WHAT IS GOD?

    Certainly no man, and in our opinion no invisible spirit of whatever rank, can so fathom a mystery as to fully describe, define and comprehend God. Mortals can describe and comprehend only what is inferior to themselves: and so, functioning upon the finite plane of existence, they can never grasp and define the infinite. In the conic sections, two mathematical lines may eternally approach and yet never meet.

    But every man and woman has some opinion of God; and the inalienable right, also, to express that opinion. Hence the following:

    "God is absolute Causation."- Proclus. "God is the Great Positive Mind – A. J. Davis. "God is the Supreme Power of the Universe." – A. R. Wallace. "God is love." – The Apostle John. "God is our Loving Father in Heaven." – Channing. "God is our Father-Mother." – Ann Lee. "God is the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed." – Spencer. "God is that power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." – Arnold. "God is Absolute Being manifest throughout all nature as Energy, Life, and the Consciousness, as Love, Purpose and Will." – Peebles. "God is the Infinite Oversoul." – Emerson. "God the Supreme Being, is not God apart from the universe, but immanent and actually incarnate in it as Life and Will." – Lodge. "God, the intra mundane and transcendent potency, and life of all things that were and are." – Sankhya.

    The conceptions of Proclus, Jesus and A. J. Davis, relating to the divine presence, are taken as the foundation of reasoning among Spiritualists because they are the most concise.

    While there is everywhere manifest an infinite and eternal energy – God, pure spirit, - there is something that is not God. For the want of a better descriptive word we will term it substance, the negative side of Being. If all is God, as the enthusiast sometimes states, then cause and effect are one, which negates all logic. This inconceivable realm of substance, that is, nebula, monads, atoms, electrons, fire, dust and infinitesimal entities when manipulated and moved upon by spirit force, become matter, a temporary appearance, cognized by the sense perceptions; we say temporary, because granite itself, submitted to a very intense degree of heat, melts, becoming a liquid, a gas, vanishing into the invisible. Every appearance however, must have a corresponding base – a reality. None will contend that the thing moved, moved itself, or that the thing developed, developed itself, or that the thing evolved, evolved itself, independent of some causative propelling power. Never a machine manufactured a machine of itself. Life springing into conscious existence from non-life, is as irrational and as unthinkable as the derivation of something from nothing. Neither man nor ennobling religious emotions originated from the chance force friction of atoms, nor from any blind, polarized interblending of unreasoning molecules. These of themselves could never produce such desirable and magnificent fruitage as morality and religion, - that religion of love and truth that characterizes Spiritualism.

J. M. P.