that we have not to make anything like a choice between immanence and transcendence--that these two can never be separated, but are related to each other as the less to the greater, as the part to the whole. One naturally shrinks from employing a diagram in dealing with such a topic as this; but perhaps recourse might without offence be had to this method--necessarily imperfect as it is--on account of its essential simplicity, and because it is calculated to remove misapprehensions. If we can think of a very large sphere, _A_, and, situated anywhere _within_ this, of a very small sphere, _a_--then the relation of the smaller to the greater will be that of the sphere of immanence to the sphere of transcendence. The two are not mutually separable, but the one has its being wholly within the other.