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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of God and Mr. Wells, by William Archer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: God and Mr. Wells
+       A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King'
+
+Author: William Archer
+
+Release Date: January 7, 2010 [EBook #30882]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GOD AND MR. WELLS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Ritu Aggarwal and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+
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+
+
+
+  GOD AND MR. WELLS
+
+  A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF
+  "GOD THE INVISIBLE KING"
+
+
+
+
+  GOD AND MR. WELLS
+
+  A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF
+  "GOD THE INVISIBLE KING"
+
+  By WILLIAM ARCHER
+
+
+  NEW YORK . ALFRED A. KNOPF . 1917
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
+  ALFRED A. KNOPF
+  _Published, September, 1917_
+
+
+  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+As I look through the proofs of this little treatise, a twinge of
+compunction comes upon me. That humane philosopher Mr. Dooley has
+somewhere a saying to this effect: "When an astronomer tells me that
+he has discovered a new planet, I would be the last man to brush the
+fly off the end of his telescope." Would not this have been a good
+occasion for a similar exercise of urbanity? Nay, may it not be said
+that my criticism of _God the Invisible King_ is a breach of
+discipline, like duelling in the face of the enemy? I am proud to
+think that Mr. Wells and I are soldiers in the same army; ought we not
+at all costs to maintain a united front? On the destructive side
+(which I have barely touched upon) his book is brilliantly effective;
+on the constructive side, if unconvincing, it is thoughtful,
+imaginative, stimulating, a thing on the whole to be grateful for.
+Ought one not rather to hold one's peace than to afford the common
+enemy the encouragement of witnessing a squabble in the ranks?
+
+But we must not yield to the obsession of military metaphor. It is not
+what the enemy thinks or what Mr. Wells or I think that matters--it is
+what the men of the future ought to think, as being consonant with
+their own nature and with the nature of things. Ideas, like organisms,
+must abide the struggle for existence, and if the Invisible King is
+fitted to survive, my criticism will reinforce and not invalidate him.
+Even if he should come to life in a way one can scarcely anticipate,
+his proceedings will have to be carefully watched. He cannot claim the
+reticences of a "party truce." He will be all the better for a candid,
+though I hope not captious, Opposition.
+
+I thought of printing on my title-page a motto from Mr. Bernard Shaw;
+but it will perhaps come better here. "The fact," says Mr. Shaw, "that
+a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the
+fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of
+credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no
+means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out
+of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of
+Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys;
+and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all
+events, it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our
+hope lies now."
+
+Besides, it has yet to be proved that the believer in the Invisible
+King is happier than the sceptic.
+
+  LONDON, _May_ 24, 1917.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    I The Great Adventurer                                         1
+   II A God Who "Growed"                                           3
+  III New Myths for Old                                            8
+   IV The Apostle's Creed                                         32
+    V When Is a God Not a God?                                    47
+   VI For and Against Personification                             73
+  VII Back to the Veiled Being                                   101
+
+
+
+
+GOD AND MR. WELLS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE GREAT ADVENTURER
+
+
+When it was known that Mr. H. G. Wells had set forth to discover God,
+all amateurs of intellectual adventure were filled with pleasurable
+excitement and anticipation. For is not Mr. Wells the great Adventurer
+of latter-day literature? No quest is too perilous for him, no
+forlorn-hope too daring. He led the first explorers to the moon. He
+it was who lured the Martians to earth and exterminated them with
+microbes. He has ensnared an angel from the skies and expiscated a
+mermaid from the deep. He has mounted a Time Machine (of his own
+invention) and gone careering down the vistas of the Future. But these
+were comparatively commonplace feats. After all, there had been a
+Jules Verne, there had been a Gulliver and a Peter Wilkins, there had
+been a More, a Morris and a Bellamy. It might be that he was fitted
+for far greater things. "There remains," we said to ourselves, "the
+blue ribbon of intellectual adventure, the unachieved North Pole of
+spiritual exploration. He has had countless predecessors in the
+enterprise, some of whom have loudly claimed success; but their
+log-books have been full of mere hallucinations and nursery tales.
+What if it should be reserved for Mr. Wells to bring back the first
+authentic news from a source more baffling than that of Nile or
+Amazon--the source of the majestic stream of Being? What if it should
+be given him to sign his name to the first truly-projected chart of
+the scheme of things?"
+
+We almost held our breath in eager anticipation, just as we did when
+there came from America a well-authenticated rumor that the problem of
+flying had at last been solved. Were we on the brink of another and
+much more momentous discovery? Was Mr. Wells to be the Peary of the
+great quest? Or only the last of a thousand Dr. Cooks?
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A GOD WHO "GROWED"
+
+
+Our excitement, our suspense, were so much wasted emotion. Mr. Wells's
+enterprise was not at all what we had figured it to be.
+
+  GOD
+  THE INVISIBLE KING
+
+is a very interesting, and even stimulating disquisition, full of a
+fine social enthusiasm, and marked, in many passages, by deep poetic
+feeling. But it is not a work of investigation into the springs of
+Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from the outset any dealings
+with "cosmogony." It is a description of a way of thinking, a system
+of nomenclature, which Mr. Wells declares to be extremely prevalent in
+"the modern mind," from which he himself extracts much comfort and
+fortification, and which he believes to be destined to regenerate the
+world.
+
+But Mr. Wells will not have it that what is involved is a mere system
+of nomenclature. He avers that he, in common with many other
+like-minded persons, has achieved, not so much an intellectual
+discovery as an emotional realisation, of something actual and
+objective which he calls God. He does not, so far as I remember, use
+the term "objective"; but as he insists that God is "a spirit, a
+person, a strongly marked and knowable personality" (p. 5), "a single
+spirit and a single person" (p. 18), "a great brother and leader of
+our little beings" (p. 24) with much more to the same purpose, it
+would seem that he must have in his mind an object external to us, no
+mere subjective "stream of tendency," or anything of that sort. It
+would of course be foolish to doubt the sincerity of the conviction
+which he so constantly and so eagerly asserts. Nevertheless, one
+cannot but put forward, even at this stage, the tentative theory that
+he is playing tricks with his own mind, and attributing reality and
+personality to something that was in its origin a figure of speech. He
+has been hypnotized by the word God:
+
+  As when we dwell upon a word we know,
+  Repeating, till the word we know so well
+  Becomes a wonder, and we know not why.
+
+At all events, "God the Invisible King" is not the creator and
+sustainer of the universe. As to the origin of things Mr. Wells
+professes the most profound agnosticism. "At the back of all known
+things," he says, "there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of
+existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or
+death or good or ill.... The new religion does not pretend that the
+God of its life is that Being, or that he has any relation of control
+or association with that Being. It does not even assert that God knows
+all, or much more than we do, about that ultimate Being" (p. 14). Very
+good; but--here is the first question which seems to arise out of the
+Wellsian thesis--are we not entitled to ask of "the new religion" some
+more definite account of the relation between "God" and "the Veiled
+Being"? Surely it is not enough that it should simply refrain from
+"asserting" anything at all on the subject. If "God" is outside
+ourselves ("a Being, not us but dealing with us and through us," p. 6)
+we cannot leave him hanging in the void, like the rope which the
+Indian conjurer is fabled to throw up into the air till it hooks
+itself on to nothingness. If we are to believe in him as a lever for
+the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know
+something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from
+the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God? Do
+we really get over any difficulty--do we not rather create new
+difficulties,--by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is
+no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how
+this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to
+disentangle it a little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort
+of seemliness and order"? Is it an idle and presumptuous curiosity
+which enquires whether we are to consider him co-ordinate with the
+Veiled Being, and in that case probably hostile, or subordinate, and
+in that case instrumental? Are we, in a word, to consider the earth a
+little rebel state in the gigantic empire of the universe, working out
+its own salvation under its Invisible King? Or are we to regard God as
+the Viceroy of the Veiled Being, to whom, in that case, our ultimate
+allegiance is due?
+
+I talked the other day to a young Australian who had been breaking new
+land for wheat-growing. "What do you do?" I asked, "with the stumps of
+the trees you fell? It must be a great labour to clear them out." "We
+don't clear them out," he replied. "We use ploughs that automatically
+rise when they come to a stump, and take the earth again on the other
+side." I cannot but conjecture that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is
+fitted with some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily over the
+snags that stud the ploughlands of theology.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+NEW MYTHS FOR OLD
+
+
+Before examining the particular attributes and activities of the
+Invisible King, let us look a little more closely into the question
+whether a God detached alike from man below and (so to speak) from
+heaven above, is a thinkable God in whom any satisfaction can be
+found. Mr. Wells must not reply (he probably would not think of doing
+so) that "satisfaction" is no test: that he asserts an objective truth
+which exists, like the Nelson Column or the Atlantic Ocean, whether we
+find satisfaction in it or not. Though he does not mention the word
+"pragmatism," his standards are purely pragmatist. He offers no jot or
+tittle of evidence for the existence of the Invisible King, except
+that it is a hypothesis which he finds to work extremely well.
+Satisfaction and nothing else is the test he applies. So we have every
+right to ask whether the renunciation of all concern about the Veiled
+Being, and concentration upon the thought of a finite God, practically
+unrelated to the infinite, can bring us any reasonable sense of
+reconciliation to the nature of things. For that, I take it, is the
+essence of religion.
+
+It was in no spirit of irony that I began this essay by expressing the
+lively interest with which I learned that Mr. Wells was setting out on
+the quest for God. The dogmatic agnosticism which declares it
+impossible ever to know anything about the whence, how and why of the
+universe does not seem to me more rational than any other dogma which
+jumps from "not yet" to "never." Mr. Wells himself disclaims that
+dogma. He says: "It may be that minds will presently appear among us
+of such a quality that the face of that Unknown will not be altogether
+hidden" (p. 108). And in another place (p. 15) he suggests that "our
+God, the Captain of Mankind," may one day enable us to "pierce the
+black wrappings," or, in other words, to get behind the veil. There is
+nothing, then, unreasonable or absurd in man's incurable
+inquisitiveness as to God, in the non-Wellsian sense of the term. God
+simply means the key to the mystery of existence; and though the keys
+hitherto offered have all either jammed or turned round and round
+without unlocking anything, it does not follow that no real key exists
+within the reach of human investigation or speculation. Therefore one
+naturally feels a little stirring of hope at the news that a fresh and
+keen intellect, untrammelled by the folk-lore theologies of the past,
+is applying itself to the problem. It is always possible, however
+improbable, that we may be helped a little forwarder on the path
+towards realization. One comes back to the before-mentioned analogy of
+flying. We had been assured over and over again, on the highest
+authority, that it was an idle dream. When we wanted to express the
+superlative degree of the impossible, we said "I can no more do it
+than I can fly." But the irrepressible spirit of man was not to be
+daunted by _a priori_ demonstrations of impossibility. One day there
+came the rumour that the thing had been achieved, followed soon by
+ocular demonstration; and now we rub shoulders every day with men who
+have outsoared the eagle, and--alas!--carried death and destruction
+into the hitherto stainless empyrean.
+
+It would seem, then, that there is no reason absolutely to despair of
+some advance towards a conception of the nature and reason of the
+universe. And it is certain that Mr. Wells's God would stand a better
+chance of satisfying the innate needs of the human intelligence if he
+had not (apparently) given up as a bad job the attempt to relate
+himself to the causal plexus of the All. Is he outside that causal
+plexus, self-begotten, self-existent? Then he is the miracle of
+miracles, a second mystery superimposed on the first. If, on the other
+hand, he falls within the system, he might surely manage to convey to
+his disciples some glimmering notion of his place in it. The
+birth-stories of Gods are always grotesque and unedifying, but that is
+because they belong to folk-lore. If this God does not belong to
+folk-lore, surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be indicated
+without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we have seen, hints that his
+reticence may be due to the fact that he does not know. In that case
+this "modern" God is suspiciously like all the ancient Gods, whose
+most unfortunate characteristic was that they never knew anything more
+than their worshippers. The reason was not far to seek--namely, that
+they were mere projections of the minds of these worshippers,
+fashioned in their own image. But Mr. Wells assures us that this is
+not the case of the Invisible King.
+
+Mr. Wells will scarcely deny that if it were possible to compress his
+mythology and merge his Invisible King in his Veiled Being, the result
+would be a great simplification of the problem. But this is not, in
+fact, possible; for it would mean the positing of an all-good and
+all-powerful Creator, which is precisely the idea which Mr. Wells
+rebels against,[1] in common with every one who realizes the facts of
+life and the meaning of words. Short of this, however, is no other
+simplification possible? Would it not greatly clarify our thought if
+we could bring the Invisible King into action, not, indeed, as the
+creator of all things, but as the organizer and director of the
+surprising and almost incredible epiphenomenon which we call life? Our
+scheme would then take this shape: an inconceivable unity behind the
+veil, somehow manifesting itself, where it comes within our ken, in
+the dual form of a great Artificer and a mass of terribly recalcitrant
+matter--the only medium in which he can work. In other words, the
+Veiled Being would be as inscrutable as ever, but the Invisible King,
+instead of dropping in with a certain air of futility, like a doctor
+arriving too late at the scene of a railway accident, would be placed
+at the beginning, not of the universe at large, but of the atomic
+re-arrangements from which consciousness has sprung. Can we, on this
+hypothesis (which is practically that of Manichaeanism) hazard any
+guess at the motives or forces actuating the Invisible King,--or, to
+avoid confusion, let us say the Artificer--which should acquit him of
+the charge of being a callous and mischievous demon rather than a
+well-willing God? Can we not only place pain and evil (a tautology) to
+the account of sluggish, refractory matter, but also conjecture a
+sufficient reason why the Artificer should have started the painful
+evolution of consciousness, instead of leaving the atoms to whirl
+insentiently in the figures imposed on them by the stupendous
+mathematician behind the veil?
+
+    [1] In _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_, which is in some sense
+    a prologue to _God the Invisible King_, we find an emphatic
+    renunciation of the all-good and all-powerful God. "The
+    theologians," says Mr. Britling, "have been extravagant about
+    God. They have had silly, absolute ideas--that he is all
+    powerful. That he's omni-everything.... Why! if I thought
+    there was an omnipotent God who looked down on battles and
+    deaths and all the waste and horror of this war--able to
+    prevent these things--doing them to amuse himself--I would
+    spit in his empty face" (p. 406).
+
+A complete answer to this question would be a complete solution of the
+riddle of existence. That, if it be ever attainable, is certainly far
+enough off. But there are some considerations, not always sufficiently
+present to our minds, which may perhaps help us, not to a solution,
+but to a rational restatement, of the riddle.
+
+It is possible to suppose, in the first place, that the Artificer,
+though entirely well-meaning, was not a free agent. We can construct a
+myth in which an Elder Power should announce to a Younger Power his
+intention of setting a number of sentient puppets dancing for his
+amusement, and regaling himself with the spectacle of their antics, in
+utter heedlessness of the agonies they must endure, which would,
+indeed, lend an additional savor to the diversion. This Elder Power,
+with the "sportsman's" preference for pigeons as against clay balls,
+would be something like the God of Mr. Thomas Hardy. Then we can
+imagine the Younger Power, after a vain protest demanding, as it were,
+the vice-royalty of the new kingdom, in order that he might shape its
+polity to high and noble ends, educe from tragic imperfection some
+approach to perfection, and, in short, make the best of a bad
+business. We should thus have (let us say) Marcus Aurelius claiming a
+proconsulate under Nero, and, with very limited powers, gradually
+substituting order and humanity for oppression and rapine. This
+fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. Wells's; but I submit that it has the
+advantage of placing the Invisible King, or his equivalent, in a
+conceivable relation to the whole mundane process.
+
+Now let us proceed to the alternative hypothesis. Let us suppose that
+the Artificer was a free agent, and that he voluntarily, and in full
+view of the consequences, engineered the conjunction of atoms from
+which consciousness arose. He could have let it alone, he could have
+suffered life to remain an abortive, slumbering potentiality, like the
+fire in a piece of flint; yet he deliberately clashed the flint and
+steel and kindled the torch which was to be handed on, not only from
+generation to generation, but from species to species, through all the
+stages of a toilsome, slaughterous, immeasurable ascent. If we accept
+this hypothesis, can we acquit the Artificer of wanton cruelty? Can we
+view his action with approval, even with gratitude? Or must we, like
+Mr. Wells, if we wish to find an outlet for religious emotion,
+postulate another, subsequent, intermeddling Power--like, say, an
+American consul at the scene of the Turkish massacre--wholly guiltless
+of the disaster of life, and doing his little best to mitigate and
+remedy it?
+
+In the present state of our knowledge, it is certainly very difficult
+to see how the kindler of the _vitai lampada_, supposing him to have
+been responsible for his actions, can claim from a jury of human
+beings a verdict of absolute acquittal. But we can, even now, see
+certain extenuating circumstances, which evidence not yet available
+may one day so powerfully reinforce as to enable him to leave the
+Court without a stain on his character.
+
+For one thing, we are too much impressed and oppressed by the ideas of
+magnitude and multitude. Since we have realized the unspeakable
+insignificance of the earth in relation to the unimaginable vastness
+of star-sown space, we have come to feel such a disproportion between
+the mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in our own experience,
+that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal
+carelessness, in the responsible Power, whoever that may be. "What is
+it all," we say, "but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million
+million of suns?" We feel like insects whom the foot of a heedless
+giant may at any moment crush. We dream of the swish of a comet's tail
+wiping out organic life on the planet, and we see, as a matter of
+fact, great natural convulsions, such as the earthquake of Lisbon or
+the eruption of Mont Pelee, treating human communities just as an
+elephant might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasurable
+disproportion in things that a pessimist poet has expressed in the
+well-known sonnet:--
+
+  Know you, my friend, the sudden ecstasy
+    Of thought that time and space annihilates,
+    Creation in a moment uncreates,
+  And whirls the mind, from secular habit free,
+  Beyond the spheres, beyond infinity,
+    Beyond the empery of the eternal Fates,
+    To where the Inconceivable ruminates,
+  The unthinkable "To be or not to be?"
+  Then, as Existence flickers into sight,
+    A marsh-flame in the night of Nothingness--
+  The great, soft, restful, dreamless, fathomless night--
+  We know the Affirmative the primal curse,
+    And loathe, with all its imbecile strain and stress,
+  This ostentatious, vulgar Universe.
+
+The mood here recorded is one that must be familiar to most thinking
+people. "The undevout astronomer is mad," said eighteenth-century
+deism: to-day we are more apt to think that the uncritical astronomer
+is dense. There is a sort of colossal stupidity about the stars in
+their courses that overpowers and disquiets us. If (as Alfred Russel
+Wallace has argued) the geocentric theory was not so far out after
+all, and the earth, holding a specially favored place in the universe,
+is the only home of life, then the disproportion of mechanism to
+result seems absolutely appalling. If, on the other hand, all the
+million million of suns are pouring out vital heat to a like number
+of inhabited planetary systems, the sheer quantity of life, of
+struggle, of suffering implied, seems a thought at which to shudder.
+We are inclined to say to the inventor of sentience: "Since this
+ingenious combination of yours was at best such a questionable boon,
+surely you might have been content with one experiment."
+
+But all such criticism rests upon a fallacy, or rather a brace of
+interrelated fallacies. There can be no disproportion between
+consciousness and the unconscious, because they are absolutely
+incommensurable; and number, in relation to consciousness, is an
+illusion. Consciousness, wherever it exists, is single, indivisible,
+inextensible; and other consciousnesses, and the whole external
+universe, are, to the individual percipient, but shapes in a more or
+less protracted dream.
+
+Why should we trouble about vastness--mere extension in space? There
+is a sense in which the infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more
+disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the
+phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all
+the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the
+bigness and the littleness of things, we are making the human body
+our standard--the body whose dimensions are no doubt determined by
+convenience in relation to terrestrial conditions, but have otherwise
+no sort of sanctity or superiority, rightness or fitness. It happens
+to be the object to which is attached the highest form of
+consciousness we know; but consciousness itself has neither parts nor
+magnitude. And consciousness itself is essentially greater than the
+very vastness which appals us, seeing that it embraces and envelops
+it. Enormous depths of space are pictured in my brain, through my
+optic nerve; and what eludes the magic mirror of my retina, my mind
+can conceive, apprehend, make its own. It is not even true to say that
+the mind cannot conceive infinity--the real truth (if I may for once
+be Chestertonian), the real truth is that it can conceive nothing
+else. "When Berkeley said there was no matter"--it mattered greatly
+what he said. Nothing can be more certain than that, apart from
+percipience, there is no matter that matters. From the point of view
+of pantheism (the only logical theism) God, far from being a Veiled
+Being, or an Invisible King, is precisely the mind which translates
+itself into the visible, sensible universe, and impresses itself, in
+the form of a never-ending pageant, upon our cognate minds. It has
+been thought that human consciousness may have come into being because
+God wanted an audience. He was tired of being a cinematograph-film
+unreeling before empty benches. Some people have even carried the
+speculation further, and wondered whether the attachment of
+percipience to organized matter, as in the case of human beings, may
+not be a necessary stage in the culture of a pure percipience, capable
+of furnishing the pageant of the universe with a permanent and
+appreciative audience. In that case the Scottish Catechism would be
+justified, which asks "What is the chief end of man?" and answers (as
+Stevenson says) nobly if obscurely: "To glorify God and to enjoy Him
+forever." But enough of these idle fantasies. What is certain is that
+we can hold up our heads serenely among the immensities, knowing that
+we are immenser than they. Even if they were malevolent--and that they
+do not seem to be--they are no more terrible than the familiar dangers
+of our homely earth. They cannot hurt us more than we can be hurt--an
+obvious truism but one which is often overlooked. And this brings us
+to the consideration of the second fallacy which sometimes warps our
+judgment as to the responsibility of the Power which invented life.
+
+We are all apt to speak and think as though sentience were an article
+capable of accumulation, like money or merchandise, in enormous
+aggregates--as though pleasure, and more particularly pain, were
+subject to the ordinary rules of arithmetic, so that minor quantities,
+added together, might mount up to an indefinitely gigantic total.
+Poets and philosophers, time out of mind, have been heartbroken over
+the enormous mass of evil in the world, and have spoken as though
+animated nature were one great organism, with a brain in which every
+pang that afflicted each one of its innumerable members was piled up
+into a huge, pyramidal agony. But this is obviously not so. That very
+"individuation" which to some philosophies is the primal curse--the
+condition by all means to be annulled and shaken off[2]--forbids the
+adding up of units of sentience. If "individuation" is the source of
+human misery (which seems a rather meaningless proposition) it is
+beyond all doubt its boundary and limit. We are each of us his own
+universe. With each of us the universe is born afresh; with each of us
+it dies--assuming, that is to say, that consciousness is extinguished
+at death. There never has been and never can be in the world more
+suffering than a single organism can sustain--which is another way of
+saying that nothing can hurt us more than we can be hurt. Is this an
+optimistic statement? Far from it. The individual is capable of great
+extremities of suffering; and though not all men, or even most, are
+put to the utmost test in this respect, there are certainly cases not
+a few in which a man may well curse the day he was born, and see in
+the universe that was born with him nothing but an instrument of
+torture. But such an one must speak for himself. It is evident that,
+take them all round, men accept life as no such evil gift. It cannot
+even be said that, in handing it on to others, they are driven by a
+fatal instinct which they know in their hearts to be cruel, and would
+resist if they could. The vast majority have been, and still are,
+entirely light-hearted about the matter, thus giving the best possible
+proof that they cherish no grudge against the source of being, but
+find it, on the balance, acceptable enough. If it be said that this is
+due to stupidity, then stupidity is one of the factors in the case
+which the great Artificer must be supposed to have foreseen and
+reckoned upon. All these considerations must be taken into account
+when we try to sum up the responsibility of an organizer and director
+of life, acting of his own free will, although he knew that the
+conditions under which he had to work would make the achievement of
+any satisfactory result a slow, laborious and painful business.
+
+    [2] Mr. Wells himself is not far from this view. See _God the
+    Invisible King_, pp. 73, 76, and this book, pp. 39-40.
+
+"But sympathy!" it may be said--"You have left sympathy out of the
+reckoning. Unless we are not only 'individuals' but iron-clad
+egotists, we suffer with others more keenly, sometimes, than in our
+own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is, like the summer sun and the
+frost of winter, a fact of common experience causing us alternate joy
+and pain; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of
+"individuation." Our nearest and dearest are simply factors in our
+environment, most influential factors, but as external to us as the
+trees or the stars. We cannot, in any real sense, draw away their
+pains and add them to our own, any more than they, in their turn, can
+relieve us of our toothache or our sciatica. They are the points,
+doubtless, at which our environment touches us most closely, but
+neither incantation nor Act of Parliament, neither priest nor
+registrar, can make even man and wife really "one flesh." It was
+necessary for the conservation of the species that a strict limit
+should be set to the operation of sympathy. Had that emotion been
+able to pierce the shell of individuality, so that one being could
+actually add the sufferings of another, or of many others, to his own,
+life would long ago have come to an end. As it is, sympathy implies an
+imaginative extension of individuality, which is of enormous social
+value. But we remain, none the less, isolated each in his own
+universe, and our fellow-men and women are but shapes in the panorama,
+the strange, fantastic dream, which the Veiled Showman unrolls before
+us.
+
+In these post-Darwinian days, moreover, we are inclined to give way to
+certain morbid and sentimental exaggerations of sympathy, which do
+some injustice to the great Artificer whom we are for the moment
+assuming to be responsible for sentient life. Many of us are much
+concerned about "nature, red in tooth and claw." It is a sort of
+nightmare to us to think of the tremendous fecundity of swamp and
+jungle, warren and pond, and of the ruthless struggle for existence
+which has made earth, air, and sea one mighty battle-ground. In this
+we are again letting the fallacy of number take hold of us. There can
+be no aggregate of suffering among lower, any more than among higher,
+organisms; and the amount of pain which individual animals have to
+endure--even animals of those species which we can suppose to possess
+a certain keenness of sensibility--is probably, in the vast majority
+of cases, very trifling. Half the anguish of humanity proceeds from
+the power of looking before and after. The animal, though he may
+suffer from fear of imminent, visible danger, cannot know the torture
+of long-drawn apprehension. For most of his life he is probably aware
+of a vague well-being; then of a longer or shorter--often a very
+short--spell of vague ill-being; and so, the end. Nor is it possible
+to doubt that the experience of some animals includes a great deal of
+positive rapture. If the lark be not really the soul of joy, he is the
+greatest hypocrite under the sun. Many insects seem to be pin-points
+of vibrant vitality which we can scarcely believe to be unaccompanied
+by pleasurable sensation. The mosquito which I squash on the back of
+my hand, and which dies in a bath of my own blood, has had a short
+life but doubtless a merry one. The moths which, in a tropic night,
+lie in calcined heaps around the lamp, have probably perished in
+pursuit of some ecstatic illusion. It does not seem, on the whole,
+that we need expend much pity on the brute creation, or make its
+destinies a reproach to the great Artificer. Which is not to say, of
+course, that we ought not to detest and try with all our might to
+abolish the cruelties of labor, commerce, sport and war.
+
+Again, as to the great calamities--the earthquakes, shipwrecks,
+railway accidents, even the wars--which are often made a leading count
+in the arraignment of the Author of Sentience, we must not let
+ourselves be deceived by the fallacy of number. Their spectacular,
+dramatic aspect naturally attracts attention; but the death-roll of a
+great shipwreck is in fact scarcely more terrible than the daily bills
+of mortality of a great city. It is true that a violent death,
+overtaking a healthy man, is apt to involve moments, perhaps hours, of
+acute distress which he might have escaped had he died of gradual
+decay or of ordinary well-tended disease; and a very short space of
+the agony sometimes attendant upon (say) a railway accident, probably
+represents itself to the sufferer as an eternity. But there is also
+another side to the matter. Instantaneous death in a great catastrophe
+must be reckoned as mere euthanasia; and even short of this, the
+attendant excitement has often the effect of an anodyne. In the
+upshot, no doubt, such occurrences are rightly called disasters, since
+their tendency is to cause needlessly painful death, under
+circumstances, which in the main, enhance its terrors; but the
+sufferings of the victims cannot be added together because they occur
+within a limited area, any more than if they had been spread over an
+indefinite tract of space. As for war, it increases the liability of
+every individual who comes within its wide-flung net to intense bodily
+and mental suffering, and to premature and painful death. Moreover, it
+destroys social values which _can_ be added up. In this respect it
+leaves the world face to face with an appalling deficit. But we must
+not let it weigh upon us too heavily, or make it too great a reproach
+to the Artificer of human destiny. For the soldier, like every other
+sentient organism, is immured in his own universe, and his individual
+debit-and-credit account with the Power which placed him there would
+be no whit different if he were indeed the only real existence, and
+the world around him were naught but a dance of shadows.
+
+If there were a country of a hundred million people, in which every
+citizen was born to an allowance of five pounds, which in all his life
+he could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock enterprises,
+though he might leave some of it unexpended--we should not, in spite
+of the L500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy country. Its
+effective wealth would be precisely a five-pound note. Similarly,
+given a world in which every one is born with a limited capacity of
+sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we should do wrong to
+call that world a multi-millionaire in misery, even if it could be
+proved that in each individual account the balance of sensation was on
+the wrong side of the ledger. It is true that if, in one man's
+account, the balance were largely to the bad, he would be entitled to
+reproach the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred or five thousand
+of his fellows declared themselves satisfied with the result of their
+audit. But if the Banker, in opening business, had good reason to
+think that, in the long run, the contents would largely outvote the
+non-contents, we could scarcely blame him for going ahead. And what
+if, for contents and malcontents alike, he had an uncovenanted bonus
+up his sleeve?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this disquisition, with its shifting personifications, its
+Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, we may seem to have wandered
+far away from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader
+has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the
+idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as
+to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an
+eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our
+intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be
+possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience and
+omni-benevolence, and yet to conceive a doctrine of origins into which
+a well-willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible King, as a
+sort of remedial afterthought, but as a prime mover in this baffling
+business of life. We put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed
+more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than Mr. Wells's scheme
+of things. We imagined a wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly
+setting up combinations in matter which it knew would work out in
+cruelty and misery, and another co-ordinate though not quite equal
+Power interfering from the first to introduce into the combinations of
+the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards the good. Then we
+proposed an alternative hypothesis, logically simpler, though more
+difficult from the moral point of view. We conceived at the source of
+organic life an intelligent and well-willing Power constrained, by
+some necessity "behind the veil," to carry out his purposes through
+the sluggish, refractory, hampering medium of matter. Supposing this
+Power free to act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether he could
+take the affirmative course--choose the "Everlasting Yea" as Carlyle
+would phrase it--without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for
+the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of the term. In a
+tentative way, not exempt, perhaps, from a touch of special pleading,
+we advanced certain considerations which seemed to suggest that his
+decision to kindle the torch of life might, after all, be justified.
+Our provisional conclusion was that though, as at present advised, we
+might not quite see our way to hail him as a beneficent Invisible
+King, yet we need not go to the opposite extreme of writing him down a
+mere Ogre God, indifferent to the vast and purposeless process of
+groaning and travail, begetting and devouring, which he had wantonly
+initiated. That is the point at which we have now arrived.
+
+I hope it need not be said I do not attribute any substantive value to
+the hypothetical myths here put forward and discussed--that I do not
+accept either of them, or propose that anyone else should accept it,
+as a probable adumbration of what actually occurred "in the
+beginning"--a first chapter in a new Book of Genesis. My purpose was
+simply, since myth-making was the order of the day, to hint a
+criticism of Mr. Wells's myth, by placing beside it one or two other
+fantasies, perhaps as plausible as his, which had the advantage of not
+entirely eluding the question of origins. I submit, with great
+respect, that my Artificer comes a little less out of the blue than
+his Invisible King--that is all I claim for him.
+
+But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not without indignation.
+Myth-making, he declares, is _not_ the order of the day. Had he wanted
+to indulge in myth-making, he could easily have found some
+metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King. What he has done is
+to record a profound spiritual experience, common to himself and many
+other good men and true, which has culminated in the recognition of an
+actual Power, objectively extant in the world, to which he has felt it
+a sacred duty to bear witness. Very good; so be it; let us now look
+more in detail into the gospel according to Wells.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE APOSTLE'S CREED
+
+
+A gospel it is, in all literalness; an evangel; a message of glad
+tidings. It is not merely _a_ truth, it is "the Truth" (p. 1). Let
+there be no mistake about it: Mr. Wells's ambition is to rank with St.
+Paul and Mahomet, as the apostle of a new world-religion. He does not
+in so many words lay claim to inspiration, but it is almost inevitably
+deducible from his premises. He is uttering the first clear and
+definite tidings of a God who is endowed with personality, character,
+will and purpose. To that Deity he has submitted himself in
+enthusiastic devotion. If the God does not seize the opportunity to
+speak through such a marvellously suitable, such an ideal, mouthpiece,
+then practical common-sense cannot be one of his attributes. Which of
+the other Gods who have announced themselves from time to time has
+found such a megaphone to reverberate his voice? St. Paul was a poor
+tent-maker, whose sermons were not even reported in the religious
+press, while his letters probably counted their public by scores, or
+at most by hundreds. Mr. Wells, from the outset of his mission, has
+the ear of two hemispheres.
+
+What, then, does he tell us of his God? The first characteristic which
+differentiates him from all the other Gods with a big G--for of course
+we pay no heed to the departmental gods of polytheism--the first fact
+we must grasp and hold fast to, is that he lays no claim to infinity.
+"This new faith ... worships _a finite God_" (p. 5; Mr. Wells's
+italics). "He has begun and he never will end" (p. 18). "He is within
+time and not outside it" (p. 7). Nothing can be more definite than
+that. There was a time when God did not exist; and then somehow,
+somewhen, he came into being.
+
+Perhaps to ask "When?" would be to trespass on the department of
+origins, from which we are explicitly warned off. It would be to
+trench upon "cosmogony." Yet we are not quite without guidance. "The
+renascent religion," we are told, "has always been here; it has always
+been visible to those that had eyes to see" (p. 1). "Always," in this
+context, can only mean during the whole course of human history.
+Therefore God must have come into being some time between the issue
+of the creative fiat and the appearance of man on the planet. This is
+a pretty wide margin, but it is something to go upon. He may have been
+contemporary with the amoeba, or with the ichthyosaurus, or haply
+with the earliest quadrumana. At the very latest (if "always" is
+accurate) he must have made his appearance exactly at the same time as
+man; and if I were to give my opinion, I should say that was extremely
+probable. At all events, even if he preceded man by a few thousand or
+million years, we are compelled to assume that he came in preparation
+for the advent of the human species, determined to be on hand when
+wanted. For we do not gather that the lower animals stand in need of
+his services, or are capable of benefiting by them. One might be
+tempted to conceive him as guiding the course of evolution and
+hastening its laggard process; but (as we shall see) he scorns the
+role of Providence, and resolutely abstains from any intromission in
+organic or meteorological concerns. It would be pleasant to think that
+he had something to do with (for instance) the retreat of the ice-cap
+in the northern hemisphere; but we are not encouraged to indulge in
+any such speculation. It would appear that the activity of God is
+purely psychical and moral--that he has no interest in biology, except
+as it influences, and is influenced by, sociology. In short, from all
+that one can make out, this God is strictly correlative to Man; and
+that is a significant fact which we shall do well to bear in mind.
+
+As we have already seen, the Infinite (or Veiled) Being is not God (p.
+13); nor is God the Life Force, the "impulse thrusting through matter
+and clothing itself in continually changing material forms ... the
+Will to Be" (pp. 15-16). As we have also seen, Mr. Wells refuses to
+define the relation of his God, this "spirit," this "single spirit and
+single person," to either of these inscrutable entities. "God," he
+says, "comes to us neither out of the stars nor out of the pride of
+life, but as a still small voice within" (p. 18). It is by "faith"
+that we "find" him (p. 13); but Mr. Wells "doubts if faith can be
+complete and enduring if it is not secured by the definite knowledge
+of the true God" (p. 135). What, then, is "faith" in this context? It
+would be too much to say, with the legendary schoolboy, that it is
+"believing what you know isn't true." The implication seems rather to
+be that if you begin by believing on inadequate grounds, you will
+presently attain to belief on adequate grounds, or, in other words,
+knowledge. Thus, when you go to a spiritual seance in a sceptical
+frame of mind, the chill of your aura frightens the spirits away, and
+you obtain no manifestations; but if you go in a mood of faith, which
+practically means confident expectation, the phenomena follow, and you
+depart a convert. I use this illustration in no scoffing spirit. The
+presupposition is not irrational. It amounts, in effect, to saying
+that you must go some way to meet God before God can or will come to
+you. This seems a curious coyness; but as God is finite and
+conditioned, a bit of a character ("a strongly marked and knowable
+personality," p. 5), there is nothing contradictory in it. Even when
+we read that "the true God goes through the world like fifes and drums
+and flags, calling for recruits along the street" (p. 40), we must not
+seize upon the letter of a similitude, and talk about inconsistency.
+You must go out to meet even the Salvation Army. It offers you
+salvation in vain if you obstinately bolt your door, and insist that
+an Englishman's house is his castle.
+
+The finding of this God is very like what revivalists call
+"conversion" (p. 21). You are oppressed by "the futility of the
+individual life"; you fall into "a state of helpless self-disgust"
+(p. 21); you are, in short, in the condition described by Hamlet when
+he says: "It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly
+frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent
+canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this
+majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other
+thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." The
+condition may result, as in Hamlet's case, from an untoward
+conjunction of outward circumstances; or it may be of physiological
+(liverish) origin. The methods of treatment are many--some of them
+(such as the administration of alcohol in large doses) disastrously
+unwise. In some states of society and periods of history, religion is
+the popular specific; and there have been, and are, forms of religion
+to which alcohol would be preferable. Fortunately, one can say without
+a shadow of hesitancy that "the modern religion" lies under no such
+suspicion. As dispensed by Mr. Wells, it is entirely wholesome. If it
+is found to cheer, it will certainly not inebriate. Indeed, the doubt
+one feels as to its popular success lies in the very fact that it
+contains but an innocuous proportion of alcohol.
+
+You find yourself, then, in the distressful case described by Hamlet
+and Mr. Wells. "Man delights you not, no, nor woman neither." You
+cannot muster up energy even to kill King Claudius. You go about
+gloomily soliloquizing on suicide and kindred topics. Then, "in some
+way the idea of God comes into the distressed mind" (p. 21). It
+develops through various stages, outlined by Mr. Wells in the passage
+cited. In the modern man, it would seem, one great difficulty lies in
+"a curious resistance to the suggestion that God is truly a person"
+(p. 22). It is here, no doubt, that faith comes in; at all events, you
+ultimately get over this stumbling-block. "Then suddenly, in a little
+while, in his own time, God comes. The cardinal experience is an
+undoubting immediate sense of God. It is the attainment of an absolute
+certainty that one is not alone in oneself" (p. 23). You have come, in
+fact, to the gate of Damascus. You have found salvation.
+
+Yes, salvation!--there is no other word for it. Mr. Wells does not
+hesitate to use both that word and its correlative, damnation. From
+what, then, are you saved? Why, from quite a number of things. You are
+saved "from the purposelessness of life" (p. 18). God's immortality
+has "taken the sting from death" (p. 22). You have escaped "from the
+painful accidents and chagrins of individuation" (p. 73). "Salvation
+is to lose oneself" (p. 73); it is "a complete turning away from self"
+(p. 84). "Damnation is really over-individuation, and salvation is
+escape from self into the larger being of life" (p. 76). In another
+place we are told that salvation is "escape from the individual
+distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the
+Kingdom of God, and damnation can be nothing more and nothing less
+than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape"
+(p. 148). On the next page we have another definition of damnation
+(borrowed, it would seem, from Mr. Clutton Brock), with which I hasten
+to express my cordial and enthusiastic agreement: "_Satisfaction with
+existing things is damnation._" I have always thought that hell was
+the headquarters of conservatism, and am delighted to find such
+influential backing for that pious opinion.
+
+As for sin, it seems to be a falling away from the state of grace
+attained through conversion. You can and do sin while you are still
+unconverted; for we are told that "repentance is the beginning and
+essential of the religious life" (p. 165). Probably (though this is
+not clear) your unregenerate condition is in itself sinful,
+"individuation" being not very different from the Original Sin of the
+theologians. But it is sin after regeneration that really matters.
+"Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds not one inch to our
+spiritual and moral nature" (p. 146). "It is the amazing and
+distressful discovery of every believer so soon as the first
+exaltation of belief is past, that one does not remain always in touch
+with God" (p. 149). One backslides. One reverts to one's unregenerate
+type. The old Adam makes disquieting resurgences in the swept and
+garnished mansion from which he seemed to have been for ever cast out.
+"This is the personal problem of Sin. _Here prayer avails; here God
+can help us_" (p. 150). And what is still more consoling, "though you
+sin seventy times seven times, God will still forgive the poor rest of
+you.... There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented
+of, can stand between God and man" (p. 156).
+
+We shall have to consider later what useful purpose (if any) is served
+by this free-and-easy use of the dialect of revivalism. In the
+meantime, one would be sorry to seem to write without respect of the
+depth of conviction which Mr. Wells throws into his account of the
+supreme spiritual experience of finding God. "Thereafter," he says,
+"one goes about the world like one who was lonely and has found a
+lover, like one who was perplexed and has found a solution" (pp.
+23-24). God is a "huge friendliness, a great brother and leader of our
+little beings" (p. 24). "He is a stimulant; he makes us live
+immortally and more abundantly. I have compared him to the sensation
+of a dear strong friend who comes and stands quietly beside one,
+shoulder to shoulder" (p. 39). It certainly takes some courage for a
+modern Englishman, not by profession a licensed dealer in spiritual
+sentimentality, to write like this.
+
+And now comes the question, What does God do? What does he aim at? And
+how does he effect his purposes? The answer seems to be that, in a
+literal, tangible sense, he does nothing. He operates solely in and
+through the mind of man; and even through the mind of man he does not
+influence external events. This, it may be said, is impossible, since
+all those external events which we call human conduct flow from the
+mind of man. Perhaps it would be correct to say (for here Mr. Wells
+gives us no explicit guidance) that external events are only a
+by-product of the influence of God: that, having begotten a certain
+spiritual state which he feels to be generally desirable, he takes no
+responsibility for the particular consequences that are likely to flow
+from it. So, at least, one can best interpret Mr. Wells's repeated
+disclaimer of the idea that "God is Magic or God is Providence" (p.
+27), that "all the time, incalculably, he is pulling about the order
+of events for our personal advantages" (p. 35-6). Commenting on Mr.
+Edwyn Bevan's phrase for God, "the Friend behind phenomena," Mr. Wells
+insists that the expression "carries with it no obligation whatever to
+believe that this Friend is in control of the phenomena" (p. 87).
+Perhaps not; but it is a question for after consideration whether
+lucidity is promoted by giving the name God to a Power which has no
+power--which does not seem even to make directly purposive use of the
+influence which it possesses over the minds of believers. Once, in a
+coasting steamer on the Pacific, I nearly died of sea-sickness. A
+friend was with me, the soul of kindness, such a lovable old man that
+I write this down partly for the pleasure of recalling him. He used to
+come to my cabin every hour or so, shake his head mournfully, and go
+away again. I felt his good will and was grateful for it; but it would
+be affectation to pretend that I would not have been still more
+grateful had he possessed some "control of phenomena"--had he brought
+with him a remedy. Since those days, more than one efficacious
+preventive of sea-sickness has been discovered; and I own to counting
+the nameless chemists who have achieved this marvel among the most
+authentic friends to poor humanity of whom we have any knowledge.
+Where is the God (as Mr. Zangwill has pertinently enquired) who will
+give us a cure for cancer?
+
+This, however, is a digression, or at any rate an anticipation. What
+the Invisible King actually does, without meddling with phenomena, is
+to assume the "captaincy" of the "racial adventure" in which we are
+engaged (p. 76). "God must love his followers as a great captain loves
+his men ... whose faith alone makes him possible. It is an austere
+love. The Spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and
+bodily death" (p. 67). And what is this "racial adventure"? It is, in
+the first place, the achievement of Mr. Wells's political ideals--an
+object which has all my sympathy, since they happen to be, generally
+speaking, my own. "As a knight in God's service," says Mr. Wells, "I
+take sides against injustice, disorder, and against all those
+temporal kings, emperors, princes, landlords, and owners, who set
+themselves up against God's rule and worship" (p. 97). By all means!
+Only one does not see how, if the kings, emperors and landlords
+declare that they, too, have found God, and found him on the side of
+monarchy and landlordism, this contention of theirs is to be confuted.
+If God does not control phenomena, the actual controllers of events
+will be able to maintain in the future, as in the past, that he is on
+the side of the big battalions--an argument which it will be hard to
+meet, except by raising bigger battalions. In the meantime we have to
+note that God's political opinions are only provisional, and that he
+himself is open to conviction. "The first purpose of God is the
+attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more
+knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to power" (p. 98-9). And the
+object to which he will apply this power is "the conquest of death:
+first the overcoming of death in the individual by the incorporation
+of the motives of his life into an undying purpose, and then the
+defeat of that death which seems to threaten our species upon a
+cooling planet beneath a cooling sun" (p. 99). Ultimately, then, it
+would seem that God does intend to undertake the control of
+phenomena. Dealing with ice-caps is not so entirely outside his
+province as one had hastily assumed. The Invisible King is not, after
+all, a _roi faineant_. He will begin to do things as soon as he knows
+how: any other course would be obviously rash. One would like to live
+a few hundred thousand years, to see him come into overt action. Yet,
+in this far-reaching program, there seems to lurk a certain
+contradiction, or at least an ambiguity. If, for the believer in God,
+death has, here and now, lost its sting--if "we come staggering
+through into the golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom
+henceforth, until, at last, we are altogether taken up into his being"
+(p. 68)--one does not quite see the reason for this long campaign
+against death. Surely the logical consummation would be an ultimate
+racial euthanasia, an absorption of humanity into God, a vast
+apotheosis-nirvana, after which the earth and sun could go on cooling
+at their leisure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Apart from one or two irrepressible "asides," I have attempted in this
+chapter to let Mr. Wells speak for himself, proclaim the faith that is
+in him, and draw the portrait of his God. Many details are of course
+omitted, for which the reader must turn to the original text. He will
+find it a pleasant and profitable task. The remainder of my present
+undertaking falls into three parts. First I must ask the reader to
+consider with me whether Mr. Wells's gospel can be accepted as a real
+addition to knowledge, like (say) the discovery of radium, or whether
+it is only a re-description in new language (or old language slightly
+refurbished) of familiar facts of spiritual experience. In the second
+place, assuming that we have to fall back on the latter alternative,
+we shall enquire whether anything would be gained by the general
+acceptance of this new-old, highly emotionalized terminology. Thirdly,
+I shall venture to suggest that when Mr. Wells says "The first purpose
+of God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means
+to more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to power," he is only
+choosing a mythological way of expressing the fact that if God (in the
+ordinary, non-Wellsian sense of the word) is ever to be found, it must
+be through patient investigation of the phenomena in which he clothes
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD?
+
+
+Though many of Mr. Wells's asseverations of the substantive reality of
+his Invisible King have been quoted above, it would be easy to
+lengthen their array. There is nothing on which he is so insistent.
+For example, "God is no abstraction nor trick of words....[3] He is as
+real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace" (p. 56). And again, on the
+same page: "He feels us and knows us; he is helped and gladdened by
+us. He hopes and attempts." There is no limit to the anthropomorphism
+of the language which Mr. Wells currently employs. Or rather, there is
+only one limit: he disclaims the notion that his God is actually
+existent in space, that he has parts and dimensions, and inhabits a
+form in any way analogous to ours. He is the Invisible King, not
+merely, like the Spanish Fleet, because he "is not yet in sight," but
+because he has no material or "astral" integument. Being outside space
+(though inside time) he can be omnipresent (p. 61). But of course Mr.
+Wells would not pretend that no deity can be called anthropomorphic
+who is not actually conceived as incarnate in the visible figure of a
+man. An anthropomorphic God is one who reflects the mental
+characteristics of his worshippers; and that Mr. Wells's God does, if
+ever God did in this world.
+
+    [3] The words here omitted, "no Infinite," are nothing to the
+    present purpose. Mr. Wells has started by making this
+    declaration, which we accept without difficulty. No one will
+    suspect the Invisible King of being an "Infinite" in
+    disguise.
+
+Yet almost in the same breath in which he is claiming for his God the
+fullest independent reality--thinking of him "as having moods and
+aspects, as a man has, and a consistency we call his character" (p.
+63)--he will use language implying that he is that very abstraction of
+the better parts of human nature which has been proposed for worship
+in all the various "religions of humanity," "ethical churches," and so
+forth, for two or three generations past. Listen to this: "Though he
+does not exist in matter or space, he exists in time, just as a
+current of thought may do; he changes and becomes more even as a man's
+thought gathers itself together; somewhere in the dawning of mankind
+he had a beginning, an awakening, and as mankind grows he grows....
+_He is the undying human memory, the increasing human will_" (p. 61).
+When, in the last chapter, I discussed the date of the divinity's
+birth, I had overlooked this text. Here we have it in black and white
+that he did not precede mankind--that, of course, would have implied
+independence--but began with the "dawning" of the race, and has grown
+with its growth. Moreover, the analogy of a "current of thought" is
+expressly suggested--reinforcing the suspicion which has all along
+haunted us that the God of Mr. Wells is nothing else than what is
+known to less mythopoeic thinkers as a "stream of tendency." But Mr.
+Wells will by no means have it so. Indeed he evidently regards this as
+the most annoying, and perhaps damnable, of heresies. On the very next
+page he proceeds to rule out the suggestion that "God is the
+collective mind and purpose of the human race." "You may declare," he
+says, "that this is no God, but merely the sum of mankind. But those
+who believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that. God is, they
+say, not an aggregate but a synthesis." And he goes on to suggest
+various analogies: a temple is more than a gathering of stones, a
+regiment more than an accumulation of men: we do not love the soil of
+our back garden, or the chalk of Kent, or the limestone of Yorkshire;
+yet we love England, which is made up of these things. So God is more
+than the sum or essence of the nobler impulses of the race: he is a
+spirit, a person, a friend, a great brother, a captain, a king: he "is
+love and goodness" (p 80); and without him the Service of Man is "no
+better than a hobby, a sentimentality or a hypocrisy" (p. 95).
+
+Let us reflect a little upon these analogies, and see whether they
+rest on any solid basis. Why is a temple more than a heap of stones?
+Because human intelligence and skill have entered into the stones and
+organized them to serve a given purpose or set of purposes: to delight
+the eye, to elevate the mind, to express certain ideas, to afford
+shelter for worshippers against wind, rain and sun. Why is a regiment
+more than a mob? Again because it has been deliberately and
+elaborately organized to fulfil certain functions. Why is England more
+than the mere rocks of which it is composed? Because these materials
+have been grouped, partly by nature, but very largely by the labor of
+untold generations of our fathers, into forms which give pleasure to
+the eye and appeal to our most intimate and cherished associations.
+Besides, when we speak of "England," we do not think only or mainly
+of its physical aspects. We think of it as a great community, with an
+ancient, and in some ways admirable, tradition of political life, with
+a splendid record of achievement in both material and spiritual
+things, with a great past, and (we hope) a greater future. In all
+these cases the parts have been fused into a whole by human effort,
+either consciously or instinctively applied; and it is in virtue of
+this effort alone that the whole transcends its parts. But in the case
+of a God "synthetized" out of the thought and feeling of untold
+generations of men, the analogy breaks down at every point. To assume
+that portions of psychic experience are capable of vital coalescence,
+is to beg the whole question. We know that stone can be piled on
+stone, that men can be trained to form a platoon, a cohort, a phalanx;
+but that detached fragments of mind are capable of any sort of
+cohesion and organization we do not know at all. And, even if this
+point could be granted, where is the organizing power? We should have
+to postulate another God to serve as the architect or the
+drill-sergeant of our synthetic divinity. Nor would it help matters to
+suggest that the God (as it were) crystallized himself; for that is to
+assume structural potentialities in his component parts which must
+have come from somewhere, so that again we have to presuppose another
+God. It is true, no doubt, that portions of thought and feeling can be
+collected, arranged, edited, in some sense organized, by human effort;
+but the result is an encyclopaedia, a thesaurus, an anthology, a
+liturgy, a bible--not a God. It may, like the Vedas, the Hebrew
+Scriptures and the Koran, become an object of idolatry; but even its
+idolaters see in it only an emanation from God, not the God himself.
+All this argument may strike the reader as extremely nebulous, but I
+submit that the fault is not mine. It was not I who sought to
+demonstrate the reality of a figure of speech by placing it on all
+fours with a cathedral and a regiment. The whole contention is so
+baffling that reason staggers and flounders as in a quicksand. It
+rests upon a mixture of categories, as palpable and yet as elusive as
+anything in _The Hunting of the Snark_.
+
+If you tell me that Public Opinion is a God, I am quite willing to
+consider whether the metaphor is a luminous and helpful one. But if
+you protest that it is no metaphor at all, but a literal statement of
+fact, like the statement that Mr. Woodrow Wilson is President of the
+United States, I no longer know where we are. Mr. Wells's "undying
+human memory and increasing human will" cannot exactly be identified
+with Public Opinion, but it belongs to the same order of ideas. Here
+there is an actual workable analogy. But there is no practicable
+analogy between a purely mental concept and a physical construction.
+You will not help me to believe in (say) the doctrine of Original Sin,
+by assuring me that it is built, like the Tower Bridge, on the
+cantilever principle.
+
+It is quite certain that, if passionate conviction and the free use of
+anthropomorphic language can make a figure of speech a God, the
+Invisible King is an individual entity, as detached from Mr. Wells as
+Michelangelo's Moses from Michelangelo. Paradoxically enough, he has
+put on "individuation" that his worshippers may escape from it. Mr.
+Wells's book teems with expressions--I have given many examples of
+them--which are wholly inapplicable to any metaphor, however
+galvanized into a semblance of life by ecstatic contemplation in the
+devotional mind. For example, when we are told that it is doubtful
+whether "God knows all, or much more than we do, about the ultimate
+Being," the mere assertion of a doubt implies the possibility of
+knowledge of a quite different order from any that exists in the human
+intelligence. Mr. Wells explicitly assures us that knowledge of the
+Veiled Being is (for the present at any rate) inaccessible to our
+faculties; but he implies that such knowledge _may_ be possessed by
+the Invisible King; and as knowledge cannot possibly be a synthesis of
+ignorances, it follows that the Invisible King has powers of
+apprehension quite different from, and independent of, any operation
+of the human brain. These powers may not, as a matter of fact, have
+solved the enigma of existence; but it is clearly implied that they
+might conceivably do so; and indeed the text positively asserts that
+God knows _something_ more of the Veiled Being than we do, though
+perhaps not "much." In view of this passage, and many others of a like
+nature, we cannot fall back on the theory that Mr. Wells is merely
+trying, by dint of highly imaginative writing, to infuse life into a
+deliberate personification, like Robespierre's Goddess of Reason or
+Matthew Arnold's Zeitgeist. However difficult it may be, we must
+accustom ourselves to the belief that his assertions of the personal
+existence of his God represent the efficient element in his thought,
+and that if other passages seem inconsistent with that idea--seem to
+point to mere abstraction or allegorization of the mind of the
+race--it is these passages, and not the more full-blooded
+pronouncements, that must be cancelled as misleading or inadequate.
+There can be no doubt that the God to whom Mr. Wells seeks to convert
+us is (in his apostle's conception) much more of a President Wilson
+than of a Zeitgeist.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would be possible, of course, for a God, however dubious and even
+inconceivable the method of his "synthesis," to manifest himself in
+his effects--to prove his existence by his actions. But this, as we
+have seen, the Invisible King scorns to do. His adherents, we are
+told, "advance no proof whatever of the existence of God but their
+realization of him" (p. 98). There is a sort of implication that the
+Deity will not descend to vulgar miracle-working. "An evil and
+adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be
+given to it"--not even "the sign of Jonah the prophet."
+
+But to ask for some sort of visible or plausibly conjecturable effect
+is not at all the same thing as to ask for miracles. Mr. Wells
+proclaims with all his might that the Invisible King works the most
+marvellous and beneficent changes in the minds of his devotees; why,
+then, do these changes produce no recognizable effect on the course of
+events? The God who can work upon the human mind has the key to the
+situation in his hands--why, then, does he make such scant use of it?
+Is God only a luxury for the intellectually wealthy? The champagne of
+the spiritual life? A stimulant and anodyne highly appreciated in the
+best circles, but inaccessible to the man of small spiritual means,
+whether he be a dweller in palaces or in the slums?
+
+To say that a given Power can and does potently affect the human mind,
+and yet cannot, or at least does not, produce any appreciable or
+demonstrable effect on the external aspects of human life, is like
+asking us to believe that a man is a heaven-born conductor who can get
+nothing out of his orchestra but discords and cacophonies.
+
+Mr. Wells may perhaps reply that his God _does_ recognizably influence
+the course of events--indeed, that everything in history which we see
+to be good and desirable is the work of the Invisible King--but that
+he does not advance this fact as a proof of God's existence, because
+it is discernible only to the eye of faith and cannot be brought home
+to unregenerate reason. I do not imagine that he will take this line,
+for it would come dangerously near to identifying God with
+Providence--a heresy which he abhors. But supposing some other adept
+in "modern religion" were to make this claim on behalf of the
+Invisible King, would it go any way towards persuading us that we owe
+him our allegiance?
+
+The assumption would be, as I understand it, that of a finite God,
+unable to modify the operations of matter, but with an unlimited, or
+at any rate a very great, power of influencing the workings of the
+human mind. He would have no control over meteorological conditions:
+he could not "ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm"; he could
+not subdue the earthquake or prevent the Greenland glacier from
+"calving" icebergs into the Atlantic. He could not release the human
+body from the rhythms of growth and decay; he could not eradicate that
+root of all evil, the association of consciousness with a mechanism
+requiring to be constantly stoked with a particular sort of fuel which
+exists only in limited quantities. If God could arrange for life to be
+maintained on a diet of inorganic substances--if he could enable
+animals, like plants, to go direct to minerals and gases for their
+sustenance, instead of having it, so to speak, half-digested in the
+vegetable kingdom--or even if, under the present system, he could make
+fecundity, in any given species, automatically proportionate to the
+supply of food--he would at one stroke refashion earthly life in an
+extremely desirable sense. But this we assume to be beyond his
+competence: the Veiled Being has autocratically imposed the struggle
+for existence as an inexorable condition of the Invisible King's
+activities, except in so far as it can be eluded by and through the
+human intelligence. His problem, then, will be to guide the minds of
+men towards a realization that their higher destiny lies in using
+their intelligence to substitute ordered co-operation for the
+sanguinary competition above which merely instinctive organism are
+incapable of rising.
+
+Observe that in exercising this power of psychical influence there
+would be no sort of miracle-working, no interference with the order of
+nature. The influence of mind upon mind, even without the intervention
+of words or other symbols, is a part of the order of nature which no
+one to-day dreams of questioning. Hypnotic suggestion is a department
+of orthodox medical practice, and telepathy is more and more widely
+admitted, if only as a refuge from the hypothesis of survival after
+death. If, then, we have a divine mind applying itself to the problems
+of humanity, and capable of suggesting ideas to the mind of
+man--appealing, as a "still small voice" (p. 18), to his
+intelligence, his emotions and his will--one cannot but figure its
+power for good as almost illimitable. What is to prevent it from
+achieving a very rapid elimination of the ape and the tiger, the
+Junker and the Tory, and substituting social enthusiasms for
+individual passions as the motive-power of human conduct? We may admit
+that the brain of man must first be developed up to a certain point
+before divine suggestion could effectively work upon it. But we know
+that men and races of magnificent brainpower must have existed on the
+planet thousands and thousands of years ago. What, then, has the
+Invisible King made of his opportunities?
+
+Frankly, he has made a terrible hash of them. It is hard to see how
+the progress of the race could possibly have been slower, more
+laborious, more painful than in fact it has been. No doubt there have
+been a few splendid spurts, which we may, if we please, trace to the
+genial goading of the Invisible King. But all the great movements have
+dribbled away into frustration and impotence. There was, for example,
+the glorious intellectual efflorescence of Greece. There, you may say,
+the Invisible King was almost visibly at work. But, after all, what a
+flash-in-the-pan it was! Hellas was a little island of light
+surrounded by gloomy immensities of barbarism; yet, instead of
+stablishing and fortifying a political cosmos, its leading men had
+nothing better to do than to plunge into the bloody chaos of the
+Peloponnesian War, and set back the clock of civilization by untold
+centuries. What was the Invisible King about when that catastrophe
+happened? Similarly, the past two centuries, and especially the past
+seventy-five years, have witnessed a marvellous onrush in man's
+intellectual apprehension of the universe and mastery over the latent
+energies of matter. But because moral and political development has
+lagged hopelessly behind material progress, the world is plunged into
+a war of unexampled magnitude and almost unexampled fury, wherein the
+heights of the air and depths of the sea are pressed into the service
+of slaughter. Where was the Invisible King in July, 1914? Or, for that
+matter, what has he been doing since July, 1870? "Either he was
+musing, or he was on a journey, or peradventure he slept." Truly it
+would seem that he might have advised Mr. Wells to wait for the "Cease
+fire!" before proclaiming his godhead.
+
+Of course Mr. Wells will remind me that he claims for him no material
+potency; and I must own that no happier moment could have been chosen
+for the annunciation of an impotent God. But the plea does not quite
+tally with the facts. In the first place (as we have seen) the
+Invisible King is _going_ to do things--he is going to do very
+remarkable things as soon as he knows how. And in the second place it
+is impossible to conceive that the tremendous psychical influence
+which is claimed for this God can be exercised without producing
+external reactions. Why, he is actually stated to be--like another
+God, his near relative, whom he rather unkindly disowns--he is stated
+to be "the light of the world" (p. 18). Is there any meaning in such a
+statement if it be not pertinent to ask what sort of light has led the
+world into the ghastly quagmire in which it is to-day agonizing? The
+truth is that Mr. Wells attributes to his God powers which, even if he
+had no greater knowledge than Mr. Wells himself possesses, could be
+used to epoch-making advantage. Fancy an omnipresent H. G. Wells, able
+to speak in a still small voice to all men of good-will throughout the
+world! What a marvellous revolution might he not effect! Mr. Wells
+himself has outlined such a revolution in one of his most thoughtful
+romances, _In the Days of the Comet_. From the fact that it does not
+occur, may we not fairly suspect that the Invisible King is a creation
+of the same mythopoeic faculty which engendered the wonder-working
+comet with its aura of sweet-reasonableness?
+
+If we turn to Mr. Britling, we find that that eminent publicist was
+distressed by a sense of the difficulty of conveying God's message to
+the world; only he modestly attributed it to defects in his own
+equipment rather than to powerlessness on the part of God. We read on
+page 427:--"Never had it been so plain to Mr. Britling that he was a
+weak, silly, ill-informed and hasty-minded writer, and never had he
+felt so invincible a conviction that the Spirit of God was in him, and
+that it fell to him to take some part in the establishment of a new
+order of living upon the earth.... Always he seemed to be on the verge
+of some illuminating and beautiful statement of his cause; always he
+was finding his writing inadequate, a thin treachery to the impulse of
+his heart." Have we not in such an experience an irrefutable proof of
+the inefficacy of Mr. Britling's God? Always the world has been all
+ears for a clear, convincing, compulsive message from God; always, or
+at any rate for many thousands of years, there have been men who
+seemed the predestined mouthpieces of such a message; always what
+purported to be the word of God has proved to be either powerless to
+make itself heard, or powerful only to the begetting of hideous moral
+and social corruptions. God spoke (it is said) through the Vedic
+_rishis_, the sages of the Himalayas--and the result has been caste,
+cow-worship, suttee, abominations of asceticism, and nameless orgies
+of sensuality. God spoke through Moses, and the result was--Judaism!
+God spoke through Jesus, and the result was Arianism and
+Athanasianism, the Papacy, the Holy Office, the Thirty Years' War,
+massacres beyond computation, and the slowly calcined flesh of an
+innumerable army of martyrs. All this, no doubt, was due to gross and
+palpable misunderstanding of the message delivered through Jesus; but
+since it was so fatally open to misunderstanding, would it not better
+have remained undelivered? Could the world have been appreciably worse
+off without it? The question is rather an idle one, since it turns on
+"might have beens." That the element of good in the message of Jesus
+has been to some extent efficient, no one would deny. But the alloy of
+potential evil has made itself so overpoweringly actual that to strike
+a balance between the two forces is impossible, and the question is
+generally decided by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into one
+scale or the other.
+
+There has never been a time when a really well-informed revelation,
+uttered with charm and power, might not have revolutionized the world.
+"A well-informed revelation!" the reader may cry: "What terrible
+bathos!" Mr. Wells, moreover, speaks slightingly of revelation (pp.
+19, 163) in a tone that seems to imply that "modern religion" would
+have nothing to do with it even if it could. But the demand for a
+revelation is eminently reasonable and justified; and the only trouble
+about the historic revelations is that they have all been so
+shockingly ill-informed, and have revealed nothing to the purpose.
+Robert Louis Stevenson anticipated Mr. Wells's view of the matter when
+he wrote ironically:--
+
+  It's a simple thing that I demand,
+    Though humble as can be--
+  A statement fair in my Maker's hand
+    To a gentleman like me--
+
+  A clean account, writ fair and broad,
+    And a plain apologee--
+  Or deevil a ceevil word to God
+    From a gentleman like me.
+
+But why this irony? What an infinity of trouble and pain would have
+been saved if such a "clean account, writ fair and broad," had been
+vouchsafed, and had been found to tally with the facts! Nor have the
+reputedly wise and good of this world seen any presumption in desiring
+such a _communique_. Most of them thought they had received it, and
+many wasted half their lives in attempting to reconcile new knowledge
+with old ignorance, promulgated under the guarantee of God. I cannot
+but think that the poet got nearer the heart of the matter who
+wrote:--
+
+  Was Moses upon Sinai taught
+  How Sinai's mighty ribs were wrought?
+  Did Buddha, 'neath the bo-tree's shade,
+  Learn how the stars were poised and swayed?
+
+  Did Jesus still pain's raging storm,
+  And dower the world with chloroform?
+  Or Mahomet a jehad decree
+  'Gainst microbe-harboring gnat and flea?
+
+  Has revelation e'er revealed
+  Aught from its age and hour concealed?
+  Or miracle, since time began,
+  Conferred a single boon on Man?
+
+Truly, we may agree with Mr. Wells that the Invisible King was
+probably not in the secrets of the Veiled Being, else he could
+scarcely have kept them so successfully. But have we any use for a God
+who can teach us nothing? who has to be taught by us before he can do
+anything worth mentioning? The old Gods who professed to teach were
+much more rational in theory, if only their teaching had not been all
+wrong. Man has built up his knowledge of the universe he lives in by
+slow, laborious degrees, not helped, but constantly and cruelly
+hindered, by his Gods. Yet Mr. Wells will surely not deny that an
+approximately true conception of the process of nature, and of his own
+origin and history, was an indispensable basis for all right and
+lasting social construction. What colossal harm has been wrought, for
+instance, by the fairy-tale of the Fall, and all its theological
+consequences! Yet, age after age, the Invisible King did nothing to
+shake its calamitous prestige. Of late it is true that the progress of
+knowledge has seemed no longer slow, but amazingly rapid; but that is
+because the amount of energy devoted to it has been multiplied a
+hundredfold. Each new step is still a very short one: it is generally
+found that several investigators have independently arrived at the
+verge of a new discovery, and it is often a matter of chance which of
+them first crosses the line and is lucky enough to associate his name
+with the completed achievement. All this means that to-day, as from
+the beginning, man has to wring her secrets from Nature in the sweat
+of his brain, and without the smallest assistance from any Invisible
+King or other potentate. To-day there are doubtless beneficent secrets
+under our very noses, so to speak, which one word of a still small
+voice might enable us to grasp, but which may remain undiscovered, to
+our great detriment, for centuries to come. There is, in short, no
+single point, either in history or in contemporary life, where "the
+light of the world" can be shown, or plausibly conjectured, to have
+lighted us to any practical purpose. And it is futile to urge, I
+repeat, that it could not have done so without a miraculous
+disturbance of the order of nature. The influence of mind upon mind,
+however conveyed, is the most natural thing in the world; and, short
+of transplanting mountains, inhibiting earthquakes, and teaching
+people to subsist on air, there is nothing that mind cannot do.
+
+Besides, when we come to think of it, why this prejudice against
+miracles? Why is Mr. Wells so sternly opposed to the bare idea of
+Providence? "Fear and feebleness," he says, "go straight to the
+Heresies that God is Magic or that God is Providence" (p. 27)--as
+though it were disgracefully pusillanimous to prefer a well-governed
+to an ungoverned world. God, in the ordinary sense of the word, the
+sense we all understand, is unquestionably magic, whether we like it
+or not. He is none the less magic because he works through one great
+spell, and not through a host of minor, petti-fogging miracles. Upon
+the matter of fact we are all agreed, Mr. Chesterton only dissenting;
+but Mr. Wells writes as if it were an essentially godlike thing, and
+greatly to the credit of any and every God, to give Nature its head,
+and take no further trouble about the matter. I cannot share that
+view. My only objection to Providence is that it manifestly does not
+exist. If it did exist, and made the world an appreciably better place
+to live in, why should we grudge it a few miracles? There is a touch
+of the sour-grapes philosophy in the rationalist attitude on this
+matter which Mr. Wells attributes to his Invisible King. Because we
+can't have any miracles, we say we don't want them. Also, no doubt, we
+see that the alleged miracles of the past were childish futilities,
+doing at most a little temporary good to individuals, never rendering
+any permanent service to a city or a nation, and much less to mankind
+at large. They were a sort of niggardly alms from omnipotence, not a
+generous endowment or a liberal compensation. But is that any reason
+why an intelligent Power should be unable to devise a really helpful
+miracle? Another plausible objection is that, even if we could admit
+the justice of a system of rewards and punishments, good and evil are
+so inextricably intermixed in this world that it is impossible to
+distribute benefits on a satisfactory moral scheme. It is impossible
+to manipulate the rainfall so that the righteous farmer shall have
+just what he wants at the appropriate seasons, while his wicked
+neighbour suffers from alternate drought and floods; nor can it be
+arranged that the midday express shall convey all the good people
+safely, while the 4.15, which is wrecked, carries none but undesirable
+characters. To this it might be replied that the inconceivable
+complexity of the chess-board of the world exists only in relation to
+our human faculties; but what is far more to the point is the
+indubitable fact that many salutary miracles might be wrought which
+would raise no question whatever as to the moral merits or defects of
+the beneficiaries. Miracles of alleged justice may reasonably be
+deprecated; but where is the objection to miracles of mercy, falling,
+like the blessed rain from heaven, on both just and unjust?
+
+The haughty soul of Mr. Wells may prefer a deity who offers us no
+tangible bribes--who not only does not work miracles, but will not
+even utilize to material ends that great system of wireless telegraphy
+between his mind and ours which he has, by hypothesis, at his
+disposal. Mine, I confess, is a humbler spirit. I should be perfectly
+willing to accept even thaumaturgic benefits if only they came in my
+way; and I cannot regard it as a merit in a God that he should
+carefully abstain from using even his powers of suggestion to do some
+practical good in the world, and, incidentally, to demonstrate his own
+existence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is difficult, in the course of a long discussion, to keep the
+attention fixed on the precise point at issue. I therefore sum up in a
+few words the argument of this chapter.
+
+In the first place, I have shown that, if words mean anything, Mr.
+Wells does actually wish us to believe that his God is not a figure of
+speech, but a person, an individual, as real and independent an entity
+as the Kaiser or President Wilson. In the second place, I have
+enquired whether anything he says enables us to conceive _a priori_
+the possibility of such an entity disengaging itself from the mind of
+the race, and have regretfully been led to the conclusion that the
+genesis of this God remains at least as insoluble a mystery as that of
+any other God ever placed before a confiding public. Thirdly, I have
+approached the question _a posteriori_ and enquired whether history or
+present experience offers any evidence from which we can reasonably
+infer the existence and activity of such a God--arriving once more at
+a negative conclusion. With the best will in the world, I can discover
+nothing in this Invisible King but a sort of new liqueur--or old
+liqueur with a new label--suited, no doubt, to the constitutions of
+certain very exceptional people. Mr. Wells avers that he himself finds
+it supremely grateful and comforting, and further appeals to the
+testimony of a number of other (unnamed) believers--"English,
+Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French ... Positivists, Baptists,
+Sikhs, Mohammedans" (p. 4)--a quaint Pentecostal gathering. It is
+true, of course, that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and
+of the liqueur in the drinking. But some of us are inveterately
+sceptical of the virtues of alcohol, even in non-intoxicant doses, and
+are apt to think that the man who discovers a remedy for sea-sickness
+or a prophylactic against typhoid is a greater benefactor of the race
+than a God whose special characteristic it is to be not only invisible
+himself but equally imperceptible in his workings.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+FOR AND AGAINST PERSONIFICATION
+
+
+For those of us who cannot accept Mr. Wells's Invisible King as a God
+in any useful or even comprehensible sense of the term, there remains
+the question whether he is a useful figure of speech. Metaphors and
+personifications are often things of great potency, whether for good
+or evil. It might quite well happen that, if we wholly rejected Mr.
+Wells's gospel, on account of a mere squabble as to the meaning of the
+word "God," we should thereby lose something which might have been of
+the utmost value to us. Let us not run the risk of throwing out the
+baby with the bath-water.
+
+Take the case of a very similar personification with which we are all
+familiar--to wit, John Bull. Is he a helpful or a detrimental
+"synthesis"? It is not quite easy to say. There is a certain
+geniality, a bluff wholesomeness, a downright honesty about him, which
+has doubtless its value; but on the other hand he is the incarnation
+of Philistinism and Toryism, the perfect expression of the average
+sensual man. I am told that in one of his avatars he has something
+like two million worshippers, on whom his influence is of the most
+questionable, precisely because they have implicit "faith" in him, and
+regard him as a "Friend behind phenomena," a "great brother," a
+"strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and
+lovable." That is an illustration of the dangers which may lurk in
+prosopopoeia. But in the main we can regard John Bull without too
+much misgiving, because we cannot regard him seriously. His worship
+will always be seasoned with the saving grace of humor. He can do
+service in two capacities--sometimes as an ideal, often as a
+deterrent. Whatever religious revolutions may await us, we are not
+likely to see St. Paul's Cathedral solemnly re-dedicated to the
+worship of John Bull. He and his sister divinity, Mrs. Grundy, have
+never lacked adorers in that basilica; but their cult is probably not
+on the increase.
+
+The Invisible King, on the other hand, is a personage to be taken with
+the utmost seriousness. If he has anything like the success Mr. Wells
+anticipates for him, it is quite on the cards that he might oust the
+present Reigning Family from one or all of the cathedrals. It is true
+that Mr. Wells deprecates any ritual worship; but "religious thought
+finely expressed" would always be in order; and he "does not see why
+there should not be, under God, associations for building cathedrals
+and such like great still places urgent with beauty, into which men
+and women may go to rest from the clamor of the day's confusions" (p.
+168). If cathedrals may be built, all the more clearly may they be
+appropriated--if you can convert or evict the dean and chapter. If the
+Invisible King should take the fancy of the nation and the world, as
+Mr. Wells would have us think that he is already doing, he is bound to
+become the object of a formal cult. We shall very soon see a
+prayer-book of the "modern religion" with marriage, funeral and
+perhaps baptismal services, with daily lessons, and with suitable
+forms of prayer for persons who cannot trust themselves to extempore
+communings even with a "great brother."
+
+Well, there might be no great harm in this. Some solemn form for the
+expression of cosmic, and even of mundane or political, emotion would
+doubtless be useful; and if the "modern religion" could be saved from
+degenerating into a hysterical superstition on the one hand, or a
+petrified, persecuting orthodoxy on the other, it would certainly be a
+vast improvement on many of the religions of to-day.
+
+But the ambitions of the Invisible King go far beyond the mere
+presidency of an Ethical Church on an extended scale. He is to be a
+King and no mistake; not even a King of Kings, but "sole Monarch of
+the universal earth." Autocracies, oligarchies, and democracies are
+alike to be swept out of his path. The "implicit command" of the
+modern religion "to all its adherents is to make plain the way to the
+world theocracy" (p. 97). How the fiats of the Invisible King are to
+be issued, we are not informed. If through the ballot-box--"vox
+populi, vox dei"--then the distinction between theocracy and democracy
+will scarcely be apparent to the naked eye. And one does not see how,
+in the transition stage at any rate, recourse to the ballot-box is to
+be avoided, if only as a lesser evil than recourse to howitzers, tanks
+and submarines. We read that "if you do not feel God then there is no
+persuading you of him"; but if you do, "you will realize more and more
+clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method and intention"
+(p. 98). Now, assuming (no slight assumption) that the oracles of
+God, the message of the still small voice, will be identically
+interpreted by all believers, the unbelievers, those who "do not feel
+God," have still to be dealt with; and, as they are not open to
+persuasion, it would seem that the faithful must be prepared either to
+shoot them down or to vote them down--whereof the latter seems the
+humaner alternative. It is true that Mr. Wells's God is a man of war;
+like that other whom he disowns but strangely resembles, "he brings
+mankind not rest but a sword" (p. 96). But we may confidently hold
+that this, at any rate, is but a manner of speaking. Even if the God
+is real, his sword is metaphoric. Mr. Wells is not seriously proposing
+to take his cue from his Mohammedan friends, raise the cry of "Allahu
+Akbar!" and propagate his gospel scimitar in hand. It is hard to see,
+then, what other method there can be of dealing with the heathen,
+except the method of the ballot-box--of course with proportional
+representation. When there are no more heathen--when the whole world
+can read the will of God by direct intuition, as though it were
+written in letters of fire across the firmament--then, indeed, the
+ballot-box may join the throne, sceptre and crown in the historical
+museum. But even the robust optimism of the _gottestrunken_ Mr. Wells
+can scarcely conceive this millennium to be at hand. So that in the
+meantime it seems unwise to speak slightingly of democracy, lest we
+thereby help the Powers, both here and elsewhere, which are fighting
+for something very much worse. For I take it that the worst enemy of
+the Wellsian God is the Superman, who has quite a sporting chance of
+coming out on top, if not actually in this War, at least in the welter
+that will succeed it.
+
+But seriously, is any conceivable sort of theocracy a desirable ideal?
+Or, to put the same question in more general terms, is it wise of Mr.
+Wells to make such play with the word "God"? He himself admits that
+"God trails with him a thousand misconceptions and bad associations:
+his alleged infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange preferences,
+his vindictive Old Testament past" (p. 8)--and, it may fairly be
+added, his blood-boltered, Kultur-stained present. Is it possible to
+deodorize a word which comes to us redolent of "good, thick stupefying
+incense-smoke," mingled with the reek of the auto-da-fe? Can we beat
+into a ploughshare the sword of St. Bartholomew, and a thousand other
+deeds of horror? God has been by far the most tragic word in the whole
+vocabulary of the race--a spell to conjure up all the worst fiends in
+human nature: arrogance and abjectness, fanaticism, hatred and
+atrocity. Religious reformers--with Jesus at their head--have time and
+again tried to divest it of some, at least, of its terrors, but they
+have invariably failed. Will Mr. Wells succeed any better? Is it not
+apparent in the foregoing discussion that, even if the word had no
+other demerits, it leads us into regions in which the mind can find no
+firm foothold? I have done my best to accept Mr. Wells's definitions,
+but I am sure he feels that I have constantly slipped from the strait
+and narrow path. Has he himself always kept to it? I think not. And,
+waiving that point, is it at all likely that people in general will be
+more successful than I have been in grasping and holding fast to the
+differentiating attributes of Mr. Wells's divinity? If the word is at
+best a confusion and at worst a war-whoop, should we not try to
+dispense with it, to avoid it, to find a substitute which should more
+accurately, if less truculently, express our idea? Is it wise or kind
+to seek to impose on the future an endless struggle with its sinister
+ambiguities?
+
+There are, no doubt, regions of thought from which it is extremely
+difficult to exclude the word; but these, fortunately, are regions in
+which it is almost necessarily divested of its historical
+associations. As a term of pure philosophy, if safeguarded by careful
+definition, it is a convenient piece of shorthand, obviating the
+necessity for a constant recourse to cumbrous formulas. But politics
+is not one of these regions of thought; and it is precisely in
+politics that the intervention of God has from of old been most
+disastrous. "Theocracy" has always been the synonym for a bleak and
+narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained, tyranny. Why seek to revive
+and rehabilitate a word of such a dismal connotation? I suggest that
+even if the Invisible King _were_ a God, it would be tactful to
+pretend that he was not. As he is _not_ a God, in any generally
+understood sense of the term, it seems a curious perversity to pretend
+that he is.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Even in the region of morals it is a backward step to restore God to
+the supremacy from which he has with the utmost difficulty been
+deposed. I am sure Mr. Wells does not in his heart believe that any
+theological sanction is required for the plain essentials of social
+well-doing, or any theological stimulus for the rare sublimities of
+virtue. Incalculable mischief has been wrought by the clerical
+endeavour to set up a necessary association between right conduct and
+orthodoxy, between heterodoxy and vice. This Mr. Wells knows as well
+as I do; yet he can use such phrases as "Without God, the 'Service of
+Man' is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or a hypocrisy." No
+doubt he has carefully explained that he does not mean by God or
+religion what the clergy mean; but can he be sure that by imitating
+their phrases he may not imperceptibly slide into their frame of mind?
+or at any rate tempt the weaker brethren to do so? In using such an
+expression he comes perilously near the attitude adopted by the Bishop
+of London in a recent address to the sailors of the Grand Fleet. His
+Lordship told his hearers--we have it on his own authority--that
+"there was in everyone a good man and a bad man. And I have not known
+a case," he added, "where the good man conquered the bad man without
+religion." Can there be any doubt that the Bishop was either
+telling--well, not the truth--or shamelessly playing with words? Of
+course it may be said that any man who keeps his lower instincts in
+control does so by aid of a feeling that there are higher values in
+life than sensual gratification or direct self-gratification of any
+sort; and we may, if we are so minded, call this feeling religion. But
+it is a very inconvenient meaning to attach to the word, and we cannot
+take it to be the meaning the Bishop had in view. What he meant, in
+all probability--what he desired his simple-minded hearers to
+understand--was that he had never known a good man who did not
+believe, if not in all the dogmas of the Church of England, at any
+rate in the Christian Trinity, the fall of man, redemption from sin,
+and the inspiration of the Scriptures. He meant that no man could be
+good who did not believe that God has given us in writing a synopsis
+of his plan of world-government, and has himself sojourned on earth
+and submitted to an appearance of death, some two thousand years ago,
+in fulfilment of the said plan. If he did _not_ mean that, he was, I
+repeat, playing with words and deceiving his hearers, who would
+certainly understand him to mean something to that effect; and if he
+_did_ mean that, he departed very palpably from the truth. The Bishop
+of London is no recluse, shut up in a monastery among men of his own
+faith. He is a man of the modern world, and he must know, and know
+that he knows, scores of men as good as himself who have no belief in
+anything that he would recognize as religion. Perhaps he was not
+directly conscious of telling a falsehood, for "faith" plays such
+havoc with the intellect that men cease to attach any living meaning
+to words, and come to deal habitually in those unrealized phrases
+which we call cant. But whatever may have been his excuses to his
+conscience, he was saying a very noxious thing to the simple, gallant
+souls who heard him. Many of them must have been well aware that they
+had no faith that would have satisfied the Bishop of London, and that
+whatever religious ideas lurked in their minds were of very little use
+to them in struggling with the temptations of a sailor's life. Where
+was the sense in telling them that the ordinary motives which make for
+good conduct--prudence, self-respect, loyalty, etc., etc.--are of no
+avail, and that they must inevitably be bad men if they had not "found
+religion"? If such talk does no positive harm, it is only because men
+have learnt to discount the patter of theology. Yet here we find Mr.
+Wells, after vigorously disclaiming any participation in the Bishop's
+beliefs, falling into the common form of episcopal patter, and telling
+me, for example--a benighted but quite well-intentioned heathen--that
+I can do no good in my generation unless I believe in a God whom he
+and a number of Eastern sages, Parthians, Medes, Elamites and dwellers
+in Mesopotamia, have recently "synthetized" out of their inner
+consciousnesses! It is not Mr. Wells's fault if I do not abandon the
+steep and thorny track of austerity which I have hitherto pursued,
+invest all my spare cash either in whiskey or in whiskey shares, and
+go for my philosophy in future to the inspiring author of _Musings
+without Method_ in "Blackwood."
+
+It is not quite clear why Mr. Wells should accept so large a part of
+the Christian ethic and yet refuse to identify his Invisible King with
+Christ. One would have supposed it quite as easy to divest the
+Christ-figure of any inconvenient attributes as to eliminate
+omniscience and omnipotence from the God-idea. Mr. Wells constantly
+allows his thoughts to run into the stereotype moulds of biblical
+phraseology. We have seen how he talks of "the still small voice," of
+"the light of the world," "taking the sting from death" and of God
+coming "in his own time" and bringing "not rest but a sword." To those
+instances may be added such phrases as "death will be swallowed up in
+victory" (p. 39), "by the grace of the true God" (p. 44), "God is
+Love" (p. 65), "the Son of Man" (p. 86), "I become my brother's
+keeper" (p. 97), "he it is who can deliver us 'from the body of this
+death'" (p. 99). But the clearest indication of Christian influence is
+to be found in Mr. Wells's unhesitating and emphatic adoption of the
+idea that "Salvation is indeed to lose oneself" (p. 73). "The
+difference," he says, "between ... the unbeliever and the servant of
+the true God is this ... that the latter has experienced a complete
+turning away from self. This only difference is all the difference in
+the world" (p. 84). It is curious what a fascination this turn of
+phrase has exercised upon many and diverse intelligences. Mr. Bernard
+Shaw, for instance, adopts it with enthusiasm. Henrik Ibsen--if it is
+ever possible to tie a true dramatist down to a doctrine--preaches in
+_Peer Gynt_ that "to be thyself is to slay thyself." Mr. Wells has a
+cloud of witnesses to back him up; and yet it is very doubtful whether
+the turn of phrase is a really helpful one--whether it does not rather
+get in the way of the natural man in his quest for a sound rule of
+life.
+
+It is a commonplace that the entirely self-centred man--the Robinson
+Crusoe of a desert island of egoism--is unhappy. At least if he is not
+he belongs to a low intellectual and moral type: the proof being that
+all development above the level of the oyster and the slug has
+involved more or less surrender of the immediate claims of "number
+one" to some larger unity. Progress has always consisted, and still
+consists, in the widening of the ideal concept which appeals to our
+loyalty. Is it not Mr. Wells's endeavour in this very book to claim
+our devotion for the all-embracing and ultimate ideal--the human race?
+So far, we are all at one. But when we are told that "conversion" or
+"salvation" consists in a "_complete_ turning away from self," common
+sense revolts. It is not true either in every-day life or in larger
+matters of conduct. In every-day life the incurably "unselfish" person
+is an intolerable nuisance. Here the common-sense rule is very simple:
+you have no right to seek your own "salvation," or, in non-theological
+terms, your own self-approval, at the cost of other people's; you have
+no business to offer sacrifices which the other party ought not to
+accept. It is true that in the application of this simple rule
+difficult problems may arise; but a little tact will generally go a
+long way towards solving them. In these matters an ounce of tact is
+worth a pound of casuistry. And in our every-day England, in all
+classes, it is my profound conviction that a reasonable selflessness
+is very far from uncommon, very far from being confined to the
+"converted" of any religion. For forty years I have watched it growing
+and spreading before my very eyes. Reading the other way _The
+Roundabout Papers_, I was greatly struck by the antiquated cast of the
+manners therein described. Of course Thackeray, in his day, was
+reputed a cynic, and supposed to have an over-partiality for studying
+the seamy side of things. But even if that had been true (which I do
+not believe) it would not have accounted for all the difference
+between the world he saw and that in which we move to-day. I suggest,
+then, that so far as the minor moralities are concerned, no new
+religion is required, and we have only to let things pursue their
+natural trend.
+
+And what of the great selflessnesses? What of the ideal loyalties?
+What of the long-accumulated instincts which tell a man, in tones
+which brook no contradiction, that the shortest life and the cruellest
+death are better than the longest life of sensual self-contempt? Here,
+as it seems to me, Mr. Wells's apostolate of a new religion is very
+conspicuously superfluous--much more so than it would have been five
+years ago. For have not he and I been privileged to witness one of the
+most beautiful sights that the world ever saw--the flocking of Young
+England, in its hundreds upon hundreds of thousands, to endure the
+extremity of hardship and face the high probability of a cruel death,
+not for England alone, not even for England, France and Belgium, but
+for what they obscurely but very potently felt to be the highest
+interests of the very same ideal entity which Mr. Wells proposes to
+our devotion--the human race? I am sure he would be the last to
+minimize the significance of that splendid uprising. No doubt there
+were other motives at work: in some, the mere love of change and
+adventure; in others, the pressure of public opinion. But my own
+observation assures me that, on the whole, these unideal motives
+played a very small part. The young men simply felt that he who held
+back was unfaithful to his fathers and unworthy of his sons; and they
+"turned away from self" without a moment's hesitation, and streamed to
+the colors with all the more eagerness the longer the casualty-lists
+grew, and the more clearly the horrors they had to face were brought
+home to them. Has there been any voluntary "slaying of self" on so
+huge a scale since the world began? I have not heard of it. And Mr.
+Wells will scarcely tell me that these young men went through the
+experiences he describes as "conversion," and escaped from the burden
+of "over-individuation" by throwing themselves into the arms of a
+synthetic God! Many of them, no doubt, would have expressed their
+idealism, had they expressed it at all, in terms of Christianity; but
+that, we are told, is a delusion, and the only true God is the
+Invisible King. If that be so, the conclusion would seem to be that,
+in the present stage of the evolution of human character, no God at
+all is needed to enable millions of men, in whom the blood runs high
+and the joy of life is at its keenest, to achieve the conquest of self
+in one of its noblest forms. Or (what comes to the same thing) any
+sort of God will serve the purpose. Your God (divested of metaphysical
+attributes) is simply a name for your own better instincts and
+impulses. Many people, perhaps most, share Mr. Wells's tendency to
+externalize, objectivate, personify these impulses; and there may be
+no harm in doing so. But when it comes to asserting that your own
+personification is the only true one, then--I am not so sure.
+
+Finally there arises the question whether the personification of the
+Invisible King can really, in any comprehensible sense, and for any
+considerable number of normal human beings, rob death of its sting,
+the grave of its victory? On this point discussion cannot possibly be
+conclusive, for the ultimate test is necessarily a personal one. If
+any sane and sincere person tells me that a certain idea, or emotion,
+or habit of mind, or even any rite or incantation, has deprived death
+of its terrors for him, I can only congratulate him, even if I have to
+confess that my own experience gives me no clue to his meaning. It is
+not even very profitable to enquire whether a man can be confident of
+his own attitude towards death unless he has either come very close to
+its brink himself, or known what it means to witness the extinction of
+a life on which his whole joy in the present and hope for the future
+depended. All one can do is to try to ascertain as nearly as possible
+what the contemner of death really means, and to consider whether his
+individual experience or feeling is, or is likely to become, typical.
+
+One thing we must plainly realize, and that is that, for the purposes
+of his present argument, Mr. Wells conceives death to be a real
+extinction of the individual consciousness. He does not formally
+commit himself to a denial of personal immortality, but it is a
+contingency which he declines to take into account. Oddly enough, in
+trying to acclimatize our minds to the idea of such an absolutely
+incorporeal and immaterial, yet really existent, being as his
+Invisible King, he comes near to clearing away the one great obstacle
+to belief in survival after death. "From the earliest ages," he says,
+"man's mind has found little or no difficulty in the idea of something
+essential to the personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing
+apart from the body and continuing after the destruction of the body,
+and being still a person and an individual" (p. 59). He does not
+actually say that there _is_ no difficulty about this conception: he
+only says that, as a matter of history, the great mass of men have
+found it easy and natural to believe in ghosts. But it is hard to see
+any force in his argument at this point unless he means to imply that
+he himself finds "little or no difficulty" in conceiving the continued
+existence of a spiritual consciousness and individuality after the
+dissolution of the body to which it has been attached; and if he does
+mean this, it is hard to see why he does not take his stand beside Sir
+Oliver Lodge on the spiritist platform. To many of us, the extreme
+difficulty of such a conception is the one great barrier to the
+acceptance of the spiritist theory, for which remarkable evidence can
+certainly be adduced. This, however, is a digression. So far as _God
+the Invisible King_ is concerned, Mr. Wells must be taken as ignoring,
+if not rejecting, the idea of personal immortality.
+
+The victory over death, then, which the Invisible King is said to
+achieve, does not consist in its abolition. It may probably be best
+defined as the perfect reconcilement of the believer to the extinction
+of his individual consciousness. And what are the grounds of that
+reconcilement? Let us search the scriptures. Where the steps are
+described by which the catechumen approaches the full realization of
+God, it is said that at that stage he feels that "if there were such a
+being he would supply the needed consolation and direction, his
+continuing purpose would knit together the scattered effort of life,
+_his immortality would take the sting from death_" (p. 21-22). A
+little further on, the idea is elaborated in a high strain of
+mysticism. God, who "captains us but does not coddle us" (p. 42), will
+by no means undertake to hold the believer scatheless among the
+pitfalls and perils that beset our earthly pilgrimage. "But God will
+be with you nevertheless. In the reeling aeroplane, or the dark
+ice-cave, God will be your courage. Though you suffer or are killed,
+it is not an end. He will be with you as you face death; he will die
+with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave deaths. He
+will come so close to you that at the last you will not know whether
+it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be swallowed up
+in his victory" (p. 39). The passage has already been quoted in which
+it is written that, at the end of the fight for God's Kingdom, "we are
+altogether taken up into his being" (p. 68). In a discussion of "the
+religion of atheists" we are told that unregenerate man is "acutely
+aware of himself as an individual and unawakened to himself as a
+species," wherefore he "finds death frustration." His mistake is in
+not seeing that his own frustration "may be the success and triumph of
+his kind" (p. 72). At the point where we are told that "the first
+purpose of God is the attainment of clear knowledge," we are further
+informed that "he will apprehend more fully as time goes on" the
+purpose to which this knowledge is to be applied. But already it is
+possible to define "the broad outlines" of his purpose. "It is the
+conquest of death; first the overcoming of death in the individual _by
+the incorporation of the motives of his life into an undying purpose_"
+(p. 99), and then, as we saw before, the defeat of the threatened
+extinction of life through the cooling of the planet. These, I think,
+are the chief texts bearing directly on this particular matter; but
+there is one other remark which must not be overlooked. "A convicted
+criminal, frankly penitent," we are told, "... may still die well and
+bravely on the gallows, to the glory of God. He may step straight from
+that death into the immortal being of God."
+
+To what, now, does all this amount? Is there any more substantial
+solace in it than in the "Oh, may I join the Choir Invisible"
+aspiration of mid-nineteenth-century positivism? Far be it from me to
+speak contemptuously of that aspiration. It gives a new orientation
+and consistency to thought and effort during life; and to the man who
+feels that his little note will melt into the world-harmony that is to
+be, that thought may impart a certain serenity under the shadow of the
+end. It is certainly better to feel at night, "I have done a fair
+day's work," than to lie down with the confession, "My day has been
+wasted, and worse." No one wants, I suppose, to say with Peer Gynt:--
+
+  Thou beautiful earth, be not angry with me,
+  That I trampled thy grasses to no avail;
+  Thou beautiful sun, thou hast squandered away
+  Thy glory of light in an empty hut.
+  Beautiful sun and beautiful earth,
+  You were foolish to bear and give light to my mother.
+
+But there is also another side to the question. The more surely you
+believe that "through the ages one increasing purpose runs"--the more
+intimately you have merged your individual will in what Mr. Wells
+would call the will of the Invisible King--the less do you relish the
+thought that you can never see that will worked out. The intenser your
+interest in the play, the greater your disinclination to leave the
+theatre just as the plot is thickening. Nor does it afford much
+consolation to know that the Producer is just (as it were) getting
+into his stride, and that, if the house should become too cold for
+comfort, arrangements will be made for the transference of the
+production to another theatre, with a better heating-apparatus.
+
+Is there any real escape from the fact that for each of us the one
+thing that actually exists is our individual consciousness? It is our
+universe; and if its trembling flame is blown out, that particular
+universe is no more. If its limits of "individuation" are
+irrecoverably lost, what avails it to tell us that the flame is
+absorbed into the light of the world or the dayspring on high? Is it
+possible to imagine that the rain-drop which falls in the Atlantic
+thrills with a great rapture as its molecules disperse in the moment
+of coalescence, because it is now part of an infinite and immortal
+entity? Yes, it is possible to imagine it rejoicing that its "chagrins
+of egotism," as an individual drop, are now over; in fact, this is
+precisely the sort of thing that some poets love to imagine; but has
+it any real relevance to our sublunary lot? Can it minister any
+substantial comfort or fortification to the normal man in the moment
+of peril or agony? I ask; I do not answer. Can Mr. Wells put in the
+witness-box any flight-lieutenant who will swear that in his reeling
+aeroplane, as death seemed on the point of engulfing him, he felt
+uncertain whether it was God or he that was about to die, and
+gloriously certain that in any case he was about to "step straight
+into the immortal being of God"? And even if, in the excitement of
+violent action, such hallucinations do mean something to a peculiar
+type of mind, has any one dying of pneumonia or Bright's disease been
+known to declare that, though his mortal spark was on the point of
+extinction, he felt that "by the incorporation of the motives of his
+life into an undying purpose" he had triumphed over death and the
+grave? The simple soul who says "We shall meet in Heaven" no doubt
+enjoys such a triumph--and even if he fails to keep the appointment,
+no one is any the worse. But where are the men and women who feel the
+immortality of God, however we define or construct him, a rich
+compensation for their own mortality?
+
+It may be said that I am applying shockingly terrestrial tests to Mr.
+Wells's soaring transcendentalisms. I am simply asking: "Will they
+work?" A world-religion cannot be what I have called a luxury for the
+intellectually wealthy. It must be within the reach of plain men and
+women; and plain men and women cannot, as the French say, "pay
+themselves with words." Take them all round, they do not make too much
+of death. With or without the aid of religion, they generally meet it
+with tolerable fortitude. But it will be hard to persuade them that
+annihilation is a thing to be faced with rapture, because a synthetic
+God is indestructible; or that death is not death because other people
+will be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence. Even if you cannot
+offer them another life, you may tell them of the grave as a place
+where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, and
+they will understand. But will they understand if you tell them that
+we triumph over the grave because God dies with us and yet never dies?
+I fear it will need something clearer and more credible than this to
+make the undertaker a popular functionary.
+
+The doctrines of "the modern religion" may give us a new motive for
+living; but how can they at the same time diminish our distaste for
+dying? That might be their effect, no doubt, in cases where we felt
+that our death was promoting some great and sacred cause more than our
+life could have done; but such cases must always be extremely rare.
+Even the soldier on the battlefield will help his country more by
+living than by dying, if he can do so without failing in his duty. His
+death is not a triumph, but only a lesser evil than cowardice and
+disgrace. And what shall we say, for example, of the case of a young
+biologist who dies of blood-poisoning on the eve of a great and
+beneficent discovery? Is not this a case in which the modern God might
+with advantage have swerved from his principles and (for once) played
+the part of Providence? It is better, no doubt, to die in a good cause
+than to throw away life in the pursuit of folly or vice; but is it
+not playing with words to say that even the end of a martyr to science
+like Captain Scott, or a martyr to humanity like Edith Cavell, is a
+triumph over death and the grave? It is a triumph over cowardice,
+baseness, the love of ease and safety, all the paltrier aspects of our
+nature; but a triumph over death it is not. If it be true (which I do
+not believe) that German soldiers sign a declaration devoting the
+glycerine in their dead bodies to their country's service, one may
+imagine that some of them feel a species of satisfaction in resolving
+upon this final proof of patriotism; but it will be a gloomy
+satisfaction at best; there will be a lack of exhilaration about it;
+if the Herr Hauptmann who witnesses their signatures congratulates
+them on having triumphed over death, they will be apt to think it a
+rather empty form of words. If they had had the advantage of reading
+Jane Austen, they would probably say with Mr. Bennet, "Let us take a
+more cheerful view of the subject, and suppose that I survive."
+
+I fear that not even the companionship offered by the modern God in
+the act of dissolution will make death a cheerful experience, or
+induce ordinary, unaffected mortals to glory in their mortality. It
+is too much the habit of Gods to pretend to die when they don't really
+die at all--when, in fact, the whole idea is a mere intellectual
+hocus-pocus.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+BACK TO THE VEILED BEING
+
+
+Why has Mr. Wells partly goaded and partly hypnotized himself into the
+belief that he is the predestined prolocutor of a new hocus-pocus?
+Rightly or wrongly, I diagnose his case thus: What he really cares for
+is the future of humanity, or, in more concrete language, social
+betterment. He suffers more than most of us from the spectacle of the
+world of to-day, because he has the constructive imagination which can
+place alongside of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision
+of a rational world-order which seems easily attainable if only some
+malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man. But he finds
+himself impotent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-are.
+Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for the
+part of a social regenerator. He has the pen of a ready and sometimes
+very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he has a
+fertile and inventive brain; his works of fiction have won for him a
+great public, both in Europe and America; yet he feels that his social
+philosophy, his ardent and enlightened meliorism, makes no more
+impression than the buzzing of a gnat in the ear of a drowsy mastodon.
+At the same time he has persuaded himself, whether on internal or on
+external evidence--partly, I daresay, on both--that men cannot thrive,
+either as individuals or as world-citizens, without some relation of
+reverence and affection to something outside and above themselves. He
+foresees that Christianity will come bankrupt out of the War, and yet
+that the huge, shattering experience will throw the minds of men open
+to spiritual influences. At the same time (of this one could point to
+several incidental evidences) he has come a good deal in contact with
+Indian religiosity, and learnt to know a type of mind to which God, in
+one form or another, is indeed an essential of life, while the
+particular form is a matter of comparative indifference. Then the idea
+strikes him: "Have we not here a great opportunity for placing the
+motive-power of spiritual fervor behind, or within, the sluggish
+framework of social idealism? Here it lies, well thought-out,
+carefully constructed, but inert, like an aeroplane without an
+engine. By giving the glow of supernaturalism, of the worship of a
+personal God, to the good old Religion of Humanity, may we not impart
+to our schemes for a well-ordered world precisely the uplift they at
+present lack? It was all very well for chilly New England
+transcendentalism to 'hitch its waggon to a star,' but the result is
+that Boston is governed by a Roman Catholic Archbishop. It is really
+much easier and more effective to hitch our waggon to God, who, being
+a synthesis of our own higher selves, will naturally pull it in
+whatever direction we want. Thus the mass of mankind will escape from
+that spiritual loneliness which is so discomfortable to them, and will
+find, in one and the same personification, a deity to listen to their
+prayers, and a 'boss,' in the Tammany sense of the term, to herd them
+to the polling-booths. What we want is collectivism touched with
+emotion. By proclaiming it to be the will of God, and identifying
+sound politics with ecstatic piety, we may shorten by several
+centuries the path to a new world-order."
+
+This is a translation into plain English of the thoughts which would
+seem to have possessed Mr. Wells's mind during the past year or so. I
+do not for a moment mean that he put them to himself in plain
+English. That would be to accuse him of insincerity--a thought which I
+most sincerely disclaim. I have not the least doubt that the Invisible
+King does actually supply a "felt want" in his spiritual outfit, and
+that he is perfectly convinced that most other people are similarly
+constituted and will welcome this new object of loyalty and devotion.
+Time will show whether his psychology is correct. If it is, then he
+has indeed made an important discovery. To use a very homely
+illustration: a carrot dangled from the end of a stick before a
+donkey's nose makes no mechanical difference in the problem of
+traction presented by the costermonger's barrow. If anything, it adds
+to the weight to be drawn. But if the sight of it cheers, heartens,
+and inspires the donkey, helping him to overcome those fits of
+lethargy so characteristic of his race, then the carrot may quite
+appreciably accelerate the general rate of progress. It all depends on
+the psychology of the donkey.
+
+Moses doubtless did very wisely in going up into Mount Sinai and
+abiding there forty days and forty nights. Whatever he may have seen
+and heard, the semblance of communion with a Higher Power
+unquestionably lent a prestige to his scheme of social reform which
+it could never have attained had he offered it on its inherent merits,
+as the project of a mere human legislator, or (still worse) of a man
+of letters. Moses, in fact, knew his Children of Israel. Does Mr.
+Wells know his modern Englishmen or Anglo-Americans?
+
+That is the question.
+
+Mr. Bernard Shaw has made a similar and very ingenious attempt, not
+exactly to found a new religion, but to place his ideas in a religious
+atmosphere. In the preface to _Androcles and the Lion_ (a disquisition
+just about as long as _God the Invisible King_) he propounds the
+question, "Why not give Christianity a trial?" and opens the
+discussion thus: "The question seems a hopeless one after 2,000 years
+of resolute adherence to the old cry of 'Not this man, but Barabbas.'
+Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of
+his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of
+money, and his moralities and churches and political constitutions.
+'This man' has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane
+enough to try his way." Then he goes on to shew, by a course of very
+plausible reasoning, that the teaching of Jesus was, in all
+essentials, an exact anticipation of the economic and social
+philosophy of G. B. S.; so that, in giving political expression to
+that philosophy, we should be, for the first time, establishing the
+Kingdom of Christ upon earth. It is true that there are passages in
+the Gospels which no more accord with Mr. Shaw's sociology than do
+omnipotence and omniscience with the theology of Mr. Wells. But these
+passages do not embarrass Mr. Shaw. He simply points out that, at
+Matthew xvi, 16, where Peter hailed him as "the Christ, the Son of the
+living God," Jesus went mad. Up to that fatal moment "his history is
+that of a man sane and interesting apart from his special gifts as
+orator, healer and prophet"; but from that point onward he set to work
+to live up to "his destiny as a god," part of which was to be killed
+and to rise again. Many other prophets have gone mad--for instance,
+Ruskin and Nietzsche. Therefore we can have no difficulty in simply
+eliminating as a morbid aberration whatever is un-Shavian in the
+message of Jesus, and accepting the rest as the sincere milk of the
+word. Mr. Shaw's attempt to place his philosophy under divine
+patronage is not so serious as Mr. Wells's; for Mr. Shaw can never
+take himself quite seriously for five pages together. But the motive,
+in each case, in manifestly the same--to obtain for a system of ideas
+the prestige, the power of insinuation, penetration, and stimulation,
+that attaches to the very name of religion.
+
+The notion is a very tempting one. What every prophet wants, in the
+babel of latter-day thought, is a magic sounding-board which shall
+make his voice carry to the ends of the earth and penetrate to the
+dullest understanding. The more he believes in his own reason, the
+more he yearns for some method of out-shouting the unreason of his
+neighbours. German philosophy thought it had discovered the ideal
+reverberator in the artillery of Herr Krupp von Bohlen; but the world
+is curiously indisposed to conversion by cannon, and has retorted in a
+still louder roar of high-explosive arguments. God, as a
+politico-philosophical ally, is certainly cheaper than Herr Krupp;
+and, divested of his mediaeval sword and tinder-box, he is decidedly
+humaner. But is the glamour of his name quite what it once was? Or can
+it be restored to its pristine potency?
+
+On a question, such as this, on which the evidence is too vague, too
+voluminous and too complex to be interpreted with any certainty, our
+wishes are apt to take control of our thoughts. Making all allowance
+for this source of error, I nevertheless venture to suggest to Mr.
+Wells that we may perhaps be passing out of, not into, an age of
+religiosity. May it not be that the time has come to give the name of
+God a rest? Is it not possible, and even probable, that, while the
+vast apocalypse of the observatory and the laboratory is proceeding
+with unexampled speed, thinking people may prefer to await its
+developments, rather than pin their faith to an interim, synthetic
+God, whom his own still, small voice must, in moments of candor,
+confess to be merely make-believe? Is it the fact that men, or even
+women, of our race are, as a rule, absolutely dependent for courage,
+energy, self-control and self-devotion, upon some "great brother"
+outside themselves, "a strongly-marked personality, loving, inspiring
+and lovable," whom they conceive to be always within call? In making
+this assumption, is not Mr. Wells ignoring the great mass of paganism
+in the world around him--not all of it, or even most of it,
+self-conscious and self-confessed, but none the less real on that
+account? He makes a curious remark as to the personage whom he calls
+"the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his nickname for the
+man who is not much interested in midway Gods between himself and the
+Veiled Being. This hapless fellow-creature, says Mr. Wells, "has not
+really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom
+he can give himself. _He is still a masterless man_" (p. 83). As Mr.
+Wells has evidently read a good deal about Japan, he no doubt takes
+this expression from Japanese feudalism, which made a distinct class
+of the "ronin" or masterless man, who had, by death or otherwise, lost
+his feudal superior. But is it really, to our Western sense, a
+misfortune to be a masterless man? Does the healthy human spirit
+suffer from having no one to bow down to, no one to relieve it of the
+burden of choice, responsibility, self-control? If our feudal
+allegiance has terminated through the death of the Gods who asserted a
+hereditary claim upon it, must we make haste to build ourselves an
+idol, or synthetize a mosaic ikon, to serve as the recipient of our
+obeisances, genuflexions, osculations? I cannot believe that this is a
+general, and much less a universal, tendency. If any one is irked by
+the condition of a "masterless man," the Roman Catholic Church holds
+wide its doors for him. It seems very doubtful whether any less
+ancient, dogmatic, hieratic, spectacular form of make-believe will
+serve his turn.
+
+It has sometimes seemed to me that the one great advantage of Western
+Christianity lies in the fact that nobody very seriously believes in
+it. "Nobody" is not a mathematically accurate expression, but it is
+quite in the line of the truth. You have to go to Asia to find out
+what religion means. If you cannot get so far, Russia will serve as a
+half-way house; but to study religion on its native heath, so to
+speak, you must go to India. Of course there may be some illusion in
+the matter, due to one's ignorance of the languages and inability to
+estimate the exact spiritual significance of outward manifestations;
+but I cannot believe that, anywhere between Suez and Singapore, there
+exists that healthy godlessness, that lack of any real effective
+dependence on any outward Power "dal tetto in su," which is so common
+in and around all Christian churches. In China and Japan it is another
+matter. There, I fancy, religious "ronins" are common enough. But in
+the lands of the Crescent and the land of "OM," anything like freedom
+of the human spirit is probably very rare and very difficult. The
+difference does not arise from any lesser stringency in the claims of
+Christianity to spiritual dominion, but rather, I imagine, from a
+deep-seated divergence in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have
+behind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of Greece and Rome. We
+are accustomed from childhood to the knowledge that our civilization
+was founded by two mighty aristocracies of intellect, to whom the
+religions of their day were, as they are to us, nothing but more or
+less graceful fairy-tales.[4] We know that many of the greatest men
+the world ever saw, while phrasing their relation to the "deus
+absconditus" in various ways, were utterly free from that penitential,
+supplicatory abjectness which is the mark of Asian salvationism. And
+though of course the conscious filiation to Greece and Rome is rare,
+the habit of mind which holds up its head in the world and feels no
+childish craving to cling to the skirts of a God, is not rare at all.
+Therefore I conceive that people who are shaken out of their
+conventional, unrealized Christianity by the earthquake of the war
+will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into the arms of the
+"great brother" constructed for them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to
+picture them flocking to the banner of the Fabian Jesus--the Christ
+uncrucified, and restored to sanity, of Mr. Bernard Shaw.
+
+    [4] Namque deos didici securum agere aevum,
+    nec, siquid miri faciat natura, deos id
+    tristes ex alto caeli demittere tecto.
+                                  HORACE, _Satires_ I., 5.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Does it really seem to Mr. Wells an arid and damnable "atheism" that
+finds in the very mystery of existence a subject of contemplation so
+inexhaustibly marvellous as to give life the fascination of a
+detective story? When Mr. Wells tells us that "the first purpose of
+God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means to
+more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to power," he states what
+is, to many of us, the first and last article of religion--only that
+we prefer to steer clear of hocus-pocus and substitute "Man" for
+"God." If we are almost, or even quite, reconciled to the cruelties
+and humiliations of life by the thought of its visual glories, its
+intellectual triumphs, and the mysteries with which it is surrounded,
+is that frame of mind wholly unworthy to be called religious? If it
+is, I, for one, shall not complain; for religion, like God, is a word
+that has been--
+
+    Defamed by every charlatan
+  And soil'd with all ignoble use.
+
+But it will be difficult to persuade me of the loftier spirituality,
+or even the more abiding solace, involved in ecstatic devotion to a
+figure of speech.
+
+There are two elements of consolation in life: the things of which we
+are sure, and the things of which we are unsure. We are sure that man
+has somehow been launched upon the most romantic adventure that mind
+can conceive. He has set forth to conquer and subdue the world,
+including the stupidities and basenesses of his own nature. At first
+his progress was incalculably slow; then he came on with a rush in the
+great sub-tropical river basins; and presently, where the brine of the
+AEgean got into his blood, he achieved such miracles of thought and art
+that his subsequent history, for well-nigh two thousand years, bore
+the appearance of retrogression. I have already asked what the
+Invisible King was about when he suffered the glory that was Athens to
+sink in the fog-bank that was Alexandria. At all events, that
+wonderful false-start came to nothing. Rome succeeded to the
+world-leadership; and Rome, though energetic and capable, was never
+brilliant. With her, European free thought, investigation, science
+flickered out, and Asian religion took its place. Truly the slip-back
+from antiquity to the dark ages offers a specious argument to the
+atheists--the true and irredeemable atheists--who deny the reality of
+progress. Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can analyze the
+terrestrial conditions which led to that catastrophe, and assure
+ourselves that the bugbear of their recurrence is nothing more than a
+bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestimable safeguard. If the
+Greeks had hit upon the idea of movable types--and it is little to the
+credit of the Invisible King that they did not--the onrush of
+barbarism and Byzantinism would not have been half so disastrous. And
+even through the Dark Ages the bias towards betterment is still
+perceptible, though its operation was terribly hampered. Then, at
+last, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took up the thread of
+progress where antiquity had dropped it. Science revived, and bade
+defiance to dogma. The garnering of knowledge began afresh; and true
+knowledge has this to distinguish it from pseudo-sciences like
+astrology, theology, and philately, that it is instinct with
+procreative vigour. Knowledge breeds knowledge with ever-increasing
+rapidity; and the result is that the past hundred years have seen
+additions to man's control over the powers of nature which outstrip
+the wildest imaginings of Eastern romance. When Mr. Gladstone first
+went to Rome in 1832, his "transportation" was no swifter and scarcely
+more comfortable than that of Caesar in the fifties before Christ.
+Today he could fly over the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, and then cover
+the distance from Milan onwards at the rate of seventy miles an hour
+in a limousine as luxurious as an Empress's boudoir. We are piling up
+the knowledge which is power at an enormous rate--indeed rather too
+rapidly, since we have not yet the sense to discriminate between power
+for good and power for evil. But "burnt bairns dread the fire," and
+after the present awful experience, there is fair ground for hope that
+measures will be taken to provide strait-waistcoats for the criminal
+lunatics whose vanity and greed impel them to let loose the powers of
+destruction.
+
+Can any thinking man say that the world is quite the same to him since
+the invention of wireless telegraphy? True it is only one among the
+multitude of phenomena behind which the Veiled Being dissembles
+himself. But is it not a phenomenon of a new and perhaps an
+epoch-marking order? It may not make the veil more diaphanous, but it
+somehow suggests an alteration--perhaps a progressive alteration--in
+its texture.
+
+When we say we are sure of the fact of progress, the atheist comes
+down on us with the retort that we thereby confess ourselves naive and
+credulous optimists. As well say that when we express our confidence
+that the North Western Railway will carry us to Manchester, we thereby
+imply the belief that Manchester is the Earthly Paradise. It is quite
+possible--any one who is so minded may say it is quite probable--that
+progress means advance towards disillusion. What we are sure of is
+merely this: that life may be, and ought to be, a very different thing
+from what it now is, and that it is in our own power to make it so. We
+have not the least doubt that the generations which come after us will
+say:--
+
+  We will not cease from mortal strife,
+    Nor shall the sword slip from our hand,
+  Till we have built Jerusalem
+    In England's green and pleasant land.
+
+But whether, when they have built it, they will think Jerusalem worth
+the building is quite a different matter. It may be that Leopardi was
+right when he said, "Men are miserable by necessity, but resolute in
+believing themselves to be miserable by accident." That is a
+proposition which the individual can accept or reject so far as his
+own little span is concerned, but on which the race, as such, can pass
+no valid judgment. Life has never had a fair chance. It has always
+been so beset with accidental and corrigible evils that no man can say
+what life, in its ultimate essence, really is. All we know is that
+many of its miseries are factitious, inessential, eminently curable;
+and till these are eradicated, how are we to determine whether there
+are other evils too deep-rooted for our surgery? It may be, for
+example, that the elimination of Pain would only leave a vacuum for
+Tedium to rush in; but how are we to decide this _a priori_? Let us
+learn what are the true potentialities of life before we undertake to
+declare whether it is worth living or not.
+
+Perhaps I may be allowed to quote at this point some words of my own
+which express the idea I am trying to convey as clearly as I am
+capable of putting it. They are part of the last paragraph of an
+address entitled _Knowledge and Character: The Straight Road in
+Education_:[5]
+
+    The great, dominant, all-controlling fact of this life is the
+    innate bias of the human spirit, not towards evil, as the
+    theologians tell us, but towards good. But for this bias, man
+    would never have been man; he would only have been one more
+    species of wild animal ranging a savage, uncultivated globe,
+    the reeking battle-ground of sheer instinct and appetite. But
+    somehow and somewhere there germinated in his mind the idea
+    that association, co-operation, would serve his ends better
+    than unbridled egoism in the struggle for existence. Instead
+    of "each man for himself" his motto became "each man for his
+    family, or his tribe, or his nation, or--ultimately--for
+    humankind." And, at a very early stage, what made for
+    association, co-operation, brotherhood, came to be designated
+    "good," while that which sinned against these upward
+    tendencies was stigmatized as "evil." From that moment the
+    battle was won, and the transfiguration of human life became
+    only a matter of time. The prejudice in favour of the idea of
+    good is the fundamental fact of our moral nature. It has an
+    irresistible, a magical prestige. We have made, and are still
+    making, a myriad mistakes--tragic and horrible mistakes--in
+    striving for good things which are evils in disguise. A few
+    of us (though relatively not very many) try to overcome the
+    prejudice altogether, and say, "Evil, be thou my good!" But
+    even these recreants and deserters from the great army of
+    humanity have to express themselves in terms of good, and to
+    take their stand on a sheer contradiction. Evil, as such, has
+    simply not a fighting chance. The prestige of good is
+    stupendous. We are all hypnotized by it; and the reason we
+    are slow in realizing the ideal is, not that we are evil, but
+    that we are stupid.
+
+    [5] London: George Allen and Unwin, 1916.
+
+"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens"--no one had a
+better right to say that than a German poet. But though the Invisible
+King has made a poor fight against human stupidity, it is not really
+unconquerable. If Gods cannot conquer it, men can. Its strongholds
+are falling one by one, and, though a long fight is before us, its end
+is not in doubt.
+
+We may even hope, not without some plausibility, that moral progress
+may be all the more rapid in the future because the limit of what
+may be called mechanical progress cannot be so very far off. The
+conquest of distance is the great material fact that makes for
+world-organization; and distance cannot, after all, be more than
+annihilated--it cannot be reduced to a minus quantity. Now that we can
+whisper round the globe as we whisper round the dome of St. Paul's, we
+cannot get much further on that line of advance, until immaterial
+thought-transference shall enable us "to flash through one another in
+a moment as we will." We may before long have reduced the crossing of
+the Atlantic from five days to one, or even less; but in that
+direction, too, there is a limit to progress; no invention will enable
+us to arrive before we start. The conquest of physical disease seems
+to be well within view; the possibilities of intensive cultivation and
+selective breeding in plants and animals are likely to be rapidly
+developed. When such material problems cease to exercise the first
+fascination upon the enquiring mind, the mental sciences, psychology
+and sociology, with the great neglected art of education, may come
+into their kingdom. Then the atheism which avers that the world stands
+still, or moves only in a circle, will no longer be possible. Then all
+reasonable men will feel themselves soldiers in "a mighty army which
+has won splendid victories (though here and there chequered with
+defeats) on its march out of the dim and tragic past, and is clearly
+destined to far greater triumphs in the future, if only each man does,
+with unflinching loyalty, the duty assigned to him." That loyalty will
+then be the conscious and acknowledged rule of life, as it is now in
+an instinctive and half-realized fashion. It will help us, more than
+all the personifications in the world, to "turn away from self." It
+will not take the sting from death, but it will enable us to feel that
+we have earned our rest, and brought no disgrace upon the colors of
+our regiment.
+
+Is it necessary to protest once more that this assurance of progress
+towards the good is not to be confounded with optimism? For it is
+clear that "good" is a question-begging word. The only possible
+definition of "good" is "that which makes for life"--for life, not
+only measured by quantity, but by quality and intensity--"that ye may
+have life more abundantly." Why is egoism evil? Because a world in
+which it reigned supreme would very soon come to an end, or at any
+rate could not support anything like the abundance of life which is
+rendered possible by mutual aid and co-operation. Why are order,
+justice, courage, humanity good? Because they enable more people to
+lead fuller lives than would be possible in the absence of such
+guiding principles. But in all this we assume the validity of the
+standard--"life"--which is precisely what pessimism denies. And
+pessimism may quite conceivably be in the right on't. It is quite
+conceivable that, having made the best that can possibly be made of
+life, a world-weary race might decide that the best was not good
+enough, and deliberately turn away from it. But that is a contingency,
+a speculation, which no sane man would allow to affect his action here
+and now, or to impair his loyalty to his comrades in the great
+terrestrial adventure.
+
+And is not this question of the ultimate value of life precisely one
+of the uncertainties which lend--if the flippancy may be excused--a
+"sporting interest" to our position? I have said that we have two
+elements of consolation: the things which are sure and the things
+which are unsure: in other words, the axioms and the mysteries.
+Reason is all very well so far as it goes, and we do right to trust to
+it; but it may prove, after all, that the things that are behind and
+beyond and above reason are the things that really matter. Does this
+seem a concession to obscurantism? Not at all--for the things
+obscurantism glories in are things beneath reason, which is quite
+another affair. At the same time, we are too apt to think that reason
+has drawn a complete outline-map of its "sphere of influence," in
+which there are many details to be filled in, but no boundaries to be
+shifted, no regions wholly unexplored. It is, for instance, very
+unreasonable to hold that we can draw a hard and fast line between the
+materially possible and impossible. There is certainly a curious
+ragged edge to our purely scientific knowledge, and it may well be
+that in following up the frayed-out threads we may come upon things
+very surprising and important. For example, the question whether
+consciousness can exist detached from organized matter, or attached to
+some form of matter of which we have no knowledge, I regard as purely
+a question of evidence; and I not only admit but assert that the
+evidence pointing in that direction is worthy of careful examination.
+The interpretation which sees in it a proof of personal immortality
+may be wrong, but that does not prove that the right interpretation is
+not worth discovering. The spiritist voyagers may not have reached the
+Indies of their hopes, yet may have stumbled upon an unsuspected
+America. Nor does the fact that they are eager and credulous
+invalidate the whole, or anything like the whole, of their evidence.
+
+After all, is it a greater miracle that consciousness should exist
+_de_tached from matter than that it should exist _at_tached to matter?
+Yet the latter miracle nobody doubts, except in the nursery games of
+the metaphysicians.
+
+To define, or rather to adumbrate, the realm of mystery, which is yet
+as indisputably real as the realm of reason and sense, we naturally
+turn to the poets, the seers. Here is a glimpse of it through the eyes
+of Francis Thompson, that creature of transcendent vision who made a
+strange pretence of wearing the blinkers of the Roman Catholic Church.
+Thus he writes in his "Anthem of Earth":--
+
+                        Ay, Mother! Mother!
+  What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed,
+  Thou lustingly engender'st,
+  To sweat, and make his brag, and rot,
+  Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?
+  From nightly towers
+  He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,
+  Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,
+  And yet is he successive unto nothing
+  But patrimony of a little mould,
+  And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth
+  Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
+  All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
+  All beauty and all starry majesties,
+  And dim transtellar things;--even that it may,
+  Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
+  Confess--"It is enough." The world left empty
+  What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded
+  For pride, for potency, infinity,
+  All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
+  Arras'd with purple like the house of kings,--
+  To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm
+  Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!
+  Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues,
+  Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark
+  As we ourselves, thy darkest!
+
+Surely this is the very truth. Man is a hieroglyph to which reason
+supplies no key--nay, reason itself is the heart of the enigma. And
+does not this lend a strange fascination to the adventure of life?
+
+Another singer, in a very much simpler strain, puts something of the
+same idea:--
+
+  Marooned on an isle of mystery,
+    From a stupor of sleep we woke,
+  And gazed at each other wistfully,
+    A wondering, wildered folk.
+
+  There were flowery valleys and mountains blue,
+    And pastures, and herds galore,
+  And fruits that were luscious to bite into,
+    Though bitter at the core.
+
+  So we plucked up heart, and we dree'd our weird
+    Through flickering gleam and gloom,
+  And still for rescue we hoped--or feared--
+    From our island home and tomb.
+
+  But never over the sailless sea
+    Came messenger bark or schooner
+  With news from the far-off realm whence we
+  Set sail for that isle of mystery,
+  Or a whisper of apology
+    From our mute, malign marooner.
+
+The strain of pessimism in this is even more marked than in Thompson's
+"Anthem"; and indeed it is hard to deny that the resolute silence of
+the "Veiled Being," the "Invisible King," and all the Gods and
+godlings ever propounded to mortal piety, is one of their most
+suspicious characteristics. Yet it may be that this reproach, however
+natural, does the Veiled Being--or the Younger Power of our
+alternative myth--a measure of injustice. It may be that the great
+Dramaturge keeps his plot to himself precisely in order that the
+interest may be maintained up to the fall of the curtain. It may be
+that its disclosure would upset the conditions of some vast experiment
+which he is working out. Where would be the interest of a race if its
+result were a foregone conclusion? Where the passion of a battle if
+its issue were foreknown? What if we should prove to be somnambulists
+treading some dizzy edge between two abysses, and able to reach the
+goal only on condition that we are unconscious of the process? Perhaps
+the sanest view of the problem is that presented in Bliss Carman's
+haunting poem
+
+  THE JUGGLER
+
+  Look how he throws them up and up,
+  The beautiful golden balls!
+  They hang aloft in the purple air,
+  And there never is one that falls.
+
+  He sends them hot from his steady hand,
+  He teaches them all their curves;
+  And whether the reach be little or long,
+  There never is one that swerves.
+
+  Some, like the tiny red one there,
+  He never lets go far;
+  And some he has sent to the roof of the tent
+  To swim without a jar.
+
+  So white and still they seem to hang,
+  You wonder if he forgot
+  To reckon the time of their return
+  And measure their golden lot.
+
+  Can it be that, hurried or tired out,
+  The hand of the juggler shook?
+  O never you fear, his eye is clear,
+  He knows them all like a book.
+
+  And they will home to his hand at last,
+  For he pulls them by a cord
+  Finer than silk and strong as fate,
+  That is just the bid of his word.
+
+  Was ever there such a sight in the world?
+  Like a wonderful winding skein,--
+  The way he tangles them up together
+  And ravels them out again!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  If I could have him at the inn
+  All by myself some night,--
+  Inquire his country, and where in the world
+  He came by that cunning sleight!
+
+  Where do you guess he learned the trick
+  To hold us gaping here,
+  Till our minds in the spell of his maze almost
+  Have forgotten the time of year?
+
+  One never could have the least idea.
+  Yet why he disposed to twit
+  A fellow who does such wonderful things
+  With the merest lack of wit?
+
+  Likely enough, when the show is done
+  And the balls all back in his hand,
+  He'll tell us why he is smiling so,
+  And we shall understand.
+
+I am not, perhaps, very firmly assured of this consummation. Yet I am
+much more hopeful of one day understanding the Juggler and the Balls
+than of ever getting into confidential relations with Mr. Wells's
+Invisible King.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One is conscious of a sort of churlishness in thus rejecting the
+advances of so amiable a character as the Invisible King. But is Mr.
+Wells, on his side, quite courteous, or even quite fair, to the Veiled
+Being? "Riddle me no riddles!" he seems to say; "I am tired of your
+guessing games. Let us have done with 'distressful enquiry into
+ultimate origins,' and 'bring our minds to the conception of a
+spontaneous and developing God'--one of whose existence and
+benevolence we are sure, since we made him ourselves. I want something
+to worship, to take me out of myself, to inspire me with brave phrases
+about death. How can one worship an insoluble problem? Will an enigma
+die with me in a reeling aeroplane? While you lurk obstinately behind
+that veil, how can I even know that your political views are sound?
+Whereas the Invisible King gives forth oracles of the highest
+political wisdom, in a voice which I can scarcely distinguish from my
+own. You are a remote, tantalizing entity with nothing comforting or
+stimulating about you. But as for my Invisible King, 'Closer is he
+than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.'"
+
+A little way back, I compared Mr. Wells to Moses; but, looked at from
+another point of view, he and his co-religionists may rather be
+likened to the Children of Israel. Tired of waiting for news from the
+God on the cloudy mountain-top, did they not make themselves a
+synthetic deity, finite, friendly, and very like the Invisible King,
+inasmuch as he seems to have worked no miracles, and done, in fact,
+nothing whatever? But the God on the mountain-top was wroth, and
+accused them of idolatry, surely not without reason. For what is
+idolatry if it be not manufacturing a God, whether out of golden
+earrings or out of humanitarian sentiments, and then bowing down and
+worshipping it?
+
+The wrath of the tribal God against his bovine rival was certainly
+excessive--yet we cannot regard idolatry as one of the loftier
+manifestations of the religious spirit. The man who can bow down and
+worship the work of his hands shows a morbid craving for
+self-abasement. It is possible, no doubt, to plead that the graven
+image is a mere symbol of incorporeal, supersensible deity; and the
+plea is a good one, if, and in so far as, we can believe that the
+distinction between the sign and the thing signified is clear to the
+mind of the devotee. The difficulty lies in believing that the type of
+mind which is capable of focussing its devotion upon a statuette is
+also capable of distinguishing between the idea of a symbol and the
+idea of a portrait. But when we pass from the work of a man's hands to
+the work of his brain--from an actual piece of sculpture to a mental
+construction--the plea of symbolism can no longer be advanced. This
+graven image of the mind, so to speak, is the veritable God, or it is
+nothing; and Mr. Wells, as we have seen, is profuse in his assurances
+that it is the veritable God. That is what makes his whole attitude
+and argument so baffling. One can understand an idolater who says "I
+believe that my God inhabits yonder image," or "Yonder image is only a
+convenient point of concentration for the reverence, gratitude, and
+love which pass through it to the august and transcendent Spirit whom
+it symbolizes." But how are we to understand the idolater who adores,
+and claims actual divinity for, an emanation from his own brain and
+the brains of a certain number of like-minded persons? Is it not as
+though a ventriloquist were to prostrate himself before his own
+puppet?
+
+This craving for something to worship points to an almost uncanny
+recrudescence of the spirit of Asia in a fine European intelligence.
+For my own part, as above stated, I cannot believe Mr. Wells's case to
+be typical; but in that I may be mistaken. It is possible that an
+epidemic of Asiatic religiosity may be one of the sequels of the War.
+If that be so--if there are many people who shrink from the condition
+of the spiritual "ronin," and are in search of a respectable "daimio"
+to whom to pay their devotion--I beg leave strongly to urge the claims
+of the Veiled Being as against the Invisible King.
+
+He has at the outset the not inconsiderable advantage of being an
+entity instead of a non-entity. Whoever or whatever he may be, we are
+compelled by the very constitution of our minds to assume his (or its)
+existence; whereas there is manifestly no compulsion to assume the
+existence of the Invisible King.
+
+Then, again, the Veiled Being is entirely unpretentious. There is no
+bluster and no cant about him. He does not claim our gratitude for the
+doubtful boon of life. He does not pretend to be just, while he is
+committing, or winking at, the most intolerable injustices. He does
+not set up to be long-suffering, while in fact he is childishly
+touchy. He does not profess to be merciful, while the incurable ward,
+the battlefield--nay, even the maternity home and the dentist's
+parlor--are there to give him the lie. (Here, of course, I am not
+contrasting him with the Invisible King, but with more ancient and
+still more Asian divinities.) It is the moral pretensions tagged on by
+the theologians to metaphysical Godhead that revolt and estrange
+reasonable men--Mr. Wells among the rest. If you tell us that behind
+the Veil we shall find a good-natured, indulgent old man, who chastens
+us only for our good, is pleased by our flatteries (with or without
+music), and is not more than suitably vexed at our naughtinesses in
+the Garden of Eden and elsewhere--we reply that this is a nursery tale
+which has been riddled, time out of mind, not by wicked sceptics, but
+by the spontaneous, irrepressible criticism of babes and sucklings.
+But if you divest the Veiled Being of all ethical--or in other words
+of all human--attributes, then there is no difficulty whatever in
+admiring, and even adoring, the marvels he has wrought. Tennyson went
+deeper than he realized into the nature of things when he wrote--
+
+  "For merit lives from man to man,
+   But not from man, O Lord, to thee."
+
+Once put aside all question of merit and demerit, of praise and blame,
+and more especially (but this will shock Mr. Wells) of salvation and
+damnation--and nothing can be easier than to pay to the works of the
+Veiled Being the meed of an illimitable wonder. When we think of the
+roaring vortices of flame that spangle the heavens night by night, at
+distances that beggar conception: when we think of our tiny earth,
+wrapped in its little film of atmosphere, spinning safely for ages
+untold amid all these appalling immensities: and when we think, on the
+other hand, of the battles of claw and maw going on, beneath the
+starry vault, in that most miraculous of jewels, a drop of water: we
+cannot but own that the Power which set all this whirl of atoms agoing
+is worthy of all admiration. And approbation? Ah, that is another
+matter; for there the moral element comes in. It is possible (and here
+lies the interest of the enigma) that the Veiled Being may one day
+justify himself even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing so
+behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely useless to speculate.
+Light may one day come to us, but it will come through patient
+investigation, not through idle pondering and guessing. In the
+meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the microcosm, ourselves
+including both extremes, and being, perhaps, the most stupendous
+miracle of all, we cannot deny to this amazing frame of things the
+tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be religion, I profess myself
+as religious as Mr. Wells. I am even willing to join him in some
+outward, ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if he can suggest
+one that shall not be ridiculously inadequate. What about kneeling
+through the C Minor Symphony? That seems to me about as near as we can
+get. Or I will go with him to Primrose Hill some fine morning (like
+the Persian Ambassador fabled by Charles Lamb) and worship the Sun,
+chanting to him William Watson's magnificent hymn:--
+
+    "To thee as our Father we bow,
+      Forbidden thy Father to see,
+  Who is older and greater than thou, as thou
+    Art greater and older than we."
+
+The sun, at any rate, is not a figure of speech, and is a symbol which
+runs no risk of being mistaken for a portrait. If Mr. Wells would be
+content with some such "bright sciential idolatry," I would willingly
+declare myself a co-idolater. But alas! he is the hierophant of the
+Invisible King, and prayer to that impotent potentate is to me a moral
+impossibility. I would rather face damnation, especially in the mild
+form threatened by Mr. Wells, which consists (pp. 148-149) in not
+knowing that you are damned.
+
+And if Mr. Wells maintains that in the worship of the non-moral Veiled
+Being there is no practical, pragmatic comfort, I reply that I am not
+so sure of that. When all is said and done, is there not more hope,
+more solace, in an enigma than in a _facon de parler_? I should be
+quite willing to accept the test of the reeling aeroplane. The aviator
+can say to his soul: "Here am I, one of the most amazing births of
+time, the culmination of an endless series of miracles. Perhaps I am
+on the verge of extinction--if so, what does it all matter? But
+perhaps, on the contrary, I am about to plunge into some new
+adventure, as marvellous as this. More marvellous it cannot be, but
+it may perhaps be more agreeable. At all events, there is something
+fascinating in this leap in the dark. Good bye, my soul! Good-bye,
+my memory!
+
+  'If we should meet again, why, we shall smile;
+   If not, why then this parting was well made.'"
+
+I cannot but think that there is as much religion and as much solace
+in such a shaking-off of "the bur o' the world" as in the thought that
+the last new patent God is going to die with you, and that you,
+unconsciously and indistinguishably merged in him, are going to live
+for ever.
+
+
+
+
+  THE NEWEST BORZOI BOOKS
+
+
+  LUSTRA
+    _By Ezra Pound_
+
+  DANDELIONS
+    _By Coulson T. Cade_
+
+  A CHASTE MAN
+    _By Louis Wilkinson_
+
+  GOD AND MR. WELLS
+    _By William Archer_
+
+  MARTIN RIVAS
+    _By Alberto Blest-Gana_
+
+  BEATING 'EM TO IT
+    _By Chester Cornish_
+
+  A BOOK OF PREFACES
+    _By H. L. Mencken_
+
+  THE THREE BLACK PENNYS
+    _By Joseph Hergesheimer_
+
+  INTERPRETERS AND INTERPRETATIONS
+    _By Carl Van Vechten_
+
+  MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS
+    _By George Jean Nathan_
+
+  OTHERS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE NEW VERSE
+    _Edited by Alfred Kreymborg_
+    1917 Issue
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_.
+
+2. The words amoeba, mythopoeic and prosopopoeia use "oe" ligature in
+the original text.
+
+3. The following misprints have been corrected:
+     "blackslides" corrected to "backslides" (page 40)
+     "annhilated" corrected to "annihilated" (page 119)
+
+4. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies
+in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been
+retained.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of God and Mr. Wells, by William Archer
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