In order properly to understand the precise character of the piety of Jesus, we must forget all that is placed between the gospel and ourselves.

Deism and Pantheism have become the two poles of theology.
The paltry discussions of scholasticism, the dryness of spirit of Descartes, the deep-rooted irreligion of the eighteenth century, by lessening God, and by limiting Him, in a manner, by the exclusion of everything which is not His very self, have stifled in the breast of modern rationalism all fertile ideas of the Divinity.

If God, in fact, is a personal being outside of us, he who believes himself to have peculiar relations with God is a "visionary," and as the physical and physiological sciences have shown us that all supernatural visions are illusions, the logical Deist finds it impossible to understand the great beliefs of the past.

Pantheism, on the other hand, in suppressing the Divine personality, is as far as it can be from the living God of the ancient religions.

Were the men who have best comprehended God--Cakya-Mouni, Plato, St.Paul, St.Francis d'Assisi, and St.Augustine (at some periods of his fluctuating life)--Deists or Pantheists?
Such a question has no meaning.