"We may distinguish certain stages in idolatry, without, how-
ever, being able to maintain that all nations have passed
through them in regular succession. The fundamental prin-
ciple of idolatry is the confounding of nature and God, the
intermingling of world-consciousness and God-consciousness,
which must necessarily arise when sin becomes so powerful as
to destroy the knowledge of the holiness of God and of His
absolute personality over the world, with its high, strict, and
inexorable moral demands, its claim to absolute sovereignty
of will. Pantheism is not perhaps the production of the scien-
tific reflection of later times; although it may have given
it its form. With respect to its essence it is as old as sin,
Compare the Introduction to Symbolism and Mytlwlogy of F,
Jreuzer, who was the first of all mytliologists to recognise the
footsteps of idolatry on the pantheism of phantasy, but has
made a great mistake in regarding this pantheism as a prodnci
of the healthy condition of man. " To regard nothing, abso-
lutely nothing, in the whole visible corporeal world as quitt
dead, but to invest even the stone with a kind of life, is thf
peculiarity of this method of thought." "That which latei



THE HUMAN RACE AT THE TIME OF ABRAHAM'S CALL.' 117

pantheistic abstraction comprises in the sentence, ' Nothing can
be thought of which is not an image of the deity,' is funda-
mentally the old belief among such nations." At the first step
all nature is regarded as an image and mirror of the one God,
the whole life of nature as His life, each of its powers as His
power. The irparov '\)revSo<s is here, that God is sought only
in nature ; and the saying, " Exalt thyself above nature," is
forgotten. For this reason God is not really found in nature.
