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DEPOSITED BY THE

LINONIAN AND BROTHERS LIBRARY

GOD
THE INVISIBLE KING

BY
H. G. WELLS

Jfem fork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Tft-ay 1917
All rights reserved

COPTRIOHT, 1917,
By H. G. WELLS

Set up and electrotyped. Published, May, 1917.
Reprinted May. twice, 19x7.

PREFACE
This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as pos
sible the religious belief of the writer. That belief
is not orthodox Christianity; it is not, indeed,
Christianity at all; its core nevertheless is a_p_ro-
f ound belief in a personal and intimate God. There
is nothing in its statements that need shock or of
fend anyone who is prepared for the expression of
a faith different from and perhaps in several par
ticulars opposed to his own. The writer will be
found to /be sympathetic with all sincere religious
feeling. Nevertheless it is well to prepare the
prospective reader for statements that may jar
harshly against deeply rooted mental habits. It is
well to warn him at the outset that the departure
from accepted beliefs is here no vague scepticism,
but a quite sharply denned objection to dogmas
ver^jf/ideJyjcesseEed! Let the writer state the most
probable occasion of trouble forthwith. An issue
upon which this book will be found particularly un
compromising is the^ dogma of -Ihe Trinity. The

vi PEEFACE
writer is of opinion that the Council of Nic«a,
which forcibly crystallised the controversies of two
centuries and formulated the creed upon which all
the existing Christian churches are based, was one
of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable
of all religious gatherings, and he holds that the
Alexandrine speculations which were then conclu
sively imposed upon Christianity merit only dis
respectful attention at the present time. There
you have a chief possibility of offence. He is quite
unable to pretend any awe for what he considers
the spiritual monstrosities established by that un
dignified gathering. He makes no attempt to be
obscure or propitiatory in this connection. He
criticises the creeds explicitly and frankly, because
he believes it is particularly necessary to clear
them out of the way of those who are seeking re
ligious consolation at this present time of excep
tional religious need. He does little to conceal his
' I in^ijna,tijan_at_the role played by these dogmas
Hin obscuring, j»e ryerting^ and preventing the re-
liligipjus jif e^ of mankind. After this warning such
readers from among the various Christian churches
and sects as are accessible to storms of theological
fear or passion to whom the Trinity is an ineffable
mystery and the name of God almost unspeakably

PREFACE vii
awful, read on at their own risk. This is a re
ligious book written by a believer, but so far as
their beliefs and religion go it may seem to them
more sceptical and more antagonistic than blank
atheism. That the writer cannot tell. He is not
simply denying their God. He is declaring that
there is a living God, different altogether from that
Triune God and nearer to the heart of man. The
spirit of this book is like that of a missionary who
would only too gladly overthrow and smash some
Polynesian divinity of shark's teeth and painted
wood and mother-of-pearl. To the writer such
elaborations as " begotten of the Father before all
worlds" are no better than intellectual shark's
teeth and oyster shells. His purpose, like the pur
pose of that missionary, is not primarily to shock
and insult; but he is zealous to liberate, and he is
impatient with a reverence that stands between
man and God. He gives this fair warning and
proceeds with his matter.
His matter is modern religion as he sees it. It
is only incidentally and because it is unavoidable
that he attacks doctrinal Christianity.
In a previous book, "First and Last Things"
(Constable and Co.), he has stated his convictions
upon certain general ideas of life and thought as

viii PREFACE
clearly as he could. All of philosophy, all of meta
physics that is, seems to him to be a discussion of
the relations of class and individual. The an
tagonism of the Nominalist and the Realist, the
opposition of the One and the Many, the contrast
of the Ideal and the Actual, all these oppositions
expjes£^r,erta.m,stjw.ta
in the activity of the human mind. From an im
perfect recognition of tliaF duality ensue great
masses of misconception. That was the substance
of " First and Last Things." In this present book
there is no further attack on philosophical or meta
physical questions. Here we work at a less funda
mental level and deal with religious feeling and
religious ideas. But just as the writer was in
clined to attribute a whole world of disputation
and inexactitudes to confused thinking about the
exact value of classes and terms, so here he is dis
posed to think that interminable controversies and
conflicts arise out of a confusion of intention due
to a double meaning of the word " God " ; that the
word " God " conveys not one idea or set .olJ-deas,
but several essentially different ideas, incompatible
one with another, and falling mainly into one or
other of two divergent groups ; and that people
slip carelessly from one to the other of these groups

PREFACE ix
of ideas and so get into ultimately inextricable con
fusions. The writer believes that the centuries of fluid
religious thought that preceded the violent ulti
mate crystallisation of Mcsea, was essentially a
struggle — obscured, of course, by many complexi
ties — to reconcile and get into a relationship these .
two separate main series of God-ideas.
Putting the leading idea of this book very
roughly, these two antagonistic typical conceptions
of God may be best contrasted by speaking of one
of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of
the other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One
is the great Outward God ; the other is the Inmost
God. The first idea was perhaps developed most
highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It
is a conception of God tending to pantheism, to an
idea of a comprehensive God as ruling with justice
rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness
and awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea,
which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God,
is the God of the human heart. The writer would
suggest that the^ great^^ne^f„jia..iheologleal
struggles of that phase_oi_jdsilisati0nand~ world
unit^w^icTproduced Christianity^was-a persistent
but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different

x PREFACE
ideas of jGbod-4nto -one -focus. It was an attempt to
make the God of Nature accessible and the God
of the Heart invincible, to bring the former into
a conception of love and to vest the latter with the
beauty of stars and flowers and the dignity of in
exorable justice. There could be no finer metaphor
for such a correlation than Fatherhood and Son-
ship. But the trouble is that itjseems impossible
to most people to continue to regard the relations
of the Father to the Son as being simply a mysti
cal metaphor. Presently some materialistic bias
swings them in a moment of intellectual careless
ness back to the idea of sexual filiation.
And it may further be suggested that the extreme
aloofness and inhumanity, which is logically nee-
essary in the idea of a Creator J3&d, of an Infinite
God, was the reason, so to speak, for the invention
of a Holy_Spirit,_as something proceeding from him,
as something bridgingtBe~-great^gulf ,. a Cpmf orter,
a mediator descending into the sphere of the Tiu-
man understanding^ That, and the suggestive in
fluence of the Egyptian Trinity that was then
being worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had
saturated the thought of Alexandria with the con
ception of a trinity in unity, are probably the re
alities that account for the Third Person of the

PREFACE xi
Christian Trinity. At any rate the present writer
believes that the discussions that shaped the Chris
tian theology we know were dominated by such
natural and fundamental thoughts. These discus
sions were, of course, complicated from the outset ;
and particularly were they compjicated by the
identification of the man Jesus with the. theological
Christy by materialistic expectations of his second
coming, by materialistic inventions about his ^
" miraculous " begetting, and by the morbid specu- }
lations about virginity and the like that arose out/
of such grossness. They were still further com
plicated by the idea of the textual inspiration of the
scriptures, which presently swamped thought in
textual interpretation. That swamping came very
early in the development of Christianity. The
writer of St. John's gospel appears still to be think
ing with a considerable freedom, but Origen is al
ready hopelessly in the net of the texts. The writer
of St. John's gospel was a free man, but Origen
was a superstitious man. He was emasculated
mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry.
He quotes; his predecessor thinks.
¦ But the writer throws out these guesses at the
probable intentions of early Christian thought in
passing. His business here is the definition of a

xii PREFACE
position. The writer's position here in this book
is, firstly, complete Agnosticism in „the jm^ittgrjof
God the Creator, and secondly, entire faith in the
matte/oTGod the Redeemer. That, so to speak, is
the key of his book. He cannot bring the two
ideas under the same term God. He uses the word
God therefore for the God in our heartgbjmly? ancl
he"uses the term the Y^^^^^^^Sm.rvliixas,te
niy^teriesjof theuniverse^and he declares that we
do not know and perhaps cannot know in any com
prehensible terms the relation of the Veiled Being
to that living reality in our lives who is, in his
terminology, the true God. Speaking from the
point of view of practical religion, he is restricting
and defining the word God, as meaning only the
personal God of mankind, he is restricting it so as
to exclude all cosmogony and ideas of providence
from our religious thought and leave nothing but
the essentials of the religious life.
Many people, whom one would class as rather
liberal Christians of an Arian or Arminian com
plexion, may find the larger part of this book ac
ceptable to them if they will read " the Christ God "
where the writer has written " God." They will
then differ from him upon little more than the
question whether there is an essential identity in

PREFACE xiii
aim and quality between the Christ God and the
Veiled Being, who answer to their Creator God.
This the orthodox post Nicsean Christians assert,
and many pre-Nicaeans and many heretics (as the
Cathars) contradicted with its exact contrary.
The Cathars, Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held,
with the Manichseans, that the God of Nature, God
the Father, was evil. The Christ God was his an
tagonist. This was the idea of the poet Shelley.
Aiid passing beyond Christian theology altogether
a clue can still be found to many problems in
Comparative theology in this distinction between
the Being of Nature {cf. Kant's " starry vault
above ") and the God of the heart (Kant's " moral
law within " ) . The idea of an antagonism seems
to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes
and the Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism.
So, too, Buddhism seems to be " antagonistic." On
the other hand, the Moslem teaching and modern
Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify
the two ; God the creator is altogether and without
distinction also God the King of Mankind. Chris
tianity stands somewhere between such complete
identification and complete antagonism. It admits
a difference J;n^ttitu^e between Father jind Son
in its distinction between the Old Dispensation (of

xiv PREFACE
the Old Testament) and the New. Every possible
change is rung in the great religions of the world
between identification, complete separation, equal
ity, and disproportion of these Beings ; but it will be
found that these two ideas are, so to speak, the basal
elements of all theology in the world. The writer
is chary of assertion or denial in these matters.
He believes that they are Bp_eculations ..not at_all
necessary to salvation. He believes that men may
differ profoundly in their opinions upon these
points and still be in perfect agreement upon the
essentials of religion. The reality of religion he
believes deals wholly and exclusively with the God
of the Heart. He declares as his own opinion, and
as the opinion which seems most expressive of mod
ern thought, that there is no reason to suppose
the Veiled Being either benevolent or malignant
towards men. (But if the reader believes that God
is Almighty and in every way Infinite the practical
outcome is not very different^ Forthe_p_urjgpses of
human relationship it is impossible ._to,,deny_ that
God presents Jnviself as finite, as struggling and
taking a part against evil.
The writer believes that these dogmas of relation
ship are not merely extraneous to religion? but an
impediment to religion. His aim in this book is

PREFACE xv
to give a statement of religion which is no longer
entangled in such speculations and disputes.
Let him add only one other note of explanation
in this preface, and that is to remark that except
for one incidental passage (in Chapter IV., § 1),
nowhere does he discuss the question of personal
immortality.1 He omits this question because he
does not consider that it has any more bearing
upon the essentials of religion, than have the the
ories we may hold about the relation of God and
the moral law to the starry universe. The latter
is a question for the theologian, the former for the
psychologist. Whether we are mortal or immortal,';
whether the God in our hearts is the Son of or. a\
rebel against the Universe, th^raalitjjrf reHgion, v
the fact of salvation, is still our self-identification
with God, irresjjectivg^pf consequences, and^jthe
achievementjif Jiis_ kingdom, in our hearts and in
the_jKprlcL Whether we live forever or die to
morrow does not affect righteousness. Many peo
ple seem to find the prospect of a final personal
death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism.
I have no such Appetite for a separate immortality.
God ismy^ immortality ; what, of me, is identified
i It is discussed in " First and Last Things," Book IV, § 4.

xvi PREFACE
with God, is God ; what is not is of no more perma
nent value than the snows of yester-year. H. G. W.
Dunmow, May, 1917.

CONTENTS
CHAPTEB PAGE
Preface  v
1. The Cosmogony of Modern Religion ... 1
2. Heresies ; or the Things that God is Not . . 25
3. The Likeness of .God, ........ 55
4. The Religion of Atheists  69
5. The Invisible King  96
6. Modern Ideas of Sin and Damnation . . . 145
7. The Idea of a Church  157
The Envoy  171

GOD
THE INVISIBLE KING
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN
RELIGION
§ 1 Modern Religion Has no Founder
Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of
Mohammedanism be an exception, have dawned im
perceptibly upon the world. A little while ago and
the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been
found in existence, and already in a state of dif
fusion. People have begun to hear of the new be
lief first here and then there. It is interesting, for
example, to trace how Christianity drifted into the
consciousness of the Roman world. But when a
religion has been interrogated it has always had
hitherto a tale of beginnings, the name and story
of a founder. The renascent religion that is now
taking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points
to no origins. It is the Truth, its believers declare ;
it has always been here ; it has always been visible

2 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
to those who had eyes to see. It is perhaps plainer
than it was and to more people — that is all.
It is as if it still did not realise its own differ
ence. Many of those who hold it still think of it
as if it were a kind of Christianity. Some, catch
ing at a phrase of Huxley's, speak of it as Chris
tianity without Theology. They do not know the
creed they are carrying. It has, as a matter of
fact, a very fine and subtle theology, flatly opposed
to any belief that could, except by great stretching
of charity and the imagination, be called Christian
ity. One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with
the system ascribed to some Gnostics, but that is
far more probably an accidental rather than a sym
pathetic coincidence. Of that the reader shall
presently have an opportunity of judging.
This indefiniteness of statement and relationship
is probably only the opening phase of the new faith.
Christianity also began with an extreme neglect of
definition. It was not at first anything more than
a sect of Judaism. It was only after three cen
turies, amidst the uproar and emotions of the coun
cil of Nicsea, when the more enthusiastic Trinitari
ans stuffed their fingers in their ears in affected
horror at the arguments of old Arius, that the car
dinal mystery .oJtthe Trinity was established as the

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 3
essential fact of Christianity. Throughout those
three centuries^ the eenturies of its greatest achieve
ments and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had
not defined its God. And even to-day it has to be
noted that a large majority of those who possess
and repeat the Christian creeds have come into the
practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood,
that only in the slightest way do they realise the
nature of the statements to which they subscribe.
They will speak and think of both Christ and God
in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of the
Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire
fabric of all the churches rests. They will show
themselves as frankly Arians as though that damn
able heresy had not been washed out of the world
forever after centuries of persecution in torrents
of blood. But whatever the present state of Chris
tendom in these matters may be, there can be no
doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to
give Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambigu
ous statement possible. Christianity knew itself
clearly for what it was in its maturity, whatever
the indecisions of its childhood or the confusions
of its decay. The renascent religion that one finds
now, a thing active and sufficient in many minds,
has still scarcely come to self-consciousness. But

4 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
it is so coming, and this present book is very largely
an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to
compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and
usages of the various Christian, pseudo-Christian,
philosophical, and agnostic cults amidst which it
has appeared.
The writer's sympathies and convictions are en
tirely with this that he speaks of as renascent or
modern religion ; he is neither atheist nor Buddhist
nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make
no pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detach
ment. He will do his best to be as fair as possible
and as candid as possible, but the reader must
reckon with this bias. He has found this faith
growing up in himself; he has found it, or some
thing very difficult to distinguish from it, growing
independently in the minds of men and women he
has met. They have been people of very various
origins; English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians,
French, people brought up in a " Catholic atmos
phere," Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans.
Their diversity of source is as remarkable as their
convergence of tendency. A miscellany of minds
thinking upon parallel lines has come out to the
same light. The new teaching is also traceable in
many professedly Christian religious books and it

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 5
is to be heard from Christian pulpits. The phase
of definition is manifestly at hand.
§ 2 Modern Religion has a Finite God
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between
this new faith and any recognised form of Chris
tianity is that, knowingly or unknowingly, it_
worships a finite Ood. Directly the believer is
fairly confronted with the plain questions of the
case, the vague identifications that are still care
lessly made with one or all of the persons of the
Trinity dissolve away. He will admit that his
God is neither all-wise, nor all-powerful, nor om-/(
nipresent; that he is neither the maker of heaven
nor earth, and that he has little to identify him with j
that hereditary God of the Jews who became the j
" Father " in the Christian system. On the other ;
hand he will assert that his God Js. a^ggi of salva-
tionj, that he is a spirit, a person, a strongly marked
an4_koowable personality, loving, inspiring, and
lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every
human soul He will be much less certain in his
denials that his God has a close resemblance to the
Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
"Christ." . . .
The modern religious man will almost certainly '

6 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
profess a kind of universalism; he will assert that
whensoever men have called upon any God and have
found fellowship and comfort and courage and that
sense of God within them, that inner light which is
the quintessence of the religious experience, it was
the True God that answered them. For the True
God is a generous God, not a jealous God ; the very
antithesis of that bickering monopolist who " will
have none other gods but Me " ; and when a human
heart cries out — to what name it matters not — for
a larger spirit and a stronger help than the visible
things of life can give, straightway the nameless
Helper is with it and the God of Man answers to
the call. The True God has no scorn nor hate for
those who have accepted the many-handed symbols
of the Hindu or the lacquered "idols of China.
Where there is faith, where there is need, there is
the True God ready^to clasp the hands that stretch
out seeking for him into the darkness behind the
ivory and gold.
The fact that God is finite is one upon which those
who think clearly among the new believers are very
insistent. He is, above everything else, a person
ality, and to be a personality is to have character
istics, to be limited by characteristics; he is a Be
ing, not us but dealing with us and through us,

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 7
he has an aim and that means he has a past and
future ; he is within time and not outside it. And
they point out that this is really what everyone
who prays sincerely to God or gets help from God,
feels and believes. Our practice with God is better
than our theory. None of us really pray to that
fantastic, unqualified danse a trois, the Trinity,
which the wranglings and disputes of the worthies
'of Alexandria and Syria declared to be God. We
pray to one single understanding person. But so
far the tactics of those Trinitarians at Nicsea, who
stuck their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in
this world ; this was no matter for discussion, they
declared, it was a Holy Mystery full of magical ter
ror, and few religious people have thought it worth
while to revive these terrors by a definite contradic
tion. The truly religious have been content to
lapse quietly into the comparative sanity of an un
formulated Arianism, they have left it to the scof
fing Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of
the official creed. But one magnificent protest
against this theological fantasy must have been the
work of a sincerely religious man, the cold superb
humour of that burlesque creed, ascribed, at first
no doubt facetiously and then quite seriously, to
Saint Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far

8 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
beyond its original intention, has become at last
the accepted creed of the church.
The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian the
ology is drawing to its end. It is when men most
urgently need God that they become least patient
with foolish presentations and dogmas. The new
believers are very definitely set upon a thorough
analysis of the nature and growth of the Christian
creeds and ideas. There has grown up a practice
of assuming that, when God is spoken of, the He
brew-Christian God of Nicsea is meant. But 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. These things do not even
make a caricature of the True God; they compose
an altogether different and antagonistic figure.
It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of
impulses that has led the theologians of nearly
every faith to claim infinite qualities for their deity.
One has to remember the poorness of the mental
and moral quality of the churchmen of the third,
fourth, and fifth centuries who saddled Christen
dom with its characteristic dogmas, and the extreme
poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas within
which they thought. Many of these makers of

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 9
Christianity, like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who
had even to be baptised after his election to his
bishopric), had been pitchforked into the church
from civil life ; they lived in a time of pitiless fac
tions and personal feuds ; they had to conduct their
disputations amidst the struggles of would-be em
perors; court eunuchs and favourites swayed their
counsels, and popular rioting clinched their de
cisions. There was less freedom of discussion then
in the Christian world than there is at present
(1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience of edu
cated opinion by which a theory could be judged
did not equal, either in numbers or accuracy of in
formation, the present population of Constantino
ple. To these conditions we owe the claim that
the Christian God is a magic god, very great medi
cine in battle, " m hoc signo vmces," and the argu
ment so natural to the minds of those days and so
absurd to ours, that since he had all power, all
knowledge, and existed for ever and ever, it was no
use whatever to set up any other god against
him. . . .
By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as
its fundamental belief, without which everyone was
to be " damned everlastingly," a conception of God
and of Christ's relation to God, of which even by

10 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
the Christian account of his teaching, Jesus was
either totally unaware or so negligent and careless
of the future comfort of his disciples as scarcely to
make mention. The doctrine of the Trinity, so far
as the relationship of the" Third Person goes, hangs
almost entirely upon one ambiguous and disputed
utterance in St. John's gospel (xv. 26). Most of
the teachings of Christian orthodoxy resolve them
selves to the attentive student into assertions of the
nature of contradiction and repartee. Someone
floats an opinion in some matter that has been
hitherto" vague, in regard, for example, to the son-
ship of Christ or to the method of his birth. The
new opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of
minds unaccustomed to so definite a statement, and
in the zeal of their recoil they fly to a contrary
proposition. The Christians would neither admit
that they worshipped more gods than one because
.of the Greeks, nor deny the divinityof J3hrist be-
'causej)f the Jews. They dreaded to be polytheis-
tic; equally did they dread the least apparent de
traction from the power and importance of their
Saviour. They were forced into the theory of the
Trinity by the necessity of those contrary asser
tions, and they had to make it a mystery protected
by curses to save it from a reductio ad abswrdwn.

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 11
The entire history of the growth of the Christian
doctrine in those disordered early centuries is a
history of theology by committee; a history of furi
ous wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still
more hasty attempts to clinch matters by ana
thema. When the muddle was at its very worst,
the church was confronted by enormous political
opportunities. In order that it should seize these
one chief thing appeared imperative : doctrinal uni
formity. The emperor himself, albeit unbaptised
and very ignorant of Greek, came and seated him
self in the midst of Christian thought upon a golden
throne. At the end of it all Eusebius, that su
preme Trimmer, was prepared to damn everlast
ingly all those who doubted that consubstantiality
he himself had doubted at the beginning of the con
ference. It is quite clear that Constantine did not
care who was damned or for what period, so long
as the Christians ceased to wrangle among them
selves. The practical unanimity of Nica3a was se
cured by threats, and then, turning upon the vic
tors, he sought by threats to restore Arius to com
munion. The imperial aim was a common faith
to unite the empire. The crushing out of the
Arians and of the Paulicians and suchlike heretics,
and more particularly the systematic destruction

12 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
by the orthodox of all heretical writings, had about
it none of that quality of honest conviction which
comes to those who have a real knowledge of God ;
it was a bawling down of dissensions that, left to
work themselves out, would have spoilt good busi
ness; it was the fist of Nicolas of Myra over again,
except that after the days of Ambrose the sword
of the executioner and the fires of the book-burner
were added to the weapon of the human voice.
Priscillian was the first human sacrifice formally
offered up under these improved conditions to the
greater glory of the reinforced Trinity. There
after the blood of the heretics was the cement, of
Christian unity.
It is with these things in mind that those who pro
fess the new faith are becoming so markedly anxious
to distinguish God from the Trinitarian's deity. At
present if anyone who has left the Christian com
munion declares himself a believer in God, priest
and parson swell with self-complacency. There is
no reason why they should do so. That many of
us have gone from them and found God is no con
cern of theirs. It is not that we who went out into
the wilderness which we thought to be a desert,
away from their creeds and dogmas, have turned
back and are returning. It is that we have gone

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 13
on still further, and are beyond that desolation.
Never more shall we return to those who gather
under the cross. By faith we disbelieved and de
nied. By faith we said of that stuffed scarecrow
of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antique
theological notions, the Nicene deity, " This is cer
tainly no God." And by faith we have found
God. . . .
§3 Thb Infinite Being is not God
There has always been a demand upon the theolog
ical teacher that he should supply a cosmogony.
It has always been an effective propagandist thing
to say : " Our God made the whole universe.
Don't you think that it would be wise to abandon
your deity, who did not, as you admit, do anything
of the sort?"
The attentive reader of the lives of the Saints
will find that this style of argument did in
the past bring many tribes and nations into the
Christian fold. It was second only to the claim
of magic advantages, demonstrated by a free use
of miracles. Only one great religious system, the")
Buddhist, seems to have resisted the temptation
to secure for its divinity the honour and title ofj
Creator. Modern religion is like Buddhism in

14 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
that respect. It offers no theory whatever about
the origin of the universe. It does not reach-be
hind the appearances of space and time. It sees
\u— mm'"""811"™" '  " """" '""' wn^finTintiniiitnitTiini— mtfTniiimirrim  'i 
only a featureless presumption in that playing with
superlatives which has entertained so many minds
from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the delusion
that such negative terms as the Absolute or the
Unconditioned, can assert anything at all. At the
back of all known things 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. , Of that Being, whether it is simple or
complex or divine, we know nothing; to us it is
no more than the limit of understanding, the un
known- beyond. It may be of practically limit
less intricacy and possibility. 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.
For us life is a matter of our personalities in
space and time. Human analysis probing with
philosophy and science towards the Veiled Being
reveals nothing of God, reveals space and time
only as necessary forms of consciousness, glimpses

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 15
a dance of atoms, of whirls in the ether. Some
day in the endless future there may be a knowledge,
an understanding of relationship, a power and
courage that will pierce into those black wrap
pings. To that it may be our God, the Captain of
Mankind will take us.
That now is a mere speculation. The veil of
the unknown is set with the stars; its outer tex
ture is ether and atom and crystal. The Veiled
Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods
over the mirror upon which the busy shapes of life
are moving. It is as if it waited in a great still
ness. Our lives do not deal with it, and cannot
deal with it. It may be that they may never be
able to deal with it.
§4 The Life Force is not God
So it is that comprehensive setting of the uni
verse presents itself to the modern mind. It is
altogether outside good and evil and love and hate.
It is outside God, who is love and goodness. And
coming out of this veiled being, proceeding out
of it in a mariner altogether inconceivable, is an
other lesser being, an impulse thrusting through
matter and clothing itself in continually changing
material forms, the maker of our world, Life, the

16 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
Will to Be. It comes out of that inscrutable being
as a wave comes rolling to us from beyond the
horizon. It is as it were a great wave rushing
through matter and possessed by a spirit. It is a
breeding, fighting thing; it pants through the
jungle track as the tiger and lifts itself towards
heaven as the tree; it is the rabbit bolting for its
life and the dove calling to her mate; it crawls,
it flies, it dives, it lusts and devours, it pursues
and eats itself in order to live still more eagerly
and hastily; it is every living thing, of it are our
passions and desires and fears. And it is aware
of itself not as a whole, but dispersedly as indi
vidual self-consciousness, starting out dispersedly
from every one of the sentient creatures it has
called into being. They look out for their little
moments, red-eyed and fierce, full of greed, full of
the passions of acquisition and assimilation and
reproduction, submitting only to brief fellowships
of defence or aggression. They are beings of strain
and conflict and competition. They are living sub
stance still mingled painfully with the dust. The
forms in which this being clothes itself bear thorns
and fangs and claws, are soaked with poison and
bright with threats or allurements, prey slyly or
openly on one another, hold their own for a little

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 17
while, breed savagely and resentfully, and
pass. . . .
This second Being men have called the Life
Force, the Will to Live, the Struggle for Exist
ence. They have figured it too as Mother Nature.
We may speculate whether it is not what the wiser
among the Gnostics meant by the Demiurge, but
since the Christians destroyed all the Gnostic
books that must remain a mere curious guess. We
may speculate whether this heat and haste and
wrath of life about us is the Dark God of the
Manichees, tlie evil spirit of the sun worshippers.
But in contemporary thought there is no convic
tion apparent that this Demiurge is either good
or evil; it is conceived of as both good and evil.
If it gives all Jhe_pain and conflict of life, it gives
also the joyofjlie&unshine, the_deligEt-and hope

of youlh7_-the pleasures. If it has elaborated a
hundred thousand sorts of parasite, it has also
moulded the beautiful limbs of man and woman;
it has shaped the slug and the flower. And in it,
as part of it, taking its rewards, responding to its
goads, struggling against the final abandonment to
death, do we all live, as the beasts live, glad, angry,
sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted, for
getful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood

18 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
after mood but always fearing death, with no cer
tainty and no coherence within us, until we find
God. And God comes to us neither out of the stars
nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice
within. § 5 God is Within
God comes we know not whence, into the con
flict of life. He works in men and through men.
He is a spirit, a single spirit and a single per
son ; he has begun and he will never end. He is the
immorjal^ part andleapjer of mankind. He has
motives, he has characteristics, he has an aim.
He is by our poor scales of measurement boundless
love, boundless courage, boundless generosity. He
is thought and a steadfast will. He is our friend
and brother and the light of the world. That
briefly is the belief of the modern mind with regard
to God. There is no very novel idea about this
God, unless it be the idea that he had a beginning.
This is the God that men have sought and found
in all ages, as God or as the Messiah or the Saviour
The finding of him is salvation from the purpose
lessnfisa_x>£. lif e. The new religion has but disen
tangled the idea of him from the absolutes and' in
finities and mysteries of the Christian theologians ;

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 19
from mythological virgin births and the cosmog
onies and intellectual pretentiousness of a vanished
age. Modern religion appeals to no revelation, no
authoritative teaching, no mystery. The state
ment it makes is, it declares, a mere statement of
what we may all perceive and experience. We all
live in the storm of life, we all find our understand
ings limited by the Veiled Being; if we seek salva
tion and search within for God, presently we find
him. All this is in the nature of things. If every
one who perceives and states it were to be instantly
killed and blotted out, presently other people would
find their way to the same conclusions; and so on
again and again. To this all truereligion, cast
ing aside jtshulls of misconception, must ulti-

matelv come. To it indeed much religion is al
ready eoming. Chrjstian^ Jhought struggles^ to-
wardsjit^ with the millstones of Syrian theology
and an outrageous mythology of incarnation and
resurrection about its neck. When at last our
present bench of bishops join the early fathers of
the church in heaven there will be, I fear, a note
of reproach in their greeting of the ingenious per
son who saddled them with omnipotens. Still
more disastrous for them has been the virgin birth,

20 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
with the terrible fascination of its detail for un-
poetic minds. How rich is the literature of au
thoritative Christianity with decisions upon the
continuing virginity of Mary and the virginity of
Joseph — ideas that first arose in Arabia as a Mos
lem gloss upon Christianity — and how little have
these peepings and pryings to do with the needs of
the heart and the finding of God !
Within the last few years there have been a
score or so of such volumes as that recently com
piled by Dr. Foakes Jackson, entitled " The Faith
and the War," a volume in which the curious reader
may contemplate deans and canons, divines and
church dignitaries, men intelligent and enquiring
and religiously disposed, all lying like overladen
camels, panting under this load of obsolete theolog
ical responsibility, groaning great articles, outside
the needle's eye that leads to God.
§ 6 The Coming of God
Modern religion bases its knowledge of God
and its account of God entirely upon experience.
It has encountered God. It does not argue about
Godj it relates. It relates without any of those
wrappings of awe and reverence that fold so neces
sarily about imposture, it relates as one tells of a

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 21
friend and his assistance, of a happy adventure,
of a beautiful thing found and picked up by the
wayside. So far as its psychological phases go the new
account of personal salvation tallies very closely
with the account of "conversion" as it is given
by other religions. It has little to tell that is not
already familiar to the reader of William James's
" Varieties of Religious Experience." It describes
an initial state of distress with the aimlessness and
cruelties of life, and particularly with the futility
of the individual life, a state of helpless self-dis
gust, of inability to form any satisfactory plan of
living. This is the common prelude known to
many sorts of Christian as " conviction of sin " ;
it is, at any rate, a conviction nf hnpplpss confu
sion. . . . Then in some wayjtheidjea_pX^)djcom.es
intojth^_^isji^sse^jnmd,_at .first .simply. as an idea,
without substance or belief. It is read about or it
is remembered.; it is expounded by some teacher
or some__happy convert. In the case of all those
of the new faith with whose personal experience I
have any intimacy, the idea of God has remained
for some time simply as an idea floating about in
a mind still dissatisfied. God is not believed in,
but it is realised that if there were such a being he

22 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
would supply the needed consolation and direc
tion, his continuing purpose would knit together
the scattered effort of life, his immortality would
take the sting from death. Under this realisation
the idea is pursued and elaborated. For a time
there is a curious resistance to the suggestion that
God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably
by such phrases as the PurjjoggJu- Things, as the
Racial Consciousness, as the Collective Mind.
I believe that this resistance in so many con
temporary minds to the idea of God as a person
is due very largely to the enormous prejudice
against divine personality created by the absurdi
ties of the Christian teaching and the habitual mo
nopoly of the Christian idea. The picture of
Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself be
fore minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are
lambs. The cross in the twilight bars the way.
It is a novelty and an enormous relief to such peo
ple to realise that one may think of God without
being committed to think of either the Father, the
Son, or the Holy Ghost, or of all of them at once.
That freedom had not seemed possible to them.
They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea
that the Christian God is the only thinkable God.
They had heard so much about that God and so

COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION 23
little of any other. With that release their minds
become, as it were, nascent and ready for the com
ing of God.
Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time,
God comes.__This cardinal experience is an un-
doubting, immediate sense, of God. It is the at-N
tainment of an absolute certainty that one is not
alone in oneself. It is as if one was touched at/
every point by a being akin to oneself, sympathetic,'
beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in aim..
It is completer and more intimate, but itjs like
standing_side by side with jind touching someone
that we love very dearly and trust completely. It
is as if this being bridged a thousand misunder
standings and brought us into fellowship with a
great multitude of other people. . . .
" Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than '
hands and feet,"
The moment may come while we are alone in
the darkness, under the stars, or while we walk by
ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit and muse.
It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tu
mult of the battle. There is no saying when it may
not come to us. . . . But after it has come our
lives are changed, God is with us and there is no
more doubt of God. Thereafter one goes about the

24 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
world like one who was lonely and has found a
lover, like one who was perplexed and has found a
solution. One is assured that there is a Power that
fights with us against the confusion and evil within
us and without. There comes into the heart an
essential and enduring happiness and courage.
There is but one God, there is but one true reli
gious experience, but under a multitude of HaamgBT-
under veils and darknesses, God has in this man
ner come into countless lives. There is scarcely
a faith, however mean and preposterous, that has
not been a way to holiness. God who is himself
finite, who himself struggles in his great effort
from strength to strength, has no spite against er
ror. Far beyond halfway he hastens to meet the
purblind. But God is against the darkness in
their eyes. The faith which is returning to men
girds at veils and shadows, and would see God
plainly. It has little respect for mysteries. It
rends the veil of the temple in rags and tatters.
It has no superstitious fear of this huge friendli
ness, of this great brother and leader of our little
beings. To find God is but the beginning of wis
dom, because then for all our days we have to learn
his purpose with us and to live our lives with him.

CHAPTER THE SECOND
HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD
IS NOT
§ 1 Heresies are Misconceptions of God
Religion is not a plant that has grown from one
seed; it is like a lake that has been fed by count
less springs. It is a great pool of living water,
mingled from many sources and tainted with much
impurity. It is synthetic in its nature ; it becomes
simpler from original complexities; the sediment
subsides. A Jife_ perfectly adjusted to its surroundings is
a life without mentality ; no judgment is called"! or,
no inhibition,' no disturbance of the instinctive flow
of perfect reactions. Such a life is bliss, or nir
vana. It is unconsciousness below dreaming.
Consciousness is discord evoking the will to adjust;
it is inseparable from need. At every need con
sciousness breaks into being. Imperfect adjust
ments, needs, are the rents and tatters in the
smooth dark veil of being through which the light

26 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
of consciousness shines — the light of conscious
ness and will of which God is the sun.
So that every need of human life, every disap
pointment and dissatisfaction and call for help and
effort, is a means whereby men may and do come
to the realisation of God.
There is no cardinal need, there is no sort of
experience in human life from which there does not
come or has not come a contribution to men's re
ligious ideas. At every challenge men have to put
forth effort, feel doubt of adequacy, be thwarted,
perceive the chill shadow of their mortality. At
every challenge comes the possibility of help from
without, the idea of eluding frustration, the as
piration towards immortality. It is possible to
classify the appeals men make for God under the
headings of their chief system of effort, their ef
forts to understand, their fear and their struggles
for safety and happiness, the craving of their rest
lessness for peace, their angers against disorder
and their desire for the avenger; their sexual pas
sions and perplexities. . . .
Each of these great systems of needs and efforts
brings its own sort of sediment into religion.
Each, that is to say, has its own kind of heresy,
its distinctive misapprehension of God. It is only

HERESIES 27
in the synthesis and mutual correction of many
divergent ideas that the idea of God grows clear.
The effort to understand completely, for example,
leads to the endless Heresies of Theory. Men trip
over the inherent infirmities of the human mind.
But in these days one does not argue greatly about
dogma. Almost every conceivable error about
unity, about personality, about time and quantity
and genus and species, about begetting and begin
ning and limitation and similarity and every kink
in the difficult mind of man, has been thrust for
ward in some form of dogma. Beside the errors of
thought are the errors of emotion. Fear and
feebleness go straight to the Heresies that God is
Magic or that God is Providence; restless egotism
at leisure and unchallenged by urgent elementary
realities breeds the Heresies of Mysticism, anger
and hate call for God's Judgments, and the stormy
emotions of sex gave mankind the Phallic God.
Those who find themselves possessed by the new
spirit in religion, realise very speedily the necessity
of clearing the mind of all these exaggerations,
¦ transferences, and overflows of feeling. The, search
for divine truth is like gold washing ; nothing is of
any value until most has been swept away.

28 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
§ 2 Heresies of Speculation
One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest.
It is infinitely the most various sort. It includes
all those heresies which result from wrong-headed
mental elaboration, as distinguished from those
which are the result of hasty and imperfect appre
hension, the heresies of the clever rather than the
heresies of the obtuse. The former are of endless
Variety and complexity; the latter are in compari
son natural, simple confusions. The former are
the errors of the study, the latter the superstitions
that spring by the wayside, or are brought down
to us in our social structure out of a barbaric past.
To the heresies of thought and speculation belong
the elaborate doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about
God's absolute qualities, such odd deductions as
the accepted Christian teachings about the virginity
of Mary and Joseph, and the like. All these things
are parts of orthodox Christianity. Yet none of
them did Christ, even by the Christian account, ex
pound or recommend. He treated them as negli
gible. It was left for the Alexandrians, for Alex
ander, for little, red-haired, busy, wire-pulling Ath
anasius to find out exactly what their Master was
driving at, three centuries after their Master was
dead. . . .

HERESIES 29
Men still sit at little desks remote from God or
life, and rack their inadequate brains to meet fan
cied difficulties and state unnecessary perfections.
They seek God by logic, ignoring the marginal er
ror that creeps into every syllogism. Their conceit
blinds them to the limitations upon their thinking.
They weave spider-like webs of muddle and dispu
tation across the path by which men come to God.
It would not matter very much if it were not that
simpler souls are caught in these webs. Every
great religious system in the world is choked by
such webs; each system has its own. Of all the
blood-stained tangled heresies which make up doc
trinal Christianity and imprison the mind of the
western world to-day, not one seems to have been
known to the nominal founder of Christianity.
Jesus Christ never certainly claimed to be the Mes
siah; never spoke clearly of the Trinity; was vague
upon the scheme of salvation and the significance
of his martyrdom. We are asked to suppose that
he left his apostles without instructions that were
necessary to their eternal happiness, that he could
give them the Lord's Prayer but leave them to
guess at the all-important Creed,1 and that the
i Even the " Apostles' Creed " is not traceable earlier than the
fourth century. It is manifestly an old, patched formulary.
Rufinius explains that it was not written down for a long time,

30 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
Church staggered along blindly, putting its foot in
and out of damnation, until the " experts " of Ni
csea, that " garland of priests," marshalled by Con
stantine's officials, came to its rescue. . . . From
the conversion of Paul onward, the heresies of the
intellect multiplied about Christ's memory and hid
him from the sight of men. We are no longer clear
about the doctrine he taught nor about the things
he said and did. . . .
We are all so weary of this theology of the Chris
tians, we are all at heart so sceptical about their
Triune God, that it is needless here to spend any
time or space upon the twenty thousand different
formulae in which the orthodox have attempted to
believe in something of the sort. There are several
useful encyclopaedias of sects and heresies,- compact,
but still bulky, to which the curious may go. There
are ten thousand different expositions of orthodoxy.
No one who really seeks God thinks of the Trinity,
either the Trinity of the Trinitarian or the Trinity
of the Sabellian or the Trinity of the Arian, any
more than one thinks of those theories made stone,
those gods with three heads and seven hands, who
sit on lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what
but transmitted orally, kept secret, and used as a sort of pass
word among the elect.

HERESIES 31
not, in the temples of India. Let us leave, there
fore, these morbid elaborations of the human in
telligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the
natural heresies that spring from fundamental
weaknesses of the human character, and which are
common to all religions. Against these it is neces
sary to keep constant watch. They return very
insidiously. § 3 God is not Magic
One of the most universal of these natural mis
conceptions of God is to consider him as something
magic serving the ends of men.
It is not easy for us to grasp at first the full mean
ing of giving our souls to God. The missionary
and teacher of any creed is all too apt to hawk God
for what he will fetch ; he is greedy for the poor
triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about
that many people who have been led to believe them
selves religious, are in reality still keeping back
their own souls and trying to use God for their own
purposes. God is nothing more for them as yet
than a magnificent Fetish. They did not really
want him, but they have heard that he is potent
stuff; their unripe souls think to make use of him.
They call upon his name, they do certain things that

32 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
are supposed to be peculiarly influential with him,
such as saying prayers and repeating gross praises
of him, or reading in a blind, industrious way that
strange miscellany of Jewish and early Christian
literature, the Bible, and suchlike mental mortifi
cation, or making the Sabbath dull and uncomfort
able. In return for these fetishistic propitiations
God is supposed to interfere with the normal course
of causation in their favour. He becomes a celes
tial log-roller. He remedies unfavourable acci
dents, cures petty ailments, contrives unexpected
gifts of medicine, money, or the like, he averts
bankruptcies, arranges profitable transactions, and
does a thousand such services for his little clique
of faithful people. The pious are represented as
being constantly delighted by these little surprises,
these bouquets and chocolate boxes from the divin
ity. Or contrawise he contrives spiteful turns for
those who fail in their religious attentions. He
murders Sabbath-breaking children, or disorgan
ises the careful business schemes of the ungodly.
He is represented as going Sabbath-breakering on
Sunday morning as a Staffordshire worker goes
ratting. Ordinary everyday Christianity is satur
ated with this fetishistic conception of God. It
may be disowned in The Hibbert Journal, but it is

HERESIES 33
unblushingly advocated in the parish magazine.
It is an idea taken over by Christianity with the
rest of the qualities of the Hebrew God. It is
natural enough in minds so self-centred that their
recognition of weakness and need brings with it no
real self-surrender, but it is entirely inconsistent
with the modern conception of the true God.
There has dropped upon the table as I write a
modest periodical called The Northern British
Israel Review, illustrated with portraits of various
clergymen of the Church of England, and of ladies
and gentlemen who belong to the little school of
thought which this magazine represents; it is, I
should judge, a sub-sect entirely within the Estab
lished Church of England, that is to say within the
Anglican communion of the Trinitarian Christians.
It contains among other papers a very entertaining
summary by a gentleman entitled — I cite the un
usual title-page of the periodical — "Landseer
Mackenzie, Esq.," of the views of Isaiah, Ezekiel,
and Obadiah upon the Kaiser William. They are
distinctly hostile views. Mr. Landseer Mackenzie
discourses not only upon these anticipatory con
demnations but also upon the relations of the
weather to this war. He is convinced quite simply
and honestly that God has been persistently rigging

34 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
the weather against the Germans. He points out
that the absence of mist on the North Sea was of
great help to the British in the autumn of 1914, and
declares that it was the wet state of the country that
really held up the Germans in Flanders in the win
ter of 1914-15. He ignores the part played by the
weather in delaying the relief of Kut-el-Amara, and
he has not thought of the difficult question why the
Deity, having once decided upon intervention, did
not, instead of this comparatively trivial meteoro
logical assistance, adopt the more effective course
of, for example, exploding or spoiling the German
stores of ammunition by some simple atomic mir
acle, or misdirecting their gunfire by a sudden local
modification of the laws of refraction or gravita
tion. . . .
Since these views of God come from Anglican
vicarages I can only conclude that this kind of be
lief is quite orthodox and permissible in the es
tablished church, and that I am charging orthodox
Christianity here with nothing that has ever been
officially repudiated. I find indeed the essential
assumptions of Mr. Landseer Mackenzie repeated in
endless official Christian utterances on the part of
German and British and Russian divines. The
Bishop of Chelmsford, for example, has recently as-

HERESIES 35
cribed our difficulties in the war to our impatience
with long sermons — among other similar causes.
Such Christians are manifestly convinced that God
can be invoked by ritual — for example by special
days of national prayer or an increased observance
of Sunday — or made malignant by neglect or lev
ity. It is almost fundamental in their idea of him.
The ordinary Mohammedan seems as confident of
this magic pettiness of God, and the belief of China
in the magic propitiations and resentments of
" Heaven " is at least equally strong.
But the true God as those of the new religion
know him is no such God of luck and intervention.
He is not to serve men's "ends or the ends of nations
or associations of men; he is careless of our cere
monies and invocations. He does not lose his tem
per with our follies and weaknesses. It is for us
to serve Him. He captains us, he does not coddle
us. He has his own ends for which he needs
us. . . . § 4 God is not Providence
Closely related to this heresy that God is magic,
is the heresy that calls him Providence, that de
clares the apparent adequacy of cause and effect to
be a sham, and that all the time, incalculably, he is

36 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
pulling about the order of events for our personal
advantages. The idea of Providence was very gaily travested
by Daudet in " Tartarin in the Alps." You will
remember how Tartarin's friend assured him that
all Switzerland was one great Trust, intent upon
attracting tourists and far too wise and kind to
permit them to venture into real danger, that all
the precipices were netted invisibly, and all the
loose rocks guarded against falling, that avalanches
were prearranged spectacles and the crevasses at
their worst slippery ways down into kindly catch
ment bags. If the mountaineer tried to get into
real danger he was turned back by specious excuses.
Inspired by this persuasion Tartarin behaved with
incredible daring. . . . That is exactly the Provi
dence theory of the whole world. There can be no
doubt that it does enable many a timid soul to get
through life with a certain recklessness. And pro
vided there is no slip into a crevasse, the Providence
theory works well. It would work altogether well
if there were no crevasses.
Tartarin was reckless because of his faith in
Providence, and escaped. But what would have
happened to him if he had fallen into a crevasse?
There exists a very touching and remarkable

HERESIES 37
book by Sir Francis Younghusband called
"Within."1 It is the confession of a man who
lived with a complete confidence in Providence
until he was already well advanced in years.
He went through battles and campaigns, he filled
positions of great honour and responsibility, he
saw much of the life of men, without altogether
losing his faith. The loss of a child, an Indian
famine, could shake it but not overthrow it. Then
coming back one day from some races in France,
he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt
very cruelly. He suffered terribly in body and
mind. His sufferings caused much suffering to
others. He did his utmost to see the hand of a
loving Providence in his and their disaster and the
torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling
honesty and a fine essential simplicity of mind, he
confessed at last that he could not do so. His con
fidence in the benevolent intervention of God was
altogether destroyed. His book tells of this shat
tering, and how labouriously he reconstructed his
religion upon less confident lines. It is a book
typical of an age and of a very English sort of
mind, a book well worth reading.
That he came to a full sense of the true God can-
i Williams and Norgate, 1912.

38 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
not be asserted, but how near he came to God, let
one quotation witness.
" The existence of an outside Providence," he writes,
" who created us, who watches over us, and who guides
our lives like a Merciful Father, we have found impos
sible longer to believe in. But of the existence of a
Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate be
ings, and finding its fullest expression, in man in love,
and in the flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of
anything in the world. This fiery spiritual impulsion
at the centre and the source of things, ever burning in
us, is the supremely important factor in our existence.
It does not always attain to light. In many directions
it fails; the conditions are too hard and it is utterly
blocked. In others it only partially succeeds. But in a
few it bursts forth into radiant light. There are few
who in some heavenly moment of their lives have not
been conscious of its presence. "We may not be able to
give it outward expression, but we know that it. is
there." . . .
God does not guide our feet. He is no sedulous
governess restraining and correcting the wayward
steps of men. If you would fly into the air, there
is no God to bank your aeroplane correctly for you
or keep an ill-tended engine going; if you would
cross a glacier, no God nor angel guides your steps
amidst the slippery places. He will not even mind
your innocent children for you if you leave them

HERESIES ' 39
before an unguarded fire. Cherish no delusions;
for yourself and others you challenge danger and
chance on your own strength ; no talisman, no God,
can help you or those you care for. Nothing of
such things will God do ; it is an idle dream. 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 count
less 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.
§ 5 The Heresy of Quietism
God comes to us within and takes us for his own.
He releases us from ourselves; he incorporates us
with his own undying experience and adventure;
he receives us and gives himself. He is a stimu
lant; he makes us live immortally and more abun
dantly. I have compared him to the sensation of
a dear, strong friend who comes and stands quietly
beside one, shoulder to shoulder.
The finding of God is the beginning of service.
It is not an escape from life and action; it is the

40 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
release of life and action from the prison of the
mortal self. Not to realise that, is the heresy of
Quietism, of many mystics. Commonly such peo
ple are people of some wealth, able to command
services for all their everyday needs. They make
religion a method of indolence. They turn their
backs on the toil and stresses of existence and give
themselves up to a delicious reverie in which they
flirt with the divinity. They will recount their
privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and
wonderfully God has tried and proved them. But
indeed the true God was not the lover of Madame
Guyon. The true God is not a spiritual troubadour
wooing the hearts of men and women to no pur
pose. The true God goes through the world like
fifes and drums and flags, calling for recruits
along the street. We must go out%to him. We
must accept his discipline and fight his battle. The
peace of God comes not by thinking about it but
by forgetting oneself in him.
§ 6 God does not Punish
Man is a social animal, and there is in him a
great faculty for moral indignation. Many of the
early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear. They were
more often " wrath " than not. Such was the tern-

HERESIES 41
perament of the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew
Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps under the influence
of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian
Trinity and who became also the Moslem God.1
The natural hatred of unregenerate men against
everything that is unlike themselves, against
strange people and cheerful people, against unfa
miliar usages and things they do not understand,
embodied itself in this conception of a malignant
and partisan Deity, perpetually "upset" by the
little things people did, and contriving murder and
vengeance. Now this God would be drowning
everybody in the world, now he would be burning
Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting
his congenial Israelites to the most terrific pog
roms. This divine " f rightfulness " is of course
the natural human dislike and distrust for queer
lit is not so generally understood as it should be among
English and American readers that a very large proportion of
early Christians before the creeds established and regularised
the doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely that Jehovah
was God ; they regarded Christ as a rebel against Jehovah
and a rescuer of humanity from him, just as Prometheus
was a rebel against Jove. These beliefs survived for a thou
sand years throughout Christendom ; they were held by a great
multitude of persecuted sects, from the Albigenses and Cathars
to the eastern Paulicians. The catholic church found it nec
essary to prohibit the circulation of the Old Testament among
laymen very largely on account of the polemics of the Cathars
against the Hebrew God. But in this book, be it noted, the
word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to
indicate only the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.

42 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike
reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape in us,
liberating the latent fierceness of the ape in us, giv
ing it an excuse and pressing permission upon it,
handing the thing hated and feared over to its sec
ular arm. ...
It is a human paradox that the desire for seem-
liness, the instinct for restraints and fair disci
plines;, and the impulse to cherish sweet familiar
things, that these things of the True God should
so readily liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like
a woman going with a light to tend and protect her
sleeping child, and setting the house on fire. None
the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of God
the Revengeful, God the Persecutor and Avenger,
haunts religion. It is only in quite recent years
that the growing gentleness of everyday life has
begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less
tolerant and gentle than themselves. The recent
literature of the Anglicans abounds in the evidence
of this trouble.
Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and con
demned in 1863 for denying the irascibility of his
God and teaching " the Kaffirs of Natal " the dan
gerous heresy that God is all mercy. " We cannot
allow it to be said," the Dean of Cape Town in-

HERESIES 43
sisted, " that God was not angry and was not ap
peased by punishment." He was angry "on ac
count of Sin, which is a great evil and a great in
sult to His Majesty." The case of the Rev. Charles
Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a second as
sertion of the Church's insistence upon the fierce
ness of her God. This case is not to be found in
the ordinary church histories nor is it even men
tioned in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica; nevertheless it appears to have been a
very illuminating case. It is doubtful if the church
would prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso
or Mr. Voysey to-day.
§ 7 God and the Nursery-maid
Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger,
is that kind of miniature God the Avenger, to whom
the nursery-maid and the overtaxed parent are so
apt to appeal. You stab your children with such
a God and he poisons all their lives. For many of
us the word " God " first came into our lives to
denote a wanton, irrational restraint, as Bogey, as
the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye. God
Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid
who wants to leave Fear to mind her charges and
enforce her disciplines, while she goes off upon her

44 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
own aims. But indeed, the teaching of God Bogey
is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less
dreadful than an indecent assault. The reason
rebels and is crushed under this horrible and pur
suing suggestion. Many minds never rise again
from their injury. They remain for the rest of life
spiritually crippled and debased, haunted by a fear,
stained with a persuasion of relentless cruelty in
the ultimate cause of all things.
I, who write, was so set against God, thus ren
dered. He and his Hell were the nightmare of my
childhood; I hated him while I still believed in
him, and who could help but hate? I thought of
him as a fantastic monster, perpetually spying,
perpetually listening, perpetually waiting to con
demn and to " strike me dead " ; his flames as ready
as a grill-room fire. He was over me and about
my feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the
sky and sea would be about a child drowning in
mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a child of
thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung
this Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until
I came to see that God himself had done this thing
for me, the name of God meant nothing to me but
the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon
had been.

HERESIES 45
I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and
mental cripples with this bogey God of the nursery
maid, with his black, insane revenges, .still living
like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place
where God should be. They are afraid, afraid,
afraid; they dare not be kindly to formal sinners,
they dare not abandon a hundred foolish observ
ances ; they dare not look at the causes of things.
They are afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health,
of adventure, of science, lest that old watching
spider take offence. The voice of the true God
whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writ
ing, but they avert themselves, fear-driven. For
the true God has no lash of fear. And how the
foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven face, his
greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his bel-
lowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest
of fear the ignorant cunning of the nursery girl
has sown for him! How he loves the importance
of denunciation, and, himself a malignant cripple,
to rally the company of these crippled souls to per
secute and destroy the happy children of God ! . . .
Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to
children. There is a real wickedness of the priest
that is different from other wickedness, and that
affects a- reasonable mind just as cruelty and strange

46 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
perversions of instinct affect it. Let a former
Archbishop of Canterbury speak for me. This that
follows is the account given by Archbishop Tait
in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation
(July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a
certain Society of the Holy Cross :
"I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant
for the instruction of very young children. I find, in
one of the pages of it, the statement that between the
ages of six and six and a half years would be the proper
time for the inculcation of the teaching which is to he
found in the book. Now, six to six and a half is cer
tainly a very tender age, and to these children I find
these statements addressed in the book:
" ' It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child
must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should for
give him.'
"I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or
however many there were, did not exactly realise what
they were writing ; that they did not mean to say that a
child was not to confess its sins to God direct; that it
was not to confess its sins, at the age of six, to its
mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse
to the priest. But the words, to say the least of them,
are rash. Then comes the very obvious question :
'"Do you know why? It is because God, when he was on
earth, gave to his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power
of forgiving men their sins. It was to priests alone that Jesus
said : " Receive ye the Holy Ghost." . . . Those who will not

HERESIES 47
confess will not be cured. Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts
souls into hell.'
"That is addressed to a child six years of age.
."8I have known,' the book continues, 'poor children who
concealed their sins in confession for years ; they were very
unhappy, were tormented with remorse, and if they had died
in that state they would certainly have gone to the everlasting
fires of hell.' "...
Now here is something against nature, some
thing that I have seen time after time in the faces
and bearing of priests and heard in their preaching.
It is a distinct lust. Much nobility and devotion
there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly
lives, lives of real worship, lives no man may better ;
this that I write is not of all, perhaps not of many
priests. But there has been in all ages that have
known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest ;
priestcraft and priestly power release an aggres
sive and narrow disposition to a recklessness of
suffering and a hatred of liberty that surely ex
ceeds the badness of any other sort of men.
§ 8 The Children's God
Children do not naturally love God. They have
no great capacity for an idea so subtle and mature
as the idea of God. While they are still children
in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy

48 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
for them to feel any great need of God. All things
are still something God-like. ¦. . .
The true God, our modern minds insist upon
believing, can have no appetite for unnatural
praise and adoration. He does not clamour for
the attention of children. He is not like one of
those senile uncles who dream of glory in the nurs
ery, who love to hear it said, " The children adore
him." If children are loved and trained to truth,
justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready
for the true God as their needs bring them within
his scope. They should be left to their innocence,
and to their trust in the innocence of the world, as
long as they can be. They should be told only of
God as a Great Friend whom some day they will
need more and understand and know better. That
is as much as most children need. The phrases of
religion put too early into their mouths may be
come a cant, something worse than blasphemy.
Yet children are sometimes very near to God.
Creative passion stirs in their play. At times they
display a divine simplicity. But it does not follow
that therefore they should be afflicted with theolog
ical formulas or inducted into ceremonies and rites
that they may dislike or misinterpret. If by any
accident, by the death of a friend or a distressing

HERESIES 49
story, the thought of death afflicts a child, then he
may begin to hear of God, who takes those that
serve him out of their slain bodies into his shining
immortality. Or if by some menial treachery,
through some prowling priest, the whisper of Old
Bogey reaches our children, then we may set their
minds at ease by the assurance of his limitless char
ity 
With adolescence comes the desire for God and to
know more of God, and that is the most suitable
time for religious talk and teaching.
§ 9 God is not Sexual
In the last two or three hundred years there has
been a very considerable disentanglement of the
idea of God from the complex of sexual thought
and feeling. But in the early days of religion the
two things were inseparably bound together; the
fury of the Hebrew prophets, for example, is con
tinually proclaiming the extraordinary " wrath "
of their God at this or that little dirtiness or irregu
larity or breach of the sexual tabus. The cere
mony of circumcision is clearly indicative of the
original nature of the Semitic deity who developed
into the Trinitarian God. So far as Christianity
dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed

50 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
the old associations. But to this day the repre
sentative Christian churches still make marriage
into a mystical sacrament, and, with some excep
tions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice
of celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the
mischievousness and maliciousness that so often
ensue. Nearly every Christian church inflicts as
much discredit and injustice as it can contrive
upon the illegitimate child. They do not treat
illegitimate children as unfortunate children, but
as children with a mystical and an incurable taint
of sin. Kindly easy-going Christians may resent
this statement because it does not tally with their
own attitudes, but let them consult their orthodox
authorities. One must distinguish clearly here between what
is held to be sacred or sinful in itself and what is
held to be one's duty or a nation's duty because it
is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best thing
to do. By the latter tests and reasonable argu-
ments most or all of our institutions regulating
the relations of the sexes may be justifiable. But
my case is not whether they can be justified by these
tests but that it is not by these tests that they are
judged even to-day, by the professors of the chief
religions of the world. It is the temper and not

HERESIES 51
the conclusions of the religious bodies that I would
criticise. These sexual questions are guarded by
a holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are
made — with a sense of complete righteousness —
to prohibit their discussion. That fury about sex
ual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis
that the Christian God remains a sex God in the
minds of great numbers of his exponents. His
disentanglement from that plexus is incomplete.
Sexual things are still to the orthodox Christian,
sacred things.
Now the God whom those of the new faith are
finding is only mediately concerned with the rela
tions of men and women. He is no more sexual
essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hy
gienic. The God of Leviticus was all these things.
He is represented as prescribing the most petty and
intimate of observances — many of which are now
habitually disregarded by the Christians who pro
fess him. ... It is part, of the evolution of the idea
of God that we have now so largely disentangled
our conception of him from the dietary and regi
men and meticulous sexual rules that were once
inseparably bound up with his majesty. Christ
himself was one of the chief forces in this disen
tanglement, there is the clearest evidence in several

52 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
instances of his disregard of the rule and his in
sistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit
underlying and often masked by the rule. His
Church, being made of baser matter, has followed
him as reluctantly as possible and no further than
it was obliged. But it has followed him far enough
to admit his principle that in all these matters
there is no need for superstitious fear, that the in
terpretation of the divine purpose is left to the un
embarrassed intelligence of men. The church has
followed him far enough to make the harsh threat
enings of priests and ecclesiastics against what
they are pleased to consider impurity or sexual im
piety, a profound inconsistency. One seems to
hear their distant protests when one reads of
Christ and the Magdalen, or of Christ eating with
publicans and sinners. The clergy of our own
days play the part of the New Testament Pharisees
with the utmost exactness and complete uncon
sciousness. One cannot imagine a modern ecclesi
astic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of or
dinary civility, unless she was in a very high social
position indeed, or blending with disreputable char
acters without a dramatic sense of condescension
and much explanatory by-play. Those who pro
fess modern religion do but follow in these matters

HERESIES 53
a course entirely compatible with what has sur
vived of the authentic teachings of Christ, when
they declare that God is not sexual, and that re
ligious passion and insult and persecution upon the
score of sexual things are a barbaric inheritance.
But lest anyone should fling off here with some
hasty assumption that those who profess the re
ligion of the true God are sexually anarchistic, let
stress be laid at once upon the opening sentence
of the preceding paragraph, and let me a little an
ticipate a section which follows. We would free
men and women from exact and superstitious rules
and observances, not to make them less the instru
ments of God but more wholly his. The claim of
modern religion is that one should give oneself un
reservedly to God, that there is no other salvation.
The believer owes all his being and every mo
ment of his life to God, to keep mind and body as
clean, fine, wholesome, active and completely at
God's service as he can. There is no scope for in
dulgence or dissipation in such a consecrated life.
It is a matter between the individual and his con
science or his doctor or his social understanding
what exactly he may do or not do, what he may eat
or drink or so forth, upon any occasion. Nothing
can exonerate him from doing his utmost to deter-

54 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
mine and perform the right act. Nothing can ex
cuse his failure to do so. But what is here being
insisted upon is that none of these things has im
mediately to do with God or religious emotion, ex
cept only the general will to do right in God's
service. The detailed interpretation of that
"right" is for the dispassionate consideration of
the human intelligence.
All this is set down here as distinctly as pos
sible. Because of the emotional reservoirs of sex,
sexual dogmas are among the most obstinately re
current of all heresies, and sexual excitement is al
ways tending to leak back into religious feeling.
Amongst the sex-tormented priesthood of the Ro
man communion in particular, ignorant of the ex
treme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic
cult and suchlike predecessors of Christianity,
there seems to be an extraordinary belief that
chastity was not invented until Christianity came,
and that the religious life is largely the propitiation
of God by feats of sexual abstinence. But a super
stitious abstinence that scars and embitters the
mind, distorts the imagination, makes the body
gross and keeps it unclean, is just as offensive to
God as any positive depravity.

CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE LIKENESS OF GOD
§ 1 God is Courage
Now having set down what those who profess the
new religion regard as the chief misconceptions of
God, having put these systems of ideas aside from
our explanations, the path is cleared for the state
ment of what God is. Since language springs
entirely from material, spatial things, there is
always an element of metaphor in theological state
ment. So that I have not called this chapter the
Nature of God, but the Likeness of God.
And firstly, God is Courage.
§ 2 God is a- Person
And next God is a Person.
Upon this point those who are beginning to pro
fess modern religion are very insistent. It is, they
declare, the central article, the axis, of their re
ligion. God is a person who can be known as one
knows a friend, who can be served and who receives
service, who partakes of our nature; who is, like
55

56 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
us, a being in conflict with the unknown and the
limitless and the forces of death ; who values much
that we value and is against much that we are pit
ted against. He is our king to whom we must be
loyal ; he is our captain, and to know him is to have
a direction in our lives. He feels us and knows us ;
he is helped and gladdened by us. He hopes and
attempts. . . . God is no abstraction nor trick of
words, no Infinite. He is as real as a bayonet
thrust or an embrace.
Now this is where those who have left the old
creeds and come asking about the new realisations
find their chief difficulty. They say, Show us this
person; let us hear him. (If they listen to the si
lences within, presently they will hear him. ) But
when one argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the
net of those ancient controversies between species
and individual, between the one and the many,
which arise out of the necessarily imperfect meth
ods of the human mind. Upon these matters there
has been much pregnant writing during the last
half century. Such ideas as this writer has to of
fer are to be found in a previous little book of his,
" First and Last Things," in which, writing as one
without authority or specialisation in logic and
philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly interested,

THE LIKENESS OF GOD 57
for others in a like case, he was at some pains to elu
cidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours,
this mind, by which we must seek and explain and
reach up to God. Suffice it here to say that theo
logical discussion may very easily become like the
vision of a man with cataract, a mere projection of
inherent imperfections. If we do not use our
phraseology with a certain courage, and take that of
those who are trying to convey their ideas to us with
a certain politeness and charity, there is no end pos
sible to any discussion in so subtle and intimate a
matter as theology but assertions, denials, and
wranglings. And about this word " person " it is
necessary to be as clear and explicit as possible,
though perfect clearness, a definition of mathe
matical sharpness, is by the very nature of the case •
impossible. Now when we speak of a person or an individual
we think typically of a man, and we forget that
he was once an embryo and will presently decay;
we forget that he came of two people and may be
get many, that he has forgotten much and will for
get more, that he can be confused, divided against
himself, delirious, drunken, drugged, or asleep. On
the contrary we are, in our hasty way of thinking
of him, apt to suppose him continuous, definite,

58 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
acting consistently and never forgetting. But only
abstract and theoretical persons are like that. We
couple with him the idea of a body. Indeed, in the
common use of the word " person " there is more
thought of body than of mind. We speak of a lover
possessing the person of his mistress. We speak of
offences against the person as opposed to insults,
libels, or offences against property. And the gods
of primitive men and the earlier civilisations were
quite of that quality of person. They were thought
of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting
consistently. If they were invisible in the ordi
nary world it was because they were aloof or be
cause their " persons " were too splendid for weak
human eyes. Moses was permitted a mitigated
view of the person of the Hebrew God on Mount
Horeb ; and Semele, who insisted upon seeing Zeus
in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was utterly
consumed. The early Islamic conception of God,
like the conception of most honest, simple Chris
tians to-day, was clearly, in spite of the theologians,
of a very exalted anthropomorphic personality away
somewhere in Heaven. The pergonal appearance
of the Christian God is described in The Revelation,
and however much that description may be ex
plained away by commentators as symbolical, it is

THE LIKENESS OF GOD 59
certainly taken by most straightforward believers
as a statement of concrete reality. Now if we are
going to insist upon this primary meaning of per
son and individual, then certainly God as he is now
conceived is not a person and not an individual.
The true God will never promenade an Eden or a
Heaven, nor sit upon a throne.
But current Christianity, modern developments
of Islam, much Indian theological thought — that,
for instance, which has found such delicate and
attractive expression in the devotional poetry of
Rabindranath Tagore — has long since abandoned
this anthropomorphic insistence upon a body.
From the earliest ages 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, ex
isting apart from the body and continuing after
the destruction of the body, and being still a person
and an individual. From this it is a small step to
the thought of a person existing independently of
any existing or pre-existing body. That is the idea
of theological Christianity, as distinguished from
the Christianity of simple faith. The Triune Per
sons — omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent —
exist for all time, superior to and independent of
matter. They are supremely disembodied. One

60 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
became incarnate — as a wind eddy might take up
a whirl of dust. . . . Those who profess modern
religion conceive that this is an excessive abstrac
tion of the idea of spirituality, a disembodiment of
the idea of personality beyond the limits of the
conceivable; nevertheless they accept the concep
tion that a person, a spiritual individual, may be
without an ordinary mortal body. . . . They de
clare that God is without any specific body, that
he is immaterial, that he can affect the material
universe — and that means that he can only reach
our sight, our hearing, our touch — through the
bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.
His nature is of the nature of thought and will.
Not only has he, in his essence, nothing to do with
matter, but nothing to do with space. He is not
of matter nor of space. He comes into them.
Since the period when all the great theologies that
prevail to-day were developed, there have been great
changes in the ideas of men towards the dimen
sions of time and space. We owe to Kant the re
lease from the rule of these ideas as essential ideas.
Our modern psychology is alive to the possibility
of Being that has no extension in space at all, even
as our speculative geometry can entertain the pos
sibility of dimensions — fourth, fifth, nth dimen-

THE LIKENESS OF GOD 61
sions — outside the three-dimensional universe of
our experience. And God being non-spatial is not
thereby banished to an infinite remoteness, but
brought nearer to us ; he is everywhere immediately
at hand, even as a fourth dimension would be every
where immediately at hand. He is a Being of the
minds and in the minds of men. He is in immedi
ate contact with all who apprehend him. . . .
But modern religion declares that though he
does not exist in matter or space, he exists in time
just as a current of thought may do ; that he changes
and becomes more even as a man's purpose gathers
itself together; that somewhere in the dawning of
mankind he had a beginning, .an awakening, and
that as mankind grows he grows. With our eyes
he looks out upon the universe he invades; with
our hands, he lays hands upon it. All our truth,
all our intentions and achievements, he gathers to
himself. He is the undying human memory, the
increasing human will.
But this, you may object, is no more than saying
that God is the collective mind and purpose of the
human race. You may declare 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 syn-

62 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
thesis. He is not merely the best of all of us, but
a Being in himself, composed of that but more than
that, as a temple is more than a gathering of stones,
or a regiment is more than an accumulation of
men. They point out that a man is made up of a
great multitude of cells, each equivalent to a uni
cellular organism. Not one of those cells is he,
nor is he simply just the addition of all of them.
He is more than all of them. You can take away
these and these and these, and he still remains.
And he can detach part of himself and treat it as
if it were not himself, just as a man may beat his
breast or, as Cranmer the martyr did, thrust his
hand into the flames. A man is none the less him
self because his hair is cut or his appendix removed
or his leg amputated.
And take another image. . . . Who bears affec
tion for this or that spadeful of mud in my garden?
Who cares a throb of the heart for all the tons of
chalk in Kent or all the lumps of limestone in
Yorkshire? But men love England, which is made
up of such things.
And so we think of God as a synthetic reality,
though he has neither body nor material parts.
And so too we may obey him and listen to him,
though we think but lightly of the men whose

THE LIKENESS OF GOD 63
hands or voices he sometimes uses. And we may
think of him as having moods and aspects — as a
man has — and a consistency we call his character.
These are theorisings about God. These are
statements to convey this modern idea of God.
This, we say, is the nature of the person whose will
and thoughts we serve. No one, however, who un
derstands the religious life seeks conversion by
argument. First one must feel the need of God,
then one must form or receive an acceptable idea
of God. That much is no more than turning one's
face to the east to see the coming of the sun. One
may still doubt if that direction is the east or
whether the sun will rise. The real coming of God
is not that. It is a change, an irradiation of the
mind. Everything is there as it was before, only
now it is aflame. Suddenly the light fills one's
eyes, and one knows that God has risen and that
doubt has fled for ever.
§ 3 God is Youth
The third thing to be told of the true God is that
God is Youth.
God, we hold, began and is always beginning.
He looks forever into the future.
Most of the old religions derive from a patriar-

64 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
chal phase. God is in those systems the Ancient
of Days. I know of no Christian attempt to repre
sent or symbolise God the Father which is not a
bearded, aged man. White hair, beard, bearing,
wrinkles, a hundred such symptoms of senile decay
are there. These marks of senility do not astonish
our modern minds in the picture of God, only be
cause tradition and usage have blinded our eyes
to the absurdity of a time-worn immortal. Jove
too and Wotan are figures far past the prime of
their vigour. These are gods after the ancient
habit of the human mind, that turned perpetually
backward for causes and reasons and saw all things
to come as no more than the working out of Fate, —
"Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe."
But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks
not to our past but our future, and if a figure may
represent him it must be the figure of a beautiful
youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to
his strength. He should stand lightly on his feet
in the morning time, eager to go forward, as though
he had but newly arisen to a day that was still but
a promise ; he should bear a sword, that clean, dis-

THE LIKENESS OF GOD 65
criminating weapon, his eyes should be as bright
as swords; his lips should fall apart with eagerness
for the great adventure before him, and he should
be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting the
rising sun. Death should still hang like mists and
cloud banks and shadows in the valleys of the wide
landscape about him. There should be dew upon
the threads of gossamer and little leaves and blades
of the turf at his feet. . . .
§ 4 When we say God is Love
One of the sayings about God that have grown
at the same time most trite and most sacred, is that
God is Love. This is a saying that deserves care
ful examination. Love is a word very loosely used ;
there are people who will say they love new pota
toes ; there are a multitude of loves of different col
ours and values. There is the love of a mother for
her child, there is the love of brothers, there is the
love of youth and maiden, and the love of husband
and wife, there is illicit love and the love one bears
one's home or one's country, there are dog-lovers
and the loves of the Olympians, and love which is
a passion of jealousy. Love is frequently a mere
blend of appetite and preference ; it may be almost
pure greed ; it may have scarcely any devotion nor

66 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
be a whit self-forgetful nor generous. It is pos
sible so to phrase things that the furtive craving
of a man for another man's wife may be made out
to be a light from God. Yet about all the better
sorts of love, the sorts of love that people will call
" true love," there is something of that same ex
altation out of the narrow self that is the essential
quality of the knowledge of God.
Only while the exaltation of the love passion
comes and goes, the exaltation of religious passion
comes to remain. Lovers are the windows by which
we may look out of the prison of self, but God is
the open door by which we freely, go. And God
never dies, nor disappoints, nor betrays.
The love of a woman and a man has usually, and
particularly in its earlier phases of excitement, far
too much desire, far too much possessiveness and
exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced trust,
and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like
the love of God. The former is a dramatic rela
tionship that drifts to a climax, and then again
seeks presently a climax, and that may be satiated
or fatigued. But the latter is far more like the
love of comrades, or like the love of a man and a
woman who have loved and been through much
trouble together, who have hurt one another and

THE LIKENESS OF GOD 67
forgiven, and come to a complete and generous
fellowship. There is a strange and beautiful love
that men tell of that will spring up on battlefields
between sorely wounded men, and often they are
men who have fought together, so that they will do
almost incredibly brave and tender things for one
another, though but recently they have been trying
to kill each other. There is often a pure exaltation
of feeling between those who stand side by side man
fully in any great stress. These are the forms of
love that perhaps come nearest to what we mean
when we speak of the love of God.
That is man's love of God, but there is also some
thing else; there is the love God bears for man in
the individual believer. Now this is not an indul
gent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love of
a woman for her baby. It is the love of the captain
for his men ; God must love his followers as a great
captain loves his men, who are so foolish, so help
less in themselves, so confiding, and yet 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. . . .
And God waits for us, for all of us who have the
quality to reach him. He has need of us as we of
him. He desires us and desires to make himself

68 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
known to us. When at last the individual breaks
through the limiting darknesses to him, the irra
diation of that moment, the smile and soul clasp,
is in God as well as in man. He has won us from
his enemy. We come staggering through into the
golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his king
dom henceforth, until at last we are altogether
taken up into his being.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS
§ 1 The Scientific Atheist
It is a curious thing that while most organised re
ligions seem to drape about and conceal and smother
the statement of the true God, the honest Atheist,
with his passionate impulse to strip the truth bare,
is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the di
vine likeness. It will be interesting here to call a
witness or so to the extreme instability of absolute
negation. Here, for example, is a deliverance from Pro
fessor Metchnikoff, who was a very typical antago
nist of all religion. He died only the other day.
He was a very great physiologist indeed ; he was a
man almost of the rank and quality of Pasteur or
Charles Darwin. A decade or more ago he wrote
a book called " The Nature of Man," in which he
set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts
about life. They are facts so illuminating that
presently, in our discussion of sin, they will be re
ferred to again. But it is not Professor Metchni-
69

70 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
koff's intention to provide material for a religious
discussion. He sets out his facts in order to over
throw theology as he conceives it. The remarkable
thing about his book, the thing upon which I would
now lay stress, is that he betrays no inkling of the
fact that he has no longer the right to conceive
theology as he conceives it. The development of
his science has destroyed that right.
He does not realise how profoundly modern
biology has affected our ideas of individuality and
species, and how the import of theology is modified
through these changes. When he comes from his
own world of modern biology to religion and philos
ophy he goes back in time. He attacks religion
as he understood it when first he fell out with it
fifty years or more ago.
Let us state as compactly as possible the nature
of these changes that biological science has wrought
almost imperceptibly in the general scheme and
method of our thinking.
The influence of biology upon thought in general
consists essentially in diminishing the importance
of the individual and developing the realisation of
the species, as if it were a kind of super-individual,
a modifying and immortal super-individual, main
taining itself against the outer universe by the birth

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 71
and death of its constituent individuals. Natural
History, which began by putting individuals into
species as if the latter were mere classiflcatory di
visions, has come to see that the species has its ad
ventures, its history and drama, far exceeding in
interest and importance the individual adventure.
" The Origin of Species " was for countless minds
the discovery of a new romance in life.
The contrast of the individual life and this spe
cific life may be stated plainly and compactly as
follows. A little while ago we current individuals,
we who are alive now, were each of us distributed
between two parents, then between four grand
parents, and so on backward, we are temporarily
assembled, as it were, out of an ancestral diffusion ;
we stand our trial, and presently our individuality
is dispersed and mixed again with other individu
alities in an uncertain multitude of descendants.
But the species is not like this ; it goes on steadily
from newness to newness, remaining still a unity.
The drama of the individual life is a mere episode,
beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing adven
ture of the species. And Metchnikoff finds most
of the trouble of life and the distresses of life in
the fact that the species is still very painfully ad
justing itself to the fluctuating conditions under

72 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
which it lives. The conflict of life is a continual
pursuit of adjustment, and the " ills of life," of the
individual life that is, are due to its " disharmon
ies." Man, acutely aware of himself as an indi
vidual adventure and unawakened to himself as a
species, finds life jangling and distressful, finds
death frustration. He fails and falls as a person
in what may be the success and triumph of his
kind. He dbes not apprehend the struggle or the
nature of victory, but only his own gravitation to
death and personal extinction.
Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and
he is anti-religious because to him as to so
many Europeans religion is confused with priest
craft and dogmas, is associated with disagreeable
early impressions of irrational repression and mis
guidance. How completely he misconceives the
quality of religion, how completely he sees it as
an individual's affair, his own words may witness :
"Religion is still occupied with the problem of death.
The solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be re
garded as satisfactory. A future life has no single argu
ment to support it, and the non-existence of life after
death is in consonance with the whole range of human
knowledge. On the other hand, resignation as preached
by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a
longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the
inevitability of death."

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 73
Now here it is clear that by death he means the
individual death, and by a future life the prolonga
tion of individuality. But Buddhism does not in
truth appear ever to have been concerned with that,
and modern religious developments are certainly
not under that preoccupation with the narrower
self. Buddhism indeed so far from "preaching
resignation " to death, seeks as its greater good a
death so complete as to be absolute release from the
individual's burthen of karma. Buddhism seeks
an escape from individual immortality. The deeper
one pursues religious thought the more nearly it
approximates to a search for escape from the self-
centred life and over-individuation, and the more it
diverges from Professor Metchnikoff's assertion of
its aims. Salvation. is.mdefid..to..,Iase„cd)ieis_s,elf.
But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied
that this is so, is then left free to take the very
essentials of the religious life as they are here con
ceived and present them as if they were the antithe
sis of the religious life. His book, when it is ana
lysed, resolves itself into just that research for an
escape from the painful accidents and chagrins of
individuation, which is the ultimate of religion.
At times, indeed, he seems almost wilfully blind
to the true solution round and about which his

74 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
writing goes. He suggests as his most hopeful sat
isfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such
a scientific prolongation of life that the instinct
for self-preservation will be at last extinct. If that
is not the very " resignation " he imputes to the
Buddhist I do not know what it is. He believes
that an individual which has lived fully and com
pletely may at last welcome death with the same
instinctive readiness as, in the days of its strength,
it shows for the embraces of its mate. We are to
be glutted by living to six score and ten. We are
to rise from the table at last as gladly as we sat
down. We shall go to death as unresistingly as
tired children go to bed. Men are to have a life far
beyond the range of what is now considered their
prime, and their last period (won by scientific
self-control) will be a period of ripe wisdom (from
seventy to eighty to a hundred and twenty or
thereabouts) and public service !
(But why, one asks, public service ? Why not
book-collecting or the simple pleasure of reminis
cence so dear to aged egotists ? Metchnikoff never
faces that question. And again, what of the man
who is challenged to die for right at the age of
thirty ? What does the prolongation of life do for
him ? And where are the consolations for acci-

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 75
dental misfortune, for the tormenting disease or the
lost limb?)
But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff
lapses into pure religiosity. The prolongation of
life gives place to sheer self-sacrifice as the funda
mental " remedy." And indeed what other rem
edy has ever been conceived for the general evil of
life? "On the other hand," he writes, "the knowledge that
the goal of human life can be attained only by the de
velopment of a high degree of solidarity amongst men
will restrain actual egotism. The mere fact that the
enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon
(Ecclesiastes ix. 7-10 )1 is opposed to the goal of human
life, will lessen luxury and the evil that comes from
luxury. Conviction that science alone is able to redress
the disharmonies of the human constitution will lead
directly to the improvement of education and to the
solidarity of mankind.
"In progress towards the goal, nature will have to
be consulted continuously. Already, in the case of the
ephemerids, nature has produced a complete cycle of
i Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with
a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy
garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.
Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the
life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all
the days of thy vanity for that is thy portion in this life, and
in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever
thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might ; for there is no
work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave,
whither thou goest.

76 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
normal life ending in natural death. In the problem
of his own fate, man must not be content with the gifts
of nature ; he must direct them by his own efforts. Just
as he has been able to modify the nature of animals and
plants, man must attempt to modify his own constitu
tion, so as to readjust its disharmonies. . . .
"To modify the human constitution, it will be neces
sary first, to frame the ideal, and thereafter to set to
work with all the resources of science.
"If there can be formed an ideal able to unite men
in a kind of religion of the future, this ideal must be
founded on scientific principles. And if it be true, as
has been asserted so often, that man can live by faith
alone, the faith must be in the power of science."
Now this, after all the flat repudiations that
have preceded it of " religion " and " philosophy "
as remedies for human ills, is nothing less than the
fundamental proposition of the religious life trans
lated into terms of materialistic science, the propo
sition that damnation is really over-individuation
and that salvation is escape from self into the larger
being of life. . . .
What can this "religion of the future" be but
that devotion to the racial adventure under the
captaincy of God which we have already found,
like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have
washed away the confusions and impurities of dog
matic religion? By an inquiry setting out from a

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 77
purely religious starting-point we have already
reached conclusions identical with this ultimate
refuge of an extreme materialist.
This altar to the Future of his, we can claim as
an altar to our God — an altar rather indistinctly
inscribed. § 2 Sacrifice Implies God
Almost all Agnostic and Atheistical writings that
show any fineness and generosity of spirit, have
this tendency to become as it were the statement
of an anonymous God. Everything is said that
a religious writer would say — except that God
is not named. Religious metaphors abound. It
is as if they accepted the living body of religion
but denied the bones that held it together — as they
might deny the bones of a friend. It is true, they
would admit, the body moves in a way that implies
bones in its every movement, but — we have never
seen those bones.
The disputes in theory — I do not say the dif
ference in reality — between the modern believer
and the atheist or agnostic — becomes at times al
most as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear
to students of physics, whether the scientific
" ether " is real or a formula. Every material phe-

78 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
nomenon is consonant with and helps to define this
ether, which permeates and. sustains and is all
things, which nevertheless is perceptible to no
sense, which is reached only by an intellectual proc
ess. Most minds are disposed to treat this ether
as a reality. But the acutely critical mind insists
that what is only so attainable by inference is not
real ; it is no more than " a formula that satisfies
all phenomena."
But if it comes to that, am I anything more than
the formula that satisfies all my forms of con
sciousness? Intellectually there is hardly anything more
than a certain will to believe, to divide the religious
man who knows God to be utterly real, from the
man who says that God is merely a formula to
satisfy moral and spiritual phenomena. The for
mer has encountered him, the other has as yet felt
only unassigned impulses. One says God's will is
so ; the other that Right is so. One says God moves
me to do this or that; the other the Good Will in
me which I share with you and all well-disposed
men, moves me to do this or that. But the former
makes an exterior reference and escapes a risk of
self -righteousness.
I have recently been reading a book by Mr. Jo-

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 79
seph McCabe called " The Tyranny of Shams," in
which he displays very typically this curious ten
dency to a sort of religion with God " blacked out."
His is an extremely interesting case. He is a
writer who was formerly a Roman Catholic priest,
and in his reaction from Catholicism he displays a
resolution even sterner than Professor Metchni-
koff's, to deny that anything religious or divine
can exist, that there can be any aim in life except
happiness, or any guide but " science." But —
and here immediately he turns east again — he is
careful not to say "individual happiness." And
he says " Pleasure is, as Epicureans insisted, only
a part of a large ideal of happiness." So he lets
the happiness of devotion and sacrifice creep in.
So he opens indefinite possibilities of getting away
from any merely materialistic rule of life. And he
writes :
"In every civilised nation the mass of the people are
inert and indifferent. Some even make a pretence of
justifying their inertness. Why, they ask, should we
stir at all? Is there such a thing as a duty to improve
the earth? What is the meaning or purpose of life?
Or has it a purpose?
"One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is
merely a piece of controversial athletics or a thin excuse
for idleness. People tell you that the conflict of science

80 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
and religion — it would be better to say, the conflict of
modern culture and ancient traditions — has robbed
life of its plain significance. The men who, like Tolstoi,
seriously urge this point fail to appreciate the modern
outlook on life. Certainly modern culture — science,
history, philosophy, and art — finds no purpose in life:
that is to say, no purpose eternally fixed and to be dis
covered by man. A great chemist said a few years ago
that he could imagine 'a series of lucky accidents' — the
chance blowing by the wind of certain chemicals into
pools on the primitive earth — accounting for the first
appearance of life ; and one might not unjustly sum up
the influences which have lifted those early germs to the
level of conscious beings as a similar series of lucky
accidents. "But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises
us. If there is no purpose impressed on the universe,
or prefixed to the development of humanity, it follows
only that humanity may choose its own purpose and set
up its own goal ; and the most elementary sense of order
will teach us that this choice must be social, not merely
individual. In whatever measure ill-controlled individ
uals may yield to personal impulses or attractions, the
aim of the race must be a collective aim. I do not mean
an austere demand of self-sacrifice from the individual,
but an adjustment — as genial and generous as possible
— of individual variations for common good. Other
wise life becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and
waste react on each individual. So we raise again, in
the twentieth century, the old question of 'the greatest
good,' which men discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the
suburban groves of Athens, in the cool atria of patrician

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 81
mansions on the Palatine and the Pincian, in the Museum
at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar Khayyam
frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle
Ages and the opulent chambers of Cosimo dei Medici."
And again :
"The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve
life, to bring happiness to as many minds of mortals as
we can reach, shines above all the mists of the day.
Through the ruins of creeds and philosophies, which
have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our steps
toward that height — just as the Athenians did two thou
sand years ago. It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred
legend, no disputable tradition — nothing that scepti
cism can corrode or advancing knowledge undermine.
Its foundations are the fundamental and unchanging
impulses of our nature. ' '
And again :
"The revolt which burns in so much of the abler
literature of our time is an unselfish revolt, or non-
selfish revolt : it is an outcome of that larger spirit which
conceives the self to be a part of the general social or
ganism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor altruistic.
It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an inspira
tion in the finer sentiments of our generation, but the
glow which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great
vision of a happier earth. It speaks of the claims of
truth and justice, and assails untruth and injustice, for
these are elemental principles of social life; but it ap
peals more confidently to the warmer sympathy which is
linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges

82 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
all to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the
creation of happiness. The advance guard of the race,
the men and women in whom mental alertness is asso
ciated with fine feeling, cry that they have reached
Pisgah's slope; and in increasing numbers men and
women are pressing on to see if it be really the Promised
Land." " Pisgah — the Promised Land ! " Mr. McCabe
in that passage sounds as if he were half-way to
" Oh ! Beulah Land ! " and the tambourine.
That " larger spirit," we maintain, is God ; those
"impulses" are the power of God, and Mr. Mc
Cabe serves a Master he denies. He has but to re
alise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune
God of the Catholic Church, and banish his intense
suspicion that he may yet be lured back to that
altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from that
preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to
realise the presence of Divinity.
§ 3 God is an External Reality
It may be argued that if atheists and agnostics
when they set themselves to express the good will
that is in them, do shape out God, that if their
conception of right living falls in so completely
with the conception of God's service as to be
broadly identical, then indeed God, like the ether of

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 83
scientific speculation, is no more than a theory, no
more than an imaginative externalisation of man's
inherent good will. Why trouble about God then?
Is not the declaration of a good disposition a suf
ficient evidence of salvation? What is the differ
ence between such benevolent unbelievers as Pro
fessor Metchnikoff or Mr. McCabe and those who
have found God?
The difference is this, that the benevolent atheist
stands alone upon his own good will, without a
reference, without a standard, trusting to his own
impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral
strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-
righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him;
incalculable temptations open like gulfs beneath
his feet. He has not really given himself or got
away from himself. He has no one^jto_whom he
can^giyeJhimself. He is still a masterless man.
His exaltation is self-centred, is priggishness, his
fall is unrestrained by any exterior obligation.
His devotion is only the good will in himself, a dis
position; it is a mood that may change. At any
moment it may change. He may have pledged him
self to his own pride and honour, but who will hold
him to his bargain? He has no source of strength
beyond his own amiable sentiments, his conscience

84 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
*
speaks with an unsupported voice, and no one
watches while he sleeps. He cannot pray; he can
but ejaculate. He has no real and living link with
other men of good will.
And those whose acquiescence in the idea of God
is merely intellectual are in no better case than
those who deny God altogether. They may have all
the forms of truth and not divinity. The religion
of the atheist with a God-shaped blank at its heart
and the persuasion of the unconverted theologian,
are both like lamps unlit. The lit lamp has no
difference in form from the lamp unlit. But the
lit lamp is alive and the lamp unlit is asleep or
dead. The difference between the unconverted and the
unbeliever and the servant of the true God is this ;
it is that the latter has experienced a complete turn
ing away from self. This only difference is all the
difference in the world. It is the realisation that
this goodness that I thought was within me and of
myself and upon which I rather prided myself, is
without me and above myself, and infinitely greater
and stronger than I. It is the immortal and I am
mortal. It is invincible and steadfast in its pur
pose, and I am weak and insecure. It is no longer
that I, out of my inherent and remarkable goodness,

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 85
out of the excellence of my quality and the benevo
lence of my heart, give a considerable amount of
time and attention to the happiness and welfare
of others — because I choose to do so. On the
contrary I have come under a divine imperative,
I am obeying an irresistible call, I am a humble
and willing servant of the righteousness of God.
That altruism which Professor Metchnikoff and
Mr. McCabe would have us regard as the goal and
refuge of a broad and free intelligence, is really the
first simple commandment in the religious life.
§ 4 Another Religious Materialist
Now here is a passage from a book, " Evolution and
the War," by Professor Metchnikoff's translator,
Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, which comes even closer
to our conception of God as an immortal being aris
ing out of man, and external to the individual man.
He has been discussing that well-known passage
of Kant's : " Two things fill my mind with ever-
renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper
I dwell on them — the starry vault above me, and
the moral law within me."
From that discussion, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell
presently comes to this most definite and interest
ing statement:

86 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
"Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a
lover of the scalpel and microscope, and of patient,
empirical observation, as one who dislikes all forms of
supernaturalism, and who does not shrink from the im
plications even of the phrase that thought is a secretion
of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert as
a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as ex
ternal to man as the starry vault. It has no secure seat
in any single man or in any single nation. It is the
work of the blood and tears of long generations of men.
It is not in man, inborn or innate, but is enshrined in
his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and his
religion. Its creation and sustenance are the crowning
glory of man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a
high place above the animal world. Men live and die;
nations rise and fall, but the struggle of individual lives
and of individual nations must be measured not by their
immediate needs, but as they tend to the debasement or
perfection of man's great achievement."
This is the same reality. This is the same Link
and Captain that this book asserts. It seems to
me a secondary matter whether we call Him
" Man's Great Achievement " or " The Son of Man "
or the " God of Mankind " or " God." So far as
the practical and moral ends of life are concerned,
it does not matter how we explain or refuse to ex
plain His presence in our lives.
There is but one possible gap left between the po
sition of Dr. Chalmers Mitchell and the position

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 87
of this book. In this book it is asserted that God
responds, that he gives courage and the power of
self-suppression to our weakness.
§ 5 A Note on a Lecture by Professor
Gilbert Murray
Let me now quote and discuss a very beautiful
passage from a lecture upon Stoicism by Professor
Gilbert Murray, which also displays the same char
acteristic of an involuntary shaping out of God in
the forms of denial. It is a passage remarkable
for its conscientious and resolute Agnosticism.
And it is remarkable too for its blindness to the
possibility of separating quite completely the idea
of the Infinite Being from the idea of God. It is
another striking instance of that obsession of mod
ern minds by merely Christian theology of which
I have already complained. Professor Murray has
quoted Mr. Bevan's phrase for God, " the Friend
behind phenomena," and he does not seem to rea-
Ii&e~tta1rthaTphrase carries with it no obligation
whatever to believe that this Friend is in control
of the phenomena. He assumes that he is sup
posed to be in control as if it were a matter of
course :

88 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
"We do seem to find," Professor Murray writes, "not
only in all religions, but in practically all philosophies,
some belief that man is not quite alone in the universe,
but is met in his endeavours towards the good by some
external help or sympathy. We find it everywhere in
the unsophisticated man. We find it in the unguarded
self-revelations of the most severe and conscientious
Atheists. Now, the Stoics, like many other schools of
thought, drew an argument from this consensus of all
mankind. It was not an absolute proof of the existence
of the Gods or Providence, but it was a strong indica
tion. The existence of a common instinctive belief in
the mind of man gives at least a presumption that there
must be a good cause for that belief.
"This is a reasonable position. There must be some
such cause. But it does not follow that the only valid
cause is the truth of the content of the belief. I cannot
help suspecting that this is precisely one of those points
on which Stoicism, in company with almost all philoso
phy up to the present time, has gone astray through not
sufficiently realising its dependence on the human mind
as a natural biological product. For it is very impor
tant in this matter to realise that the so-called belief is
not really an intellectual judgment so much as a craving
of the whole nature.
"It is only of very late years that psychologists have
begun to realise the enormous dominion of those forces
in man of which he is normally unconscious. We can
not escape as easily as these brave men dreamed from
the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold. In
deed, as I see philosophy after philosophy falling into
this unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena,

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 89
as I find that I myself cannot, except for a moment and
by an effort, refrain from making the same assumption,
it seems to me that perhaps here too we are under the
spell of a very old ineradicable instinct. We are gre
garious animals ; our ancestors have been such for count
less ages. We cannot help looking out on the world as
gregarious animals do; we see it in terms of humanity
and of fellowship. Students of animals under domesti
cation have shown us how the habits of a gregarious
creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thou
sand details by reference to the lost pack which is no
longer there — the pack which a dog tries to smell his
way back to all the time he is out walking, the pack he
calls to for help when danger threatens. It is a strange
and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious
animal for the herd of friends who are not there. And
it may be, it may very possibly be, that, in the matter
of this Friend behind phenomena our own yearning and
our own almost ineradicable instinctive conviction, since
they are certainly not founded on either reason or ob
servation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-souled
gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in
the great spaces between the stars.
"At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of."
There the passage and the lecture end.
I would urge that here again is an inadvertent
witness to the reality of God.
Professor Murray writes of gregarious animals
as though there existed solitary animals that are not
gregarious, pure individualists, "atheists" so to

90 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
speak, and as though this appeal to a life beyond
one's own was not the universal disposition of liv
ing things. His classical training disposes him to
a realistic exaggeration of individual difference.
But nearly every animal, and certainly every men
tally considerable animal, begins under parental
care, in a nest or a litter, mates to breed, and is
associated for much of its life. Even the great
carnivores do not go alone except when they are
old and have done with the most of life. Every
pack, every herd, begins at some point in a couple,
it is the equivalent of the tiger's litter if that were
to remain undispersed. And it is within the mem
ory of men still living that in many districts the
African lion has with a change of game and con
ditions lapsed from a " solitary " to a gregarious,
that is to say a prolonged family habit of life.
Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled
the other higher apes, is an animal becoming more
gregarious and not less. He has passed within the
historical period from a tribal gregariousness to
a nearly cosmopolitan tolerance. And he has his
tribe about him. He is not, as Professor Murray
seems to suggest, a solitary lost gregarious beast.
Why should his desire for God be regarded as the
overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 91
he has home, town, society, companionship, .trade
union, state, increasingly at hand to glut it? Why
should gregariousness drive a man to God rather
than to the third-class carriage and the public-
house? Why should gregariousness drive men out
of crowded Egyptian cities into the cells of the
Thebaid? Schopenhauer in a memorable passage
(about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth)
is flatly opposed to Professor Murray, and seems
far more plausible when he declares that the na
ture of man is insufficiently gregarious. The par
allel with the dog is not a valid one.
Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition
that it is not the Friend that is the instinctive de
lusion but the isolation? Is not the real deception,
our belief that we are completely individualised,
and is it not possible that this that Professor Mur
ray calls "instinct" is really not a vestige but a
new thing arising out of our increasing understand
ing, an intellectual penetration to that greater be
ing of the species, that vine, of which we are the
branches? Why should not the soul of the spe
cies, many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul
like our own?
Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff,
and in many other cases of atheism, it seems to me

92 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
that nothing but an inadequate understanding of
individuation bars the way to at least the intellec
tual recognition of the true God.
§ 6 Religion as Ethics
And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me
note certain recent interesting utterances of Sir
Harry Johnston's. You will note that while in
this book we use the word " God " to indicate the
God of the Heart, Sir Harry uses " God " for that
idea of God-of-the-Universe, which we have spoken
of as the Infinite Being. This use of the word
" God " is of late theological origin ; the original
identity of the words " good " and " god " and all
the stories of the gods are against him. But Sir
Harry takes up God only to define him away into
incomprehensible necessity. Thus:
"We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force
we call God; and, assuming such an intelligent ruling
force to be in existence, permeating this universe of
millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of millions of
planets, we do not know under what conditions and limi
tations It works. We are quite entitled to assume that
the end of such an influence is intended to be order out
of chaos, happiness and perfection out of incomplete
ness and misery; and we are entitled to identify the
reactionary forces of brute Nature with the anthropo
morphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of dark-

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 93
ness resisting the power of light. But in these con
jectures we must surely come to the conclusion that the
theoretical potency we call 'God' makes endless experi
ments, and scrap-heaps the failures. Think of the
Dinosaurs and the expenditure of creative energy that
went to their differentiation and their wellnigh incredi
ble physical development. . . .
"To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole
development and perfecting of life on this planet, the
whole production of man, may seem little more than to
any one of us would be the chipping out, the cutting,
the carving, and the polishing of a gem ; and we should
feel as little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and
fragments as must the Creative Force of the immeasur
ably vast universe feel for the disjecta membra of per
fected life on this planet. ..."
But thence he goes on to a curiously imperfect
treatment of the God of man as if he consisted in
nothing more than some vague sort of humanitari-
anism. Sir Harry's ideas are much less thor
oughly thought out than those of any other of these
sceptical writers I have quoted. On that ac
count they are perhaps more typical. He speaks
as though Christ were simply an eminent but ill-
reported and abominably served teacher of ethics
— and yet of the only right ideal and ethics. He
speaks as though religions were nothing more than
ethical movements, and as though Christianity

94 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
were merely someone remarking with a bright im
pulsiveness that everything was simply horrid,
and so, " Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal
axiom." He ignores altogether the fundamental
essential of religion, which is the development and
synthesis of the divergent and conflicting motives
of the unconverted life, and the identification of the
individual life with the immortal purpose of God.
He presents a conception of religion relieved of its
"nonsense" as the cheerful self-determination of
a number of bright little individuals (much stirred
but by no means overcome by Cosmic Pity) to the
Service of Man. As he seems to present it, it is as
outward a thing, it goes as little into the intimacy
of their lives, as though they had after proper
consideration agreed to send a subscription to a
Red Cross Ambulance or take part in a public
demonstration against the Armenian Massacres, or
do any other rather nice-spirited exterior thing.
This is what he says :
"I hope that the religion of the future will devote
itself wholly to the Service of Man. It can do so with
out departing from the Christian ideal and Christian
ethics. It need only drop all that is silly and disputable,
and 'mattering not neither here nor there,' of Christian
theology — a theology virtually absent from the direct
teaching of Christ — and all of Judaistic literature or

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS 95
prescriptions not made immortal in their application by
unassailable truth and by the confirmation of science.
An excellent remedy for the nonsense which still clings
about religion may be found in two books : Cotter Mori-
son 's 'Service of Man,' which was published as long ago
as 1887, and has since been re-issued by the Rationalist
Press Association in its well-known sixpenny series, and
J. Allanson Picton 's 'Man and the Bible.' Similarly,
those who wish to acquire a sane view of the relations
between man and God would do well to read Winwood
Reade's 'Martyrdom of Man.' "
Sir Harry in fact clears the ground for God very
ably, and then makes a well-meaning gesture in
the vacant space. There is no help nor strength
in his gesture unless God is there. Without God,
the " Service of Man " is no better than a hobby
or a sentimentality or an hypocrisy in the undis
ciplined prison of the mortal life.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE INVISIBLE KING
§ 1 Modern Religion a Political Religion
The conception of a young and energetic God, an
Invisible Prince growing in strength and wisdom,
who calls men and women to his service and who
gives salvation from self and mortality only
through self-abandonment to his service, necessa
rily involves a demand for a complete revision and
fresh orientation of the life of the convert.
God faces the blackness of the Unknown and the
blind joys and confusions and cruelties of Life, as
one who leads mankind through a dark jungle to
a great conquest. He brings mankind not rest but
a sword. It is plain that he can admit no divided
control of the world he claims. He concedes noth
ing to Caesar. In our philosophy there are no hu
man things that are God's and others that are
Caesar's. Those of the new thought cannot render
unto God the things that are God's, and to Caesar
the things that are Caesar's. Whatever claim
Caesar may make to rule men's lives and direct
96

THE INVISIBLE KING 97
their destinies outside the will of God, is a usurpa
tion. No king nor Caesar has any right to tax or
to service or to tolerance, except he claim as one
who holds for and under God. And he must make
good his claim. The steps of the altar of the Godj
of Youth are no safe place for the sacrilegious fig
ure of a king. Who claims " divine right " plays
with the lightning.
The new conceptions do not tolerate either kings
or aristocracies or democracies. Its implicit com
mand to all its adherents is to make plain the way
to the world theocracy. Its rule of life is the dis
covery and service of the will of God, which dwells
in the hearts of men, and the performance of that
will, not only in the private life of the believer but
in the acts and order of the state and nation of
which he is a part. I give myself to God not only
because I am so and so but because I am mankind.
I become in a measure responsible for every evil
in the world of men. I become a knight in God's
service. I become my brother's keeper. I become
a responsible minister of my King. 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. Kings, owners, and all who claim

98 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
rule and decisions in the world's affairs, must either
show themselves clearly the fellow-servants of the
believer or become the objects of his steadfast an
tagonism.
§ 2 The Will of God
It is here that those who explain this modern re
ligiosity will seem most arbitrary to the inquirer.
For they relate of God, as men will relate of a
close friend, his dispositions, his apparent inten
tions, the aims of his kingship. And just as they
advance no proof whatever of the existence of God
but their realisation of him, so with regard to these
qualities and dispositions they have little argument
but profound conviction. What they say is this;
that if you do not feel God then there is no per
suading you of him; we cannot win over the in
credulous. And what they say of his qualities is
this ; that if you feel God then you will know, you
will realise more and more clearly, that thus and
thus and no other is his method and intention.
It comes as no great shock to those who have
grasped the full implications of the statement that
God is Finite, to hear it asserted that the first pur
pose of God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of
knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of

THE INVISIBLE KING 99
knowledge as a means to power. For that he must
use human eyes and hands and brains.
And as God gathers power he uses it to an end
that he is only beginning to apprehend, and that
he will apprehend more fully as time goes on. But
it is possible to define the broad outlines of the
attainment he seeks. It is the conquest of death.
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,
and then the defeat of that death that seems to
threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath
a cooling sun. God fights against death in every
form, against the great death of the race, against
the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, baseness,
misconception, and perversion. He it is and no
other who can deliver us "from the body of this
death." This is the battle that grows plainer; this
is the purpose to which he calls us out of the ani
mal's round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling
and laughing and weeping, fearing and failing, and
presently of wearying and dying, which is the whole
life that living without God can give us. And from
these great propositions there follow many very
definite maxims and rules of life for those who
serve God. These we will immediately consider.

100 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
§ 3 The Crucifix
But first let me write a few words here about
those who hold a kind of intermediate faith be
tween the worship of the God of Youth and the
vaguer sort of Christianity. There are a number
of people closely in touch with those who have
found the new religion who, biased probably by a
dread of too complete a break with Christianity,
have adopted a theogony which is very reminiscent
of Gnosticism and of the Paulician, Catharist, and
kindred sects to which allusion has already been
made. He, who is called in this book God, they
would call God-the-Son or Christ, or the Logos;
and what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled
Being, they would call God-the-Father. And what
we speak of here as Life, they would call, with a
certain disregard of the poor brutes that perish,
Man. And they would assert, what we of the new
belief, pleading our profound ignorance, would
neither assert nor deny, that that Darkness, out of
which came Life and God; since it produced them
must be ultimately sympathetic and of like nature
with them. And that ultimately Man, being re
deemed and led by Christ and saved from death by
him, would be reconciled with God the Father.1
iThis probably was the conception of Spinoza. Christ for

THE INVISIBLE KING 101
And this great adventurer out of the hearts of man
that we here call God, they would present as the
same with that teacher from Galilee who was cru
cified at Jerusalem.
Now we of the modern way would offer the fol
lowing criticisms upon this apparent compromise
between our faith and the current religion.
Firstly, we do not presume to theorise about the
nature of the veiled being nor about that being's
relations to God and to Life. We do not recognise
any consistent sympathetic possibilities between
these outer beings and our God. Our God is, we
feel, like Prometheus, a rebel. He is unfilial.
And the accepted figure of Jesus, instinct with
meek submission, is not in the tone of our worship.
It is not by suffering that God conquers death, but
by fighting. Incidentally our God dies a million
deaths, but the thing that matters is not the deaths
but the immortality. It may be he cannot escape
in this person or that person being nailed to a
cross or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock;
These may be necessary sufferings, like hunger and
thirst in a campaign; they do not in themselves
him is the wisdom of God manifested in all things, and chiefly
in the mind of man. Through him we reach the blessedness of
an intuitive knowledge of God. Salvation is an escape from
the "inadequate" ideas of the mortal human personality to
the "adequate" and timeless ideas of God.

102 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
bring victory. They may be necessary, but they
are not glorious. The symbol of the crucifixion,
the drooping, pain-drenched figure of Christ, the
sorrowful cry to his Father, "My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me? " these things jar with
our spirit. We little men may well fail and re
pent, but it is our faith that our God does not fail
us nor himself. We cannot accept the Christian's
crucifix, or pray to a pitiful God. We cannot ac
cept the Resurrection as though it were an after
thought to a bitterly felt death. Our crucifix, if
you must have a crucifix, would show God with a
hand or a foot already torn away from its nail,
and with eyes not downcast but resolute against
the sky ; a face without pain, pain lost and forgot
ten in the surpassing glory of the struggle and the
inflexible will to live and prevail. . . .
But we do not care how long the thorns are
drawn, nor how terrible the wounds, so long as he
does not droop. God is courage. God is courage
beyond any conceivable suffering.
But when all this has been said, it is well to
add that it concerns the figure of Christ only in
so far as that professes to be the figure of God,
and the crucifix only so far as that stands for
divine action. The figure of Christ crucified, so

THE INVISIBLE KING 103
soon as we think of it as being no more than the
tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man who pro
claimed the loving-kindness of God and the su
premacy of God's kingdom over the individual life,
and who, in the extreme agony of his pain and
exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, be
comes something altogether distinct from a theo
logical symbol. Immediately that we cease to
worship, we can begin to love and pity. Here was
a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and
of great courage, of the utmost tolerance and
the subtlest sympathy, a saint of non-resis
tance. . . .
We of the new faith repudiate the teaching of
non-resistance. We are the militant followers of
and participators in a militant God. We can ap
preciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this
gentle being upon whose nobility the theologians
trade. But submission is the remotest quality of
all from our God, and a moribund figure is the
completest inversion of his likeness as we know
him. A Christianity which shows, for its daily
symbol, Christ risen and trampling victoriously
upon a broken cross, would be far more in the spirit
of our worship.1
Ut is curious, after writing the above, to find in a letter

104 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
§ 4 The Primary Duties
Now it follows very directly from the conception
of God as a finite intelligence of boundless courage
and limitless possibilities of growth and victory,
who has pitted himself against death, who stands
close to our inmost beings ready to receive us and
use us, to rescue us from the chagrins of egotism
and take us into his immortal adventure, that we
who have realised him and given ourselves joyfully
to him, must needs be equally ready and willing to
give our energies to the task we share with him, to
written by Foss Westeott, Bishop of Durham, to that pertinaci
ous correspondent, the late Lady Victoria Welby, almost ex
actly the same sentiments I have here expressed. . " If I
could fill the Crucifix with life as you do," he says, " I would
gladly look on it, but the fallen Head and the closed Eye
exclude from my thought the idea of glorified humanity. The
Christ to whom- we are led is One who ' hath been crucified,'
who hath passed the trial victoriously and borne the fruits
to heaven. I dare not then rest on this side of the glory."
I find, too, a still more remarkable expression of the modern
spirit in a tract, " The Call of the Kingdom," by that very able
and subtle, Anglican theologian, the Rev. W. Temple, who
declares that under the vitalising stresses of the war we are
winning " faith in Christ as an heroic leader. We have thought
of Him so much as meek and gentle that there is, no ground
in our picture of Him, for the vision which His disciple had
of Him : ' His head and His hair were white, as white wool,
white as snow ; and His eyes were as a flame of fire ; and His
feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a
furnace ; and His voice was as the voice of many waters. And
He had in His right hand seven stars; and out of His mouth
proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was
as the sun shineth in its strength.' "
These are both exceptional utterances, interesting as showing
how clearly parallel are the tendencies within and without
Christianity.

THE INVISIBLE KING 105
do our utmost to increase knowledge, to increase
order and clearness, to fight against indolence,
waste, disorder, cruelty, vice, and every form of
his and our enemy, death, first and chiefest in our
selves but also in all mankind, and to bring about
the establishment of his real and visible kingdom
throughout the world.
And that idea of God as the Invisible King of
the whole world means not merely that God is to
be made and declared the head of the world, but
that the kingdom of God is to be present through
out the whole fabric of the world, that the King
dom of God is to be in the teaching at the village
school, in the planning of the railway siding of
the market town, in the mixing of the mortar at
the building of the workman's house. It means
that ultimately no effigy of intrusive king or em
peror is to disfigure our coins and stamps any
more; God himself and no delegate is to be repre
sented wherever men buy or sell, on our letters
and our receipts, a perpetual witness, a perpetual
reminder. There is no act altogether without sig
nificance, no power so humble that it may not
be used for or against God, no life but can orient
itself to him. To realise God in one's heart is
to be filled with the desire to serve him, and the

106 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
way of his service is neither to pull up one's life
by the roots nor to continue it in all its essentials
unchanged, but to turn it about, to turn everything
that there is in it round into his way.
The outward duty of those who serve God must
vary greatly with the abilities they possess and
the positions in which they find themselves, but
for all there are certain fundamental duties; a con
stant attempt to be utterly truthful with oneself,
a constant sedulousness to keep oneself fit and
bright for God's service, and to increase one's
knowledge and powers, and a hidden persistent
watchfulness of one's baser motives, a watch against
fear and indolence, against vanity, against greed
and lust, against envy, malice, and uncharitable-
ness. To have found God truly does in itself make
God's service one's essential motive, but these evils
lurk in the shadows, in the lassitudes and unwary
moments. No one escapes them altogether, there
is no need for tragic moods on account of imper
fections. We can no more serve God without
blunders and set-backs than we can win battles
without losing men. But the less of such loss the
better. The servant of God must keep his mind
as wide and sound and his motives as clean as he
can,- just as an operating surgeon must keep his

THE INVISIBLE KING 107
nerves and muscles as fit and his hands as clean
as he can. Neither may righteously evade exer
cise and regular washing — of mind as of hands.
An incessant watchfulness of one's self and one's
thoughts and the soundness of one's thoughts;
cleanliness, clearness, a wariness against indolence
and prejudice, careful truth, habitual frankness,
fitness and steadfast work ; these are the daily fun
damental duties that every one who truly comes to
God will, as a matter of course, set before himself.
§ 5 The Increasing Kingdom
Now of the more intimate and personal life of
the believer it will be more convenient to write a
little later. Let us for the present pursue the idea
of this world-kingdom of God, to whose establish
ment he calls us. This kingdom is to be a peaceful
and co-ordinated activity of all mankind upon cer
tain divine ends. These, we conceive, are first, the
maintenance of the racial life; secondly, the ex
ploration of the external being of nature as it is
and as it has been, that is to say history and sci
ence; thirdly, that exploration of inherent human
possibility which is art; fourthly, that clarification
of thought and knowledge which is philosophy;
and finally, the progressive enlargement and de-

108 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
velopment of the racial life under these lights, so
that God may work through a continually better
body of humanity and through better and better
equipped minds, that he and our race may increase
for ever, working unendingly upon the development
of the powers of life and the mastery of the blind
forces of matter throughout the deeps of space.
He sets out with us, we are persuaded, to conquer
ourselves and our world and the stars. And be
yond the stars our eyes can as yet see nothing, our
imaginations reach and fail. Beyond the limits
of our understanding is the veiled Being of Fate,
whose face is hidden from us. . . .
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. . . .
But the business of such ordinary lives as ours
is the setting up of this earthly kingdom of God.
That is the form into which our lives must fall and
our consciences adapt themselves.
Belief in God as the Invisible King brings with
it almost necessarily a conception of this coming
kingdom of God on earth. Each believer as he >
grasps this natural and immediate consequence of
the faith that has come into his life will form at the
same time a Utopian conception of this world

THE INVISIBLE KING 109
changed in the direction of God's purpose. The
vision will follow the realisation of God's true na
ture and purpose as a necessary second step. And
he will begin to develop the latent citizen of this
world-state in himself. He will fall in with the
idea of the world-wide sanities of this new order
being drawn over the warring outlines of the pres
ent, and of men falling out of relationship with the
old order and into relationship with the new.
Many men and women are already working to-day
at tasks that belong essentially to God's kingdom,
tasks that would be of the same essential nature if
the world were now a theocracy ; for example, they
are doing or sustaining scientific research or edu-,
cation or creative art; they are making roads to
bring men together, they are doctors working for
the world's health, they are building homes, they
are constructing machinery to save and increase
the powers of men. . . .
Such men and women need only to change their
orientation as men will change about at a work-
table when the light that was coming in a little
while ago from the southern windows, begins pres
ently to come in chiefly from the west, to become
open and confessed servants of God. This work
that they were doing for ambition, or the love of

110 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
men or the love of knowledge or what seemed the
inherent impulse to the work itself, or for money
or honour or country or king, they will realise they
are doing for God and by the power of God. Self-
transformation into a citizen of God's kingdom and
a new realisation of all earthly politics as no more
than the struggle to define and achieve the kingdom
of God in the earth, follow on, without any need
for a fresh spiritual impulse, from the moment
when God and the believer meet and clasp one an
other. This transfiguration of the world into a theocracy
may seem a merely fantastic idea to anyone who
comes to it freshly without such general theological
preparation as the preceding pages have made.
But to anyone who has been at the pains to clear
his mind even a little from the obsession of existing
but transitory things, it ceases to be a mere sugges
tion and becomes more and more manifestly the
real future of mankind. From the phase of "so
things should be," the mind will pass very rapidly to
the realisation that " so things will be." Towards
this the directive wills among men have been drift
ing more and more steadily and perceptibly and
with fewer eddyings and retardations, for many
centuries. The purpose of mankind will not be

THE INVISIBLE KING 111
always thus confused and fragmentary. This dis
semination of will-power is a phase. The age of
the warring tribes and kingdoms and empires that
began a hundred centuries or so ago, draws to its
close. The kingdom of God on earth is not a meta
phor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream, not
an uncertain project; it is the thing before us, it is
the close and inevitable destiny of mankind.
In a few score years the faith of the true God
will be spreading about the world. The few halt
ing confessions of God that one hears here and
there to-day, like that little twittering of birds
which comes before the dawn, will have swollen to
a choral unanimity. In but a few centuries the
whole world will be openly, confessedly, preparing
for the kingdom. In but a few centuries God will
have led us out of the dark forest of these present
wars and confusions into the open brotherhood of
his rule.
§ 6 What is my Place in the Kingdom?
This conception of the general life of mankind
as a transformation at thousands of points of the
confused, egotistical, proprietary, partisan, nation
alist, life-wasting chaos of human life to-day into
the coherent development of the world kingdom of

112 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
God, provides the form into which everyone who
comes to the knowledge of God will naturally seek
to fit his every thought and activity. The material
greeds, the avarice, fear, rivalries, and ignoble am
bitions of a disordered world will be challenged
and examined under one general question : " What
am I in the kingdom of God? "
It has already been suggested that there is a
great and growing number of occupations that be
long already to God's kingdom, research, teaching,
creative art, creative administration, cultivation,
construction, maintenance, and the honest satis
faction of honest practical human needs. For such
people conversion to the intimacy of God means at
•most a change in the spirit of their work, a refreshed
energy, a clearer understanding, a new zeal, a com
pleter disregard of gains and praises and promo
tion. Pay, honours, and the like cease to be the
inducement of effort. Service, and service alone,
is the criterion that the quickened conscience will
recognise. Most of such people will find themselves in po
sitions in which service is mingled with activities
of a baser sort, in which service is a little warped
and deflected by old traditions and usage, by mer
cenary and commercial considerations, by some

THE INVISIBLE KING 113
inherent or special degradation of purpose. The
spirit of God will not let the believer rest until his
life is readjusted and as far as possible freed from
the waste of these base diversions. For example
a scientific investigator, lit and inspired by great
inquiries, may be hampered by the conditions of
his professorship or research fellowship, which ex
act an appearance of " practical " results. Or he
may be obliged to lecture or conduct classes. He
may be able to give but half his possible gift to the
work of his real aptitude, and that at a sacrifice of
money and reputation among short-sighted but in
fluential contemporaries. Well, if he is by nature
an investigator he will know that the research is
what God needs of him. He cannot continue it at
all if he leaves his position, and so he must needs
waste something of his gift to save the rest. But
should a poorer or a humbler post offer him better
opportunity, there lies his work for God. There
one has a very common and simple type of the prob
lems that will arise in the lives of men when they
are lit by sudden realisation of the immediacy of
God. Akin to that case is the perplexity of any success
ful physician between the increase of knowledge
and the public welfare on the one hand, and the

114 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
lucrative possibilities of his practice among wealthy
people on the other. He belongs to a profession
that is crippled by a mediaeval code, a profession
which was blind to the common interest of the
Public Health and regarded its members merely as
skilled practitioners employed to " cure " individual
ailments. Very slowly and tortuously do the meth
ods of the profession adapt themselves to the mod
ern conception of an army of devoted men working
as a whole under God for the health of mankind
as a whole, broadening out from the frowsy den of
the "leech," with its crocodile and bottles and hi
eroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled and illuminat
ing co-operation with those who deal with the food
and housing and economic life of the community.
And again quite parallel with these personal
problems is the trouble of the artist between the
market and vulgar fame on the one hand and his
divine impulse on the other.
The presence of God will be a continual light and
help in every decision that must be made by men
and women in these more or less vitiated, but still
fundamentally useful and righteous, positions.
The trouble becomes more marked and more dif
ficult in the case of a man who is a manufacturer
or a trader, the financier of business enterprise or

THE INVISIBLE KING 115
the proprietor of great estates. The world is in
need of manufactures and that goods should be
distributed; land must be administered and new
economic possibilities developed. The drift of
things is in the direction of state ownership and
control, but in a great number of cases the state is
not ripe for such undertakings, it commands
neither sufficient integrity nor sufficient ability, and
the proprietor of factory, store, credit or land, must
continue in possession, holding as a trustee for
God and, so far as lies in his power, preparing for
his supersession by some more public administra
tion. Modern religion admits of no facile flights
from responsibility. It permits no headlong resort
to the wilderness and sterile virtue. It counts the
recluse who fasts among scorpions in a cave as no
better than a deserter in hiding. It unhesitatingly
forbids any rich young man to sell all that he has
and give to the poor. Himself and all that he has
must be alike dedicated to God.
The plain duty that will be understood by the
proprietor of land and of every sort of general
need and service, so soon as he becomes aware of
God, is so to administer his possessions as to achieve
the maximum of possible efficiency, the most gen
erous output, and the least private profit. He may

116 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
set aside a salary for his maintenance; the rest he
must deal with like a zealous public official. And
if he perceives that the affair could be better ad
ministered by other hands than his own, then it is
his business to get it into those hands with the
smallest delay and the least profit to himself. . . .
The rights and wrongs of human equity are very
different from right and wrong in the sight of God.
In the sight of God no landlord has a right to his
rent, no usurer has a right to his interest. A man
is not justified in drawing the profits from an ad
vantageous agreement nor free to spend the profits
of a speculation as he will. God takes no heed of
savings nor of abstinence. He recognises no right
to the " rewards of abstinence," no right to any
rewards. Those profits and comforts and consola
tions are the inducements that dangle before the
eyes of the spiritually blind. Wealth is an em
barrassment to the religious, for God calls them to
account for it. The servant of God has no business
with wealth or power except to use them immedi
ately in the service of God. Finding these things
in his hands he is bound to administer them in the
service of God.
The tendency of modern religion goes far beyond
the alleged communism of the early Christians, and

THE INVISIBLE KING 117
far beyond the tithes of the scribes and Pharisees.
God takes all. He takes you, blood and bones and
house and acres, he takes skill and influence and
expectations. For all the rest of your life you are
nothing but God's agent. If you are not prepared
for so complete a surrender, then you are infinitely
remote from God. You must go your way. Here
you are merely a curious interloper. Perhaps you
have been desiring God as an experience, or covet
ing him as a possession. You have not begun to
understand. This that we are discussing in this
book is as yet nothing for you.
§ 7 Adjusting Life
This picturing of a human world more to the mind
of God than this present world and the discov
ery and realisation of one's own place and work
in and for that kingdom of God, is the natural next
phase in the development of the believer. He will
set about revising and adjusting his scheme of life,
his ways of living, his habits and his relationships
in the light of his new convictions.
Most men and women who come to God will have
already a certain righteousness in their lives ; these
things happen like a thunderclap only in strange
exceptional cases, and the same movements of the

118 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
mind that have brought them to God will already
have brought their lives into a certain rightness
of direction and conduct. Yet occasionally there
will be someone to whom the self-examination that
follows conversion will reveal an entirely wrong
and evil way of living. It may be that the light
has come to some rich idler doing nothing but fol
low a pleasurable routine. Or to someone follow
ing some highly profitable and amusing, but socially
useless or socially mischievous occupation. One
may be an advocate at the disposal of any man's
purpose, or an actor or actress ready to fall in with
any theatrical enterprise. Or a woman may find
herself a prostitute or a pet wife, a mere kept in
strument of indulgence. These are lives of prey,
these are lives of futility; the light of God will not
tolerate such lives. Here religion can bring noth
ing but a severance from the old way of life alto
gether, a break and a struggle towards use and
service and dignity.
But even here it does not follow that because
a life has been wrong the new life that begins
must be far as the poles asunder from the old.
Every sort of experience that has ever come to a
human being is in the self that he brings to God,
and there is no reason why a knowledge of evil

THE INVISIBLE KING 119
ways should not determine the path of duty. No
one can better devise protections against vices than
those who have practised them; none know tempta
tions better than those* who have fallen. If a man
has followed an evil trade, it becomes him to use
his knowledge of the tricks of that trade to help
end it. He knows the charities it may claim and
the remedies it needs. . . .
A very interesting case to discuss in relation to
this question of adjustment is that of the barrister.
A practising barrister under contemporary condi
tions does indeed give most typically the oppor
tunity for examining the relation of an ordinary
self-respecting wordly life, to life under the dis
pensation of God discovered. A barrister is usually
a man of some energy and ambition, his honour is
moulded by the traditions of an ancient and anti
quated profession, instinctively self -preserving and
yet with a real desire for consistency and respect.
As a profession it has been greedy and defensively
conservative, but it has never been shameless nor
has it ever broken faith with its own large and
selfish, but quite definite, propositions. It has
never for instance had the shamelessness of such a
traditionless and undisciplined class as the early
factory organisers. It has never had the dull in-

120 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
coherent wickedness of the sort of men who exploit
drunkenness and the turf. It offends within lim
its. Barristers can be, and are, disbarred. But
it is now a profession extraordinarily out of date;
its code of honour derives from a time of cruder and
lower conceptions of human relationship. It ap
prehends the State as a mere " ring " kept about
private disputations; it has not begun to move to
wards the modern conception of the collective en
terprise as the determining criterion of human con
duct. It sees its business as a mere play upon the
rules of a game between man and man, or between
men and men. They haggle, they dispute, they in
flict and suffer wrongs, they evade dues, and are
liable or entitled to penalties and compensations
The primary business of the law is held to be de
cision in these wrangles, and as wrangling is sub
ject to artistic elaboration, the business of the bar
rister is the business of a professional wrangler;
he is a bravo in wig and gown who fights the duels
of ordinary men because they are incapable, very
largely on account of the complexities of legal pro
cedure, of fighting for themselves. His business is
never to explore any fundamental right in the mat
ter. His business is to say all that can be said
for his client, and to conceal or minimise whatever

THE INVISIBLE KING 121
can be said against his client. The successful pro-
moted advocate, who in Britain and the United
States of America is the judge, and whose habits
and interests all incline him to disregard the reali
ties of the case in favour of the points in the forensic
game, then adjudicates upon the contest. . . .
Now this condition of things is clearly incom
patible with the modern conception of the world
as becoming a divine kingdom. When the world
is openly and confessedly the kingdom of God, the
law court will exist only to adjust the differing
views of men as to the manner of their service to
God; the only right of action one man will have
against another will be that he has been prevented
or hampered or distressed by the other in serving
God. The idea of the law court will have changed
entirely from a place of dispute, exaction and ven
geance, to a place of adjustment. The individual
or some state organisation will plead on behalf of
the common good either against some state official
or state regulation, or against the actions or inac
tion of another individual. This is the only sort
of legal proceedings compatible with the broad
beliefs of the new faith. . . . Every religion that
becomes ascendant, in so far as it is not other
worldly, must necessarily set its stamp upon the

122 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
methods and administration of the law. That this
was not the case with Christianity is one of the
many contributory aspects that lead one to the con
viction that it was not Christianity that took pos
session of the Roman empire, but an imperial ad
venturer who took possession of an all too com
plaisant Christianity.
Reverting now from these generalisations to the
problem of the religious from which they arose, it
will have become evident that the essential work
of anyone who is conversant with the existing prac
tice and literature of the law and whose natural
abilities are forensic, will lie in the direction of
reconstructing the theory and practice of the law
in harmony with modern conceptions, of making
that theory and practice clear and plain to ordinary
men, of reforming the abuses of the profession by
working for the separation of bar and judiciary,
for the amalgamation of the solicitors and the bar
risters, and the like needed reforms. These are
matters that will probably only be properly set right
by a quickening of conscience among lawyers them
selves. Of no class of men is the help and service
so necessary to the practical establishment of God's
kingdom, as of men learned and experienced in the
law. And there is no reason why for the present

THE INVISIBLE KING 123
an advocate should not continue to plead in the
courts, provided he does his utmost only to handle
cases in which he believes he can serve the right.
Few righteous cases are ill-served by a frank dis
position on the part of lawyer and client to put
everything before the court. Thereby of course
there arises a difficult case of conscience. What
if a lawyer, believing his client to be in the right,
discovers him to be in the wrong? He cannot
throw up the case unless he has been scandalously
deceived, because so he would betray the confidence
his client has put in him to "see him through."
He has a right to " give himself away," but not to
" give away " his client in this fashion. If he has
a chance of a private consultation I think he ought
to do his best to make his client admit the truth of
the case and give in, but failing this he has no
right to be virtuous on behalf of another. No man
may play God to another ; he may remonstrate, but
that is the limit of his right. He must respect a
confidence, even if it is purely implicit and involun
tary. I admit that here the barrister is in a cleft
stick, and that he must see the business through
according to the confidence his client has put in
him — and afterwards be as sorry as he may be if
an injustice ensues. And also I would suggest a

124 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
lawyer may with a fairly good conscience defend
a guilty man as if he were innocent, to save him
from unjustly heavy penalties. . . .
This comparatively full discussion of the bar
rister's problem has been embarked upon because
it does bring in, in a very typical fashion, just those
uncertainties and imperfections that abound in real
life. Religious conviction gives us a general di
rection, but it stands aside from many of these
entangled struggles in the jungle of conscience.
Practice is often easier than a rule. In practice
a lawyer will know far more accurately than a hy
pothetical case can indicate, how far he is bound
to see his client through, and how far he may play
the keeper of his client's conscience. And nearly
every day there happens instances where the most
subtle casuistry will fail and the finger of con
science point unhesitatingly. One may have wor
ried long in the preparation and preliminaries of
the issue, one may bring the case at last into the
final court of conscience in an apparently hopeless
tangle. Then suddenly comes decision.
The procedure of that silent, lit, and empty court
in which a man states his case to God, is very sim
ple and perfect. The excuses and the special plead-

THE INVISIBLE KING 125
ing shrivel and vanish. In a little while the case
lies bare and plain.
§ 8 The Oath of Allegiance
The question of oaths of allegiance, acts of ac
quiescence in existing governments, and the like,
is one that arises at once with the acceptance of
God as the supreme and real King of the Earth.
At the worst Caesar is a usurper, a satrap claiming
to be sovereign ; at the best he is provisional. Mod
ern casuistry makes no great trouble for the be
lieving public official. The chief business of any
believer is to do the work for which he is best fitted,
and since all state affairs are to become the affairs
of God's kingdom it is of primary importance that
they should come into the hands of God's servants.
It is scarcely less necessary to a believing man with
administrative gifts that he should be in the public
administration, than that he should breathe and
eat. And whatever oath or the like to usurper
church or usurper king has been set up to bar ac
cess to service, is an oath imposed under duress.
If it cannot be avoided it must be taken rather than
that a man should become unserviceable. All such
oaths are unfair and foolish things. They exclude

126 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
no scoundrels ; they are appeals to superstition.
Whenever an opportunity occurs for the abolition
of an oath, the servant of God will seize it, but
where the oath is unavoidable he will take it.
The service of God is not to achieve a delicate
consistency of statement ; it is to do as much as one
can of God's work.
§ 9 The Priest and the Creed
It may be doubted if this line of reasoning re
garding the official and his oath can be extended to
excuse the priest or pledged minister of religion
who finds that faith in the true God has ousted his
formal beliefs.
This has been a frequent and subtle moral prob
lem in the intellectual life of the last hundred
years. It has been increasingly difficult for any
class of reading, talking, and discussing people such
as are the bulk of the priesthoods of the Christian
churches to escape hearing and reading the ac
cumulated criticism of the Trinitarian theology
and of the popularly accepted story of man's fall
and salvation. Some have no doubt defeated this
universal and insidious critical attack entirely, and
honestly established themselves in a right-down
acceptance of the articles and disciplines to which

THE INVISIBLE KING 127
they have subscribed and of the creeds they profess
and repeat. Some have recanted and abandoned
their positions in the priesthood. But a great
number have neither resisted the bacillus of criti
cism nor left the churches to which they are at
tached. They have adopted compromises, they have
qualified their creeds with modifying footnotes of
essential repudiation ; they have decided that plain
statements are metaphors and have undercut,
transposed, and inverted the most vital points of
the vulgarly accepted beliefs. One may find within
the Anglican communion, Arians, Unitarians, Athe
ists, disbelievers in immortality, attenuators of
miracles; there is scarcely a doubt or a cavil that
has not found a lodgment within the ample charity
of the English Establishment. I have been inter
ested to hear one distinguished Canon deplore that
" they " did not identify the Logos with the third
instead of the second Person of the Trinity, and
another distinguished Catholic apologist declare
his indifference to the " historical Jesus." Within
hiost of the Christian communions one may believe
anything or nothing, provided only that one does
not call too public an attention to one's eccentricity.
The late Rev. Charles Voysey, for example, preached
plainly in his church at Healaugh against the divin-

128 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
ity of Christ, unhindered. It was only when he
published his sermons under the provocative title
of " The Sling and the Stone," and caused an out
cry beyond the limits of his congregation, that he
was indicted and deprived.
Now the reasons why these men do not leave the
ministry or priesthood in which they find themselves
are often very plausible. It is probable that in
very few cases is the retention of stipend or incum
bency a conscious dishonesty. At the worst it is
mitigated by^ thought for wife or child. It has only
been during very exceptional phases of religious
development and controversy that beliefs have been
really sharp. A creed, like a coin, it may be argued,
loses little in practical value because it is worn, or
bears the image of a vanished king. The religious
life is a reality that has clothed itself in many gar
ments, and the concern of the priest or minister is
with the religious life and not with the poor sym
bols that may indeed pretend to express, but do as a
matter of fact no more than indicate, its direction.
It is quite possible to maintain that the church and
not the creed is the real and valuable instrument of
religion, that the religious life is sustained not by
its propositions but by its routines. Anyone who
seeks the intimate discussion of spiritual things

THE INVISIBLE KING 129
with professional divines, will find this is the sub
stance of the case for the ecclesiastical sceptic.
His church, he will admit, mumbles its statement
of truth, but where else, is truth? What better
formulae are to be found for ineffable things ? And
meanwhile — he does good.
That may be a valid defence before a man finds
God. But we who profess the worship and fellow
ship of the living God deny that religion is a mat
ter of ineffable things. The way of God is plain
and simple and easy to understand.
Therewith the whole position of the conforming
sceptic is changed. If a professional religious has
any justification at all for his professionalism it is
surely that he proclaims the nearness and great
ness of God. And these creeds and articles and
orthodoxies are not proclamations but curtains,
they are a darkening and confusion of what should
be crystal clear. What compensatory good can a
priest pretend to do when his primary business is
the truth and his method a lie? The oaths and
incidental conformities of men who wish to serve
God in the state are on a different footing alto
gether from the falsehood and mischief of one who
knows the true God and yet recites to a trustful
congregation, foists upon a trustful congregation,

130 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
a misleading and ill-phrased Levantine creed.
Such is the line of thought which will impose the
renunciation of his temporalities and a complete
cessation of services upon every ordained priest
and minister as his first act of faith. Once that he
has truly realised God, it becomes impossible for
him ever to repeat his creed again. His course
seems plain and clear. It becomes him to stand
up before the flock he has led in error, and to pro
claim the being and nature of the one true God.
He must be explicit to the utmost of his powers.
Then he may await his expulsion. It may be
doubted whether it is sufficient for him to go away
silently, making false excuses or none at all for his
retreat. He has to atone for the implicit acquies-
cences of his conforming years.
§ 10 The Universalism of God
Are any sorts of people shut off as if by inherent
necessity from God?
This is, so to speak, one of the standing questions
of theology; it reappears with slight changes of
form at every period of religious interest, it is for
example the chief issue between the Arminian and
the Calvinist. From its very opening proposition
modern religion sweeps past and far ahead of the

THE INVISIBLE KING 131
old Arminian teachings of Wesleyans and Metho
dists, in its insistence upon the entirely finite na
ture of God. Arminians seem merely to have in
sisted that God has conditioned himself, and by his
own free act left men free to accept or reject sal
vation. To the realist type of mind — here as al
ways I use " realist " in its proper sense as the
opposite of nominalist — to the old-fashioned, over-
exact and over-accentuating type of mind, such
ways of thinking seem vague and unsatisfying.
Just as it distresses the more downright kind of
intelligence with a feeling of disloyalty to admit
that God is not Almighty, so it troubles the same
sort of intelligence to hear that there is no clear
line to be drawn between the saved and the lost.
Realists like an exclusive flavour in their faith.
Moreover, it is a natural weakness of humanity to
be forced into extreme positions by argument. It
is probable, as I have already suggested, that the
absolute attributes of God were forced upon Chris
tianity under the stresses of propaganda, and it is
probable that the theory of a super-human ob-
stinancy beyond salvation arose out of the irrita
tions natural to theological debate. It is but a
step from the realisation that there are people ab
solutely unable or absolutely unwilling to see God

132 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
as we see him, to the conviction that they are there
fore shut off from God by an invincible soul blind
ness. It is very easy to believe that other people are
essentially damned.
Beyond the little world of our sympathies and
comprehension there are those who seem inacces
sible to God by any means within our experience.
They are people answering to the " hard-hearted,"
to the " stiff-necked generation " of the Hebrew
prophets. They betray and even confess to stand
ards that seem hopelessly base to us. They show
themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusi
asm for beauty or truth or goodness. They are
altogether remote from intelligent sacrifice. To
every test they betray vileness of texture ; they are
mean, cold, wicked. There are people who seem
to cheat with a private self -approval, who are ever
ready to do harsh and cruel things, whose use for
social feeling is the malignant boycott, and for
prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating dis
play; who seize upon religion and turn it into per
secution, and upon beauty to torment it on the
altars of some joyless vice. We cannot do with
such souls ; we have no use for them, and it is very

THE INVISIBLE KING 133
easy indeed to step ^rom that persuasion to the
belief .that God has no\use for them.
And besides these base people there are the stu
pid people and the people with minds so poor in
texture that they cannot even grasp the few broad
and simple ideas that seem necessary to the salva
tion we experience, who lapse helplessly into fetish
istic and fearful conceptions of God, and are ap
parently quite incapable of distinguishing between
what is practically and what is spiritually good.
It is an easy thing to conclude that the only way
to God is our way to God, that he is the privilege
of a finer and better sort to which we of course
belong; that he is no more the God of the card-
sharper or the pickpocket or the " smart " woman
or the loan-monger or the village oaf than he is
of the swine in the sty. But are we justified in
thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and
intellectual understandings? Because some people
seem to me steadfastly and consistently base or
hopelessly and incurably dull and confused, does
it follow that there are not phases, albeit I have
never chanced to see them, of exaltation in the one
case and illumination in the other? And may I
not be a little restricting my perception of Good?

134 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
While I have been ready enough to pronounce this
or that person as being, so far as I was concerned,
thoroughly damnable or utterly dull, I find a curi
ous reluctance to admit the general proposition
which is necessary for these instances. It is pos
sible that the difference between Arminian and Cal
vinist is a difference of essential intellectual tem
perament rather than of theoretical conviction. I
am temperamentally Arminian as I am tempera
mentally Nominalist. I feel that it must be in the
nature of God to attempt all souls. There must be
accessibilities I can only suspect, and accessibilities
of which I know nothing.
Yet here is a consideration pointing rather the
other way. If you think, as you must think, that
you yourself can be lost to God and damned, then
I cannot see how you can avoid thinking that other
people can be damned. But that is not to believe
that there are people damned at the outset by their
moral and intellectual insufficiency; that is not to
make out that there is a class of essential and in
curable spiritual defectives. The religious life pre
ceded clear religious understanding and extends
far beyond its range.
In my own case I perceive that in spite of the
value I attach to true belief, the reality of religion

THE INVISIBLE KING 135
is not an intellectual thing. The essential religious
fact is in another than the mental sphere. I am
passionately anxious to have the idea of God clear
in my own mind, and to make my beliefs plain and
clear to other people, and particularly to other peo
ple who may seem to be feeling with me ; I do per
ceive that error is evil if only because a faith based
on confused conceptions and partial understand
ings may suffer irreparable injury through the col
lapse of its substratum of ideas. I doubt if faith
can be complete and enduring if it is not secured by
the definite knowledge of the true God. Yet I have
also to admit that I find the form of my own re
ligious emotion paralleled by people with whom I
have no intellectual sympathy and no agreement in
phrase or formula at all.
There is for example this practical identity of
religious feeling and this discrepancy of interpre
tation between such an inquirer as myself and a
convert, of the Salvation Army. Here, clothing
itself in phrases and images of barbaric sacrifice,
of slaughtered lambs and fountains of precious
blood, a most repulsive and incomprehensible idiom
to me, and expressing itself by shouts, clangour,
trumpeting, gesticulations, and rhythmic pacings
that stun and dismay my nerves, I find, the same

136 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
object sought, release from self, and the same end,
the end of identification with the immortal, suc
cessfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved. I
see God indubitably present in these excitements,
and I see personalities I could easily have mis
judged as too base or too dense for spiritual un
derstandings, lit by the manifest reflection of divin
ity. One may be led into the absurdest under-es-
timates of religious possibilities if one estimates
people only coldly and in the light of everyday life.
There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very
conceivably, when its utmost range can be exam
ined, excludes nothing human from religious co
operation, which will use any words to its tune,
which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world
about it, as it takes the street for its temple, and
yet which may be at its inner point in the direct-
est contact with God. Religion may suffer from
aphasia and still be religion ; it may utter mislead
ing or nonsensical words and yet intend and con
vey the truth. The methods of the Salvation Army
are older than doctrinal Christianity, and may long
survive it. Men and women may still chant of
Beulah Land and cry out in the ecstasy of salva
tion; the tambourine, that modern revival of the
thrilling Alexandrine sistrum, may still stir dull

THE INVISIBLE KING 137
j,
nerves to a first apprehension of powers and a call
beyond the immediate material compulsion of life,
when the creeds of Christianity are as dead as the
lore of the Druids.
The emancipation of mankind from obsolete the
ories and formularies may be accompanied by great
tides of moral and emotional release among types
and strata that by the standards of a trained and
explicit intellectual, may seem spiritually hopeless.
It is not necessary to imagine the whole world crit
ical and lucid in order to imagine the whole world
unified in religious sentiment, comprehending the
same phrases and coming together regardless of
class and race and quality, in the worship and
service of the true God. The coming kingship of
God if it is to be more than hieratic tyranny must
have this universality of appeal. As the head
grows clear the body will turn in the right direc
tion. To the mass of men modern religion says,
" This is the God it has always been in your nature
to apprehend."
§ 11 God and the Love and Status of Women
Now that we are discussing the general question
of individual conduct, it will be convenient to take
up again and restate in that relationship, propo-

138 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
sitions already made very plainly in the second and
third chapters. Here there are several excellent
reasons for a certain amount of deliberate repeti
tion. . . .
All the mystical relations of chastity, virginity,
and the like with religion, those questions of
physical status that play so large a part in most
contemporary religions, have disappeared from
modern faith. Let us be as clear as possible upon
this. God is concerned by the health and fitness
and vigour of his servants; we owe him our best and
utmost; but he has no special concern and no spe
cial preferences or commandments regarding sex
ual things.
Christ, it is manifest, was of the modern faith
in these matters, he welcomed the Magdalen, neither
would he condemn the woman taken in adultery.
Manifestly corruption and disease were not to stand
between him and those who sought God in him.
But the Christianity of the creeds, in this as in
so many respects, does not rise to the level of its
founder, and it is as necessary to repeat to-day as
though the name of Christ had not been ascendant
for nineteen centuries, that sex is a secondary thing
to religion, and sexual status of no account in the
presence of God. It follows quite logically that

THE INVISIBLE KING 139
God does not discriminate between man and woman
in any essential things. We leave our individual
ity behind us when we come into the presence of
God. Sex is not disavowed but forgotten. Just
as one's last meal is forgotten — which also is a
difference between the religious moment of modern
faith and certain Christian sacraments. You are
a believer and God is at hand to you ; heed not your
state; reach out to him and he is there. In the
moment of religion you are human; it matters not
what else you are, male or female, clean or unclean,
Hebrew or Gentile, bond or free. It is after the
moment of religion that we become concerned about
our state and the manner in which we use ourselves.
We have to follow our reason as our sole guide
in our individual treatment of all such things as
food and health and sex. God is the king of the
whole world, he is the owner of our souls and bodies
and all things. He is not particularly concerned
about any aspect, because he is concerned about
every aspect. We have to make the best use of
ourselves for his kingdom ; that is our rule of life.
That rule means neither painful nor frantic ab
stinences nor any forced way of living. Purity,
cleanliness, health, none of these things are for
themselves, they are for use; none are magic, all

140 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
are means. The sword must be sharp and clean.
That does not mean that we are perpetually to
sharpen and clean it — which would weaken and
waste the blade. The sword must neither be drawn
constantly nor always rusting in its sheath. Those
who have had the wits and soul to come to God,
will have the wits and soul to find out and know
what is waste, what is vanity, what is the happiness
that begets strength of body and spirit, what is
error, where vice begins, and to avoid and repent
and recoil from all those things that degrade.
These are matters not of the rule of life but of the
application of life. They must neither be neglected
nor made disproportionally important.
To the believer, relationship with God is the su
preme relationship. It is difficult to imagine how
the association of lovers and friends can be very
fine and close and good unless the two who love are
each also linked to God, so that through their
moods and fluctuations and the changes of years
they can be held steadfast by his undying steadfast
ness. But it has been felt by many deep-feeling
people that there is so much kindred between the
love and trust of husband and wife and the feeling
we have for God, that it is reasonable to consider
the former also as a sacred thing. They do so

THE INVISIBLE KING 141
value that close love of mated man and woman,
they are so intent upon its permanence and com
pleteness and to lift the dear relationship out of
the ruck of casual and transitory things, that they
want to bring it, as it were, into the very presence
and assent of God. There are many who dream and
desire that they are as deeply and completely mated
as this, many more who would fain be so, and some
who are. And from this comes the earnest desire
to make marriage sacramental and the attempt to
impose upon all the world the outward appearance,
the restrictions, the pretence at least of such a sac
ramental union.
There may be such a quasi-sacramental union in
many cases, but only after years can one be sure of
it; it is not to be brought about by vows and prom
ises but by an essential kindred and cleaving of
body and spirit ; and it concerns only the two who
can dare to say they have it, and God. And the
divine thing in marriage, the thing that is most like
the love of God, is, even then, not the relationship
of the man and woman as man and woman but the
comradeship and trust and mutual help and pity
that joins them. No doubt that from the mutual
necessities of bodily love and the common adven
ture, the necessary honesties and helps of a joint

142 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
life, there springs the stoutest, nearest, most en
during and best of human companionship ; perhaps
only upon that root can the best of mortal com
radeship be got; but it does not follow that the
mere ordinary coming together, and pairing off of
men and women is in itself divine or sacramental
or anything of the sort. Being in love is a condi
tion that may have its moments of sublime exalta
tion, but it is for the most part an experience far
down the scale below divine experience; it is often
love only in so far as it shares the name with better
things ; it is greed, it is admiration, it is desire, it
is the itch for excitement, it is the instinct for com
petition, it is lust, it is curiosity, it is adventure, it
is jealousy, it is hate. On a hundred scores 'lov
ers' meet and part. Thereby some few find true
love and the spirit of God in themselves or others.
Lovers may love God in one another; I do not
deny it. That is no reason why the imitation and
outward form of this great happiness should be
made an obligation upon all men and women who
are attracted by one another, nor why it should be
woven into the essentials of religion. For women
much more than for men is this confusion danger
ous, lest a personal love should shape and dominate
their lives instead of God. "He for God only;

THE INVISIBLE KING 143
she for God in him," phrases the idea of Milton and
of ancient Islam; it is the formula of sexual in
fatuation, a formula quite easily inverted, as the
end of Goethe's Faust ("The woman soul leadeth
us upward and on " ) may witness. The whole drift
of modern religious feeling is against this exag
geration of sexual feeling, these moods of sexual
slavishness, in spiritual things. Between the
healthy love of ordinary mortal lovers in love and
the love of God, there is an essential contrast and
opposition in this, that preference, exclusiveness,
and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the
former and are absolutely incompatible with the
latter. The former is the intensest realisation of
which our individualities are capable ; the latter is
the way of escape from the limitations of individu
ality. It may be true that a few men and more
women do achieve the completest unselfishness and
self-abandonment in earthly love. So the poets
and romancers tell us. If so, it is that by an imag
inative perversion they have given to some attract
ive person a worship that should be reserved for
God and a devotion that is normally evoked only
by little children in their mother's heart. It is not
the way between most of the men and women one
meets in this world.

144 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
But between God and the believer there is no
other way, there is nothing else, but self -surrender
and the ending of self.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH
MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION
§ 1 The Biological Equivalent of Sin
If the reader who is unfamiliar with scientific
things will obtain and read Metchnikoff's " Nature
of Man," he will find there an interesting summary
of the biological facts that bear upon and destroy
the delusion that there is such a thing as individual
perfection, that there is even ideal perfection for
humanity. With an abundance of convincing in
stances Professor Metchnikoff demonstrates that
life is a system of " disharmonies," capable of no
perfect way, that there is no " perfect " dieting, no
" perfect " sexual life, no " perfect " happiness, no
" perfect " conduct. He releases one from the arbi
trary but all too easy assumption that there is even
an ideal " perfection " in organic life. He sweeps
out of the mind with all the confidence and convic
tion of a physiological specialist, any idea that
there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man.
It is in the nature of every man to fall short at
145

146 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
every point from perfection. From the biological
point of view we are as individuals a series of in
voluntary "tries" on the part of an imperfect
species towards an unknown end.
Our spiritual nature follows our bodily as a
glove follows a hand. We are disharmonious be
ings and salvation no more makes an end to the
defects of our souls than it makes an end to the
decay of our teeth or to those vestigial structures
of our body that endanger our physical welfare.
Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds
not an inch to our spiritual and moral stature.
§ 2 What is Damnation?
Let us now take up the question of what is Sin?
and what we mean by the term " damnation," in
the light of this view of human reality. Most of
the great world religions are as clear as Professor
Metchnikoff that life in the world is a tangle of
disharmonies, and in most cases they supply a more
or less myth-like explanation, they declare that evil
is one side of the conflict between Ahriman and
Ormazd, or that it is the punishment of an act of
disobedience, of the fall of man and world alike
from a state of harmony. Their case, like his, is
that this world is damned.

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN 147
We do not find the belief that superposed upon
the miseries of this world there are the still bitterer
miseries of punishments after death, so nearly uni
versal. The endless punishments of hell appear
to be an exploit of theory; they have a superadded
appearance even in the Christian system ; the same
common tendency to superlatives and absolutes that
makes men ashamed to admit that God is finite,
makes them seek to enhance the merits of theiri
Saviour by the device of everlasting fire. Conquest
over the sorrow of life and the fear of death do not
seem to them sufficient for Christ's glory.
Now the turning round of the modern mind from
a conception of the universe as something derived
deductively from the past to a conception of it as
something gathering itself adventurously towards
the future, involves a release from the supposed
necessity to tell a story and explain why. Instead
comes the inquiry, " To what end? " We can say
without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are
here, this damnation is here — inexplicably. We
can, without any distressful inquiry into ultimate
origins, bring our minds to the conception of a
spontaneous and developing God arising out of
those stresses in our hearts and in the universe,
and arising to overcome them. Salvation for the

148 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
individual 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.
Something of that idea of damnation as a lack
of the will for salvation has crept at a number of
points into contemporary religious thought. It
was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the damned
go to their own hells of their own accord. It un
derlies a queer poem, " Simpson," by that interest
ing essayist upon modern Christianity, Mr. Clutton
Brock, which I have recently read. Simpson dies
and goes to hell — it is rather like the Cromwell
Road — and approves of it very highly, and then
and then only is he completely damned. Not to re
alise that one can be damned is certainly to be
damned ; such is Mr. Brock's idea. It is his defini
tion of damnation. S^tisfaj^Qn^^witk—existifig.
things is damnation. It is surrender to limitation ;
it is acquiescence in " disharmony " ; it is making
peace with that enemy against whom God fights
for ever.
(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who
acquiesce always and for ever remains for me, as

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN 149
I have already confessed in the previous chapter, a
quite open question. My Arminian temperament
turns me from the Calvinistic conclusion of Mr.
Brock's satire.) § 3 Sin is not Damnation
Now the question of sin will hardly concern those
damned and lost by nature, if such there be. Sin
is not the same thing as damnation, as we have
just defined damnation. Damnation is a state, but
sin is an incident. One is an essential and the
other an incidental separation from God. It is pos
sible to sin without being damned; and to be
damned is to be in a state when sin scarcely mat
ters, like ink upon a blackamoor. You cannot have
questions of more or less among absolute things.
It is the amazing and distressful discovery of
every believer so soon as the first exaltation of be
lief is past, that one does not remain always in
touch with God. At first it seems incredible that
one should ever have any motive again that is not
also God's motive. Then one finds oneself caught
unawares by a base impulse. We discover that
discontinuousness of our apparently homogeneous
selves, the unincorporated and warring elements

150 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
that seemed at first altogether absent from the syn
thesis of conversion. We are tripped up by forget
fulness, by distraction, by old habits, by tricks of
appearance. There come dull patches of exist
ence; those mysterious obliterations of one's finer
sense that are due at times to the little minor poi
sons one eats or drinks, to phases of fatigue, ill-
health and bodily disorder, or one is betrayed by
some unanticipated storm of emotion, brewed deep
in the animal being and released by any trifling
accident, such as personal jealousy or lust, or one
is relaxed by contentment into vanity. All these
rebel forces of our ill-coordinated selves, all these
" disharmonies," of the inner being, snatch us away
from our devotion to God's service, carry us off to
follies, offences, unkindness, waste, and leave us
compromised, involved, and regretful, perplexed by
a hundred difficulties we have put in our own way
back to God.
This is the personal problem of Sin. Here prayer
avails; here God can help us. From God comes
the strength to repent and make such reparation
as we can, to begin the battle again further back
and lower down. From God comes the power to
anticipate the struggle with one's rebel self, and to
resist and prevail over it.

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN 151
§ 4 The Sins of the Insane
An extreme case is very serviceable in such a dis
cussion as this.
It happens that the author carries on a corre
spondence with several lunatics in asylums. There
is a considerable freedom of notepaper in these in
stitutions; the outgoing letters are no doubt cen
sored or selected in some way, but a proportion at
any rate are allowed to go out to their addresses.
As a journalist who signs his articles and as the
author of various books of fiction, as a frequent
name, that is, to any one much forced back upon
reading, the writer is particularly accessible to this
type of correspondent. The letters come, some
manifesting a hopeless disorder that permits of no
reply, but some being the expression of minds over
laid not at all offensively by a web of fantasy, and
some (and these are the more touching ones and
the ones that most concern us now) as sanely con
ceived and expressed as any letters could be. They
are written by people living lives very like the
lives of us who are called " sane," except that they
lift to a higher excitement and fall to a lower de
pression, and that these extremer phases of mania
or melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency

152 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
altogether and take abnormal forms. They tap
deep founts of impulse, such as we of the safer ways
of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence
of drugs, or in dreams and rare moments of con
trollable extravagance. Then the insane become
" glorious," or they become murderous, or they be
come suicidal. All these letter-writers in confine
ment have convinced their fellow-creatures by some
extravagance that they are a danger to themselves
or others.
The letters that come from such types written
during their sane intervals, are entirely sane.
Some, who are probably unaware — I think they
should know — of the offences or possibilities that
justify their incarceration, write with a certain re- '
sentment at their position; others are entirely ac
quiescent, but one or two complain of the neglect
of friends and relations. But all are as manifestly
capable of religion and of the religious life as any
other intelligent persons during the lucid inter
ludes that make up nine-tenths perhaps of their
lives. . . . Suppose now one of these cases, and sup
pose that the infirmity takes the form of some cruel,
disgusting, or destructive disposition that may be
come at times overwhelming, and you have our uni
versal trouble with sinful tendency, as it were mag-

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN 153
nified for examination. It is clear that the mania
which defines his position must be the primary if
not the cardinal business in the life of a lunatic,
but his problem with that is different not in kind
but merely in degree from the problem of lusts,
vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal
lives. It is an unconquered tract, a great rebel
province in his being, which refuses to serve God
and tries to prevent him serving God, and suc
ceeds at times in wresting his capital out of his
control. But his relationship to that is the same
relationship as ours to the backward and insubor
dinate parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly
houses in our own private texture.
It is clear that the believer who is a lunatic is, as
it were, only the better part of himself. He serves
God with this unconquered disposition in him, like
a man who, whatever else he is and does, is obliged
to be the keeper of an untrustworthy and wicked
animal. His beast gets loose. His only resort is
to warn those about him when he feels that jang
ling or excitement of the nerves which precedes
its escapes, to limit its range, to place weapons
beyond its reach. And there are plenty of human
beings very much in his case, whose beasts have
never got loose or have got caught back before their

154 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
essential insanity was apparent. And there are
those uncertifiable lunatics we call men and women
of " impulse " and " strong passions." If perhaps
they have more self-control than the really mad,
yet it happens of tener with them that the whole in
telligent being falls under the dominion of evil.
The passion scarcely less than the obsession may
darken the whole moral sky. Repentance and
atonement; nothing less will avail them after the
storm has passed, and the sedulous preparation of
defences and palliatives against the return of the
storm. This discussion of the lunatic's case gives us in
deed, usefully coarse and large, the lines for the
treatment of every human weakness by the servants
of God. A "weakness," just like the lunatic's
mania, becomes a particular charge under God, a
special duty for the person it affects. He has to
minimise it, to isolate it, to keep it out of mis
chief. If he can he must adopt preventive meas
ures. . . .
These passions and weaknesses that get control
of us hamper our usefulness to God, they are an
incessant anxiety and distress to us, they wound
our self-respect and make us incomprehensible to
many who would trust us, they discredit the faith

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN 155
we profess. If they break through and break
through again it is natural and proper that men
and women should cease to believe in our faith,
cease to work with us or to meet us frankly. . . .
Our sins do everything evil to us and through us
except separate us from God.
Yet let there be no mistake about one thing.
Here prayer is a power. Here God can indeed
work miracles. A man with the light of God in
his heart can defeat vicious habits, rise again com
bative and undaunted after a hundred falls, escape
from the grip of lusts and revenges, make head
against despair, thrust back the very onset of mad
ness. He is still the same man he was before he
came to God, still with his libidinous, vindictive,
boastful, or indolent vein ; but now his will to pre
vail over those qualities can refer to an exterior
standard and an external interest, he can draw
upon a strength, almost boundless, beyond his own.
§ 5 Believe, and you are Saved
But be a sin great or small, it cannot damn a
man once he has found God. You may kill and
hang for it, you may rob or rape ; the moment you
truly repent and set yourself to such atonement
and reparation as is possible there remains no bar-

156 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
rier between you and God. Directly you cease to
hide or deny or escape, and turn manfully towards
the consequences and the setting of things right,
you take hold again of the hand of God. Though
you sin seventy times seven times, God will still
forgive the poor rest of you. Nothing but utter
blindness of the spirit can shut a man off from God.
There is nothing one can suffer, no situation so
unfortunate, that it can shut off one who has the
thought of God, from God. If you but lift up your
head for a moment out of a stormy chaos of mad
ness and cry to him, God is there, God will not
fail you. A convicted criminal, frankly penitent,
and neither obdurate nor abject, whatever the evil
of his yesterdays, 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.
This persuasion is the very essence of the re
ligion of the true God. There is no sin, no state
that, being regretted and repented of, can stand be
tween God and man.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
THE IDEA OF A CHURCH
§ 1 The World Dawn
As yet those who may be counted as belonging
definitely to the new religion are few and scattered
and unconfessed, their realisations are still uncer
tain and incomplete. But that is no augury for
the continuance of this state of affairs even for the
next few decades. There are many signs that the
revival is coming very swiftly, it may be coming
as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical
night. It may seem at present as though nothing
very much were happening, except for the fact that
the old familiar constellations of theology have be
come a little pallid and lost something of their
multitude of points. But nothing fades of itself.
The deep stillness of the late night is broken by a
stirring, and the morning star of creedless faith,
the last and brightest of the stars, the star that
owes its light to the coming sun is in the sky.
There is a stirring and a movement. There is a
stir, like the stir before a breeze. Men are begin-
157

158 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
ning to speak of religion without the bluster of
the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak
of God without any reference to Omnipresence,
Omniscience, Omnipotence. The Deists and The-
ists of an older generation, be it noted, never did
that. Their " Supreme Being " repudiated noth
ing. He was merely the whittled stump of the
Trinity. It is in the last few decades that the west
ern mind has slipped loose from this absolutist con
ception of God that has dominated the intelligence
of Christendom at least, for many centuries. Al
most unconsciously the new thought is taking a
course that will lead it far away from the moor
ings of Omnipotence. It is like a ship that has
slipped its anchors and drifts, still sleeping, under
the pale and vanishing stars, out to the open
sea. . . .
§ 2 Convergent Religious Movements
In quite a little while the whole world may be
alive with this renascent faith.
For emancipation from the Trinitarian formu
laries and from a belief in an infinite God means
not merely a great revivification of minds trained
under the decadence of orthodox Christianity,
minds which have hitherto been hopelessly embar-

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH 159
rassed by the choice between pseudo-Christian re
ligion or denial, but also it opens the way towards
the completest understanding and sympathy and
participation with the kindred movements for re
lease and for an intensification of the religious life,
that are going on outside the sphere of the Christian
tradition and influence altogether. Allusion has
already been made to the sympathetic devotional
poetry of Rabindranath Tagore; he stands for a
movement in Brahminism parallel with and assim
ilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.
It is too often supposed that the religious ten
dency of the East is entirely towards other-world-
ness, to a treatment of this life as an evil entangle
ment and of death as a release and a blessing. It
is too easily assumed that Eastern teaching is
wholly concerned with renunciation, not merely of
self but of being, with the escape from all effort
of any sort into an exalted vacuity. This is in
deed neither the spirit of China nor of Islam nor
of the every-day life of any people in the world.
It is not the spirit of the Sikh nor of these newer
developments of Hindu thought. It has never been
the spirit of Japan. To-day less than ever does
Asia seem disposed to give up life and the effort
of life. Just as readily as Europeans, do the Asi-

160 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
atics reach out their arms to that fuller life we can
live, that greater intensity of existence, to which
we can attain by escaping from ourselves. All
mankind is seeking God. There is not a nation
nor a city in the globe where men are not being
urged at this moment by the spirit of God in them
towards the discovery of God. This is not an age
of despair but an age of hope in Asia as in all the
world besides.
Islam is undergoing a process of revision closely
parallel to that which ransacks Christianity.
Tradition and mediaeval doctrines are being thrust
aside in a similar way. There is much probing
into the spirit and intention of the Founder. The
time is almost ripe for a heart-searching Dialogue
of the Dead, " How we settled our religions for
ever and ever," between, let us say, Eusebius of
Caesarea and one of Nizam-al-Mulk's tame theolo
gians. They would be drawn together by the same
tribulations ; they would be in the closest sym
pathy against the temerity of the moderns; they
would have a common courtliness. The Quran is
but little read by Europeans ; it is ignorantly sup
posed to contain many things that it does not con
tain; there is much confusion in people's minds be
tween its text and the ancient Semitic traditions

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH 161
and usages retained by its followers; in places it
may seem formless and barbaric; but what it has
chiefly to tell of is the leadership of one individ
ualised militant God who claims the rule of the
whole world, who favours neither rank nor race,
who would lead men to righteousness. It is much
more free from sacramentalism, from vestiges of
the ancient blood sacrifice, and its associated
sacerdotalism, than Christianity. The religion
that will presently sway mankind can be reached
more easily from that starting-point than from
the confused mysteries of Trinitarian theology.
Islam was never saddled with a creed. With the
very name "Islam" (submission to God) there is
no quarrel for those who hold the new faith. . . .
All the world over there is this stirring in the
dry bones of the old beliefs. There is scarcely a re
ligion that has not its Bahaism, its Modernists, its
Brahmo Somaj, its "religion without theology,"
its attempts to escape from old forms and hamper
ing associations to that living and world-wide spir
itual reality upon which the human mind almost in
stinctively insists. . . .
It is the same God we all seek ; he becomes more
and more plainly the same God.
So that all this religious stir, which seems so

162 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
multifold and incidental and disconnected and con
fused and entirely ineffective to-day, may be and
most probably will be, in quite a few years a great
flood of religious unanimity pouring over and
changing all human affairs, sweeping away the old
priesthoods and tabernacles and symbols and
shrines, the last crumb of the Orphic victim and the
last rag of the Serapeum, and turning all men
about into one direction, as the ships and house
boats swing round together in some great river
with the uprush of the tide. . . .
§ 3 Can there be a True Church?
Among those who are beginning to realise the dif
ferences and identities of the revived religion that
has returned to them, certain questions of or
ganisation and assembly are being discussed.
Every new religious development is haunted by
the precedents of the religion it replaces, and it
was only to be expected that among those who have
recovered their faith there should be a search for
apostles and disciples, an attempt to determine
sources and to form original congregations, espe
cially among people with European traditions.
These dispositions mark a relapse from under
standing. They are imitative. This time there

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH 163
has been no revelation here or there; there is no
claim to a revelation but simply that God has be
come visible. Men have thought and sought until
insensibly the fog of obsolete theology has cleared
away. There seems no need therefore for special
teachers or a special propaganda, or any ritual
or observances that will seem to insist upon differ
ences. The Christian precedent of a church is par
ticularly misleading. The church with its sacra
ments and its sacerdotalism is the disease of Chris
tianity, Save for a few doubtful interpolations
there is no evidence that Christ tolerated either
blood sacrifices or the mysteries of priesthood. All
these antique grossnesses were superadded after his
martyrdom. He preached not a cult but a gospel ;
he sent out not medicine men but apostles.
No doubt all who believe owe an apostolic service
to God. They become naturally apostolic. As
men perceive and realise God, each will be disposed
in his own fashion to call his neighbour's attention
to what he sees. The necessary elements of reli
gion could be written on a post card; this book,
small as it is, bulks large not by what it tells posi
tively but because it deals with misconceptions.
We may (little doubt have I that we do) need spe
cial propagandas and organisations to discuss er-

164 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
rors and keep back the jungle of false ideas, to
maintain free speech and restrain the enterprise of
the persecutor, but we do not want a church to
keep our faith for us. We want our faith spread,
but for that there is no need for orthodoxies and
controlling organisations of statement. It is for
each man to follow his own impulse, and to speak
to his like in his own fashion.
Whatever religious congregations men may form
henceforth in the name of the true God must be for
their own sakes and not to take charge of religion.
The history of Christianity, with its encrustation
and suffocation in dogmas and usages, its dire per
secutions of the faithful by the unfaithful, its desic
cation and its unlovely decay, its invasion by robes
and rites and all the tricks and vices of the Phari-
sees whom Christ detested and denounced, is full
of warning against the dangers of a church. Or
ganisation is an excellent thing for the material
needs of men, for the draining of towns, the mar
shalling of traffic, the collecting of eggs, and the
carrying of letters, the distribution of bread, the
notification of measles, for hygiene and economics
and suchlike affairs. The better we organise such
things, the freer and better equipped we leave men's
minds for nobler purposes, for those adventures

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH 165
and experiments towards God's purpose which are
the reality of life. But all organisations must be
watched, for whatever is organised can be "cap
tured" and misused. Repentance, moreover, is
the beginning and essential of the religious life, and
organisations (acting through their secretaries and
officials) never repent. God deals only with the in
dividual for the individual's surrender. He takes
no cognisance of committees.
Those who are most alive to the realities of liv
ing religion are most mistrustful of this congre
gating tendency. To gather together is to purchase
a benefit at the price of a greater loss, to strengthen
one's sense of brotherhood by excluding, the major
ity of mankind. Before you know where you are
you will have exchanged the spirit of God for esprit
de corps. You will have reinvented the symbol;
you will have begun to keep anniversaries and es
tablish sacramental ceremonies. The disposition
to form cliques and exclude and conspire against
unlike people is all too strong in humanity, to per
mit of its formal encouragement. Even such or
ganisation as is implied by a creed is to be avoided,
for all living faith coagulates as you phrase it. In
this book I have not given so much as a definite
name to the faith of the true God. Organisation

166 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
for worship and collective exaltation also, it may
be urged, is of little manifest good. You cannot ap
point beforehand a time and place for God to irradi
ate your soul.
All these are very valid objections to the church-
forming disposition. § 4 Organisations under God
Yet still this leaves many dissatisfied. They want
to shout out about God. They want to share this
great thing with all mankind.
Why should they not shout and share?
Let them express all that they desire to express
in their own fashion by themselves or grouped with
their friends as they will. Let them shout chorally
if they are so disposed. Let them work in a gang
if so they can work the better. But let them guard
themselves against the idea that they can have God
particularly or exclusively with them in any such
undertaking. Or that so they can express God
rather than themselves.
That I think states the attitude of the modern
spirit towards the idea of a church. Mankind
passes for ever out of the idolatry of altars, away
from the obscene rites of circumcision and symbol
ical cannibalism, beyond the sway of the ceremonial

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH 167
priest. But if the modern spirit holds that religion
cannot be organised or any intermediary thrust be
tween God and man, that does not preclude infinite
possibilities of organisation and collective action
under God and within the compass of religion.
There is no reason why religious men should not
band themselves the better to attain specific ends.
To borrow a term from British politics, there is no
objection to ad hoc organisations. The objection
lies not against subsidiary organisations for service
but against organisations that may claim to be com
prehensive. For example there is no reason why one should
not — and in many cases there are good reasons
why one should — organise or join associations for
the criticism of religious ideas, an employment that
may pass very readily into propaganda.
Many people feel the need of prayer to resist the
evil in themselves and to keep them in mind of di
vine emotion. And many want not merely prayer
but formal prayer and the support of others, pray
ing in unison. The writer does not understand this
desire or need for collective prayer very well, but
there are people who appear to do so and there is no
reason why they should not assemble for that pur
pose. And there is no doubt that divine poetry,

168 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
divine maxims, religious thought finely expressed,
may be heard, rehearsed, collected, published, and
distributed by associations. The desire for ex
pression implies a sort of assembly, a hearer at
least as well as a speaker. And expression has
many forms. People with a strong artistic impulse
will necessarily want to express themselves by art
when religion touches them, and many arts, archi
tecture and the drama for example, are collective
undertakings. I do not see why there should not
be, under God, associations for building cathedrals
and suchlike great still places urgent with beauty,
into which men and women may go to rest from
the clamour of the day's confusions ; I do not see '
why men should not make great shrines and pic
tures expressing their sense of divine things, and
why they should not combine in such enterprises
rather than work to fill heterogeneous and chaotic
art galleries. A wave of religious revival and re
ligious clarification, such as I foresee, will most
certainly bring with it a great revival of art, re
ligious art, music, songs, and writings of all sorts,
drama, the making of shrines, praying places, tem
ples and retreats, the creation of pictures and
sculptures. It is not necessary to have priestcraft
and an organised church for such ends. Such en-

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH 169
richments of feeling and thought are part of the
service of God.
And again, under God, there may be associations
and fraternities for research in pure science; asso
ciations for the teaching and simplification of lan
guages; associations for promoting and watching
education; associations for the discussion of po
litical problems and the determination of right poli
cies. In all these ways men may multiply their
use by union. Only when associations seek to con
trol things of belief, to dictate formulae, restrict re
ligious activities or the freedom of religious
thought and teaching, when they tend to subdivide
those who believe and to set up jealousies or ex
clusions, do they become antagonistic to the spirit
of modern religion.
§ 5 The State is God's Instrument
Because religion cannot be organised, because
God is everywhere and immediately accessible to
every human being, it does not follow that religion
cannot organise every other human affair. It is
indeed essential to the idea that God is the In
visible King of this round world and all mankind,
that we should see in every government, great and
small, from the council of the world-state that is

170 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
presently coming, down to the village assembly, the
instrument of God's practical control. Religion
which is free, speaking freely through whom it will,
subject to a perpetual unlimited criticism, will be
the life and driving power of the whole organised
world. So that if you prefer not to say that there
will be no church, if you choose rather to declare
that the world-state is God's church, you may have
it so if you will. Provided that you leave con
science and speech and writing and teaching about
divine things absolutely free, and that you try to set
no nets about God.
The world is God's and he takes it. But he him
self remains freedom, and we find our freedom in
him.

THE ENVOY
So I end this compact statement of the renascent
religion which I believe to be crystallising out of
the intellectual, social, and spiritual confusions of
this time. It is an account rendered. It is a
statement and record; not a theory. There is noth
ing in all this that has been invented or constructed
by the writer; I have been but scribe to the spirit
of my generation; I have at most assembled and
put together things and thoughts that I have come
upon, have transferred the statements of " science "
into religious terminology, rejected obsolescent
definitions, and re-coordinated propositions that
had drifted into opposition. Thus, I see, ideas are
developing, and thus have I written them down.
It is a secondary matter that I am convinced that
this trend of intelligent opinion is a discovery of
truth. The reader is told of my own belief merely
to avoid an affectation of impartiality and aloof
ness. The theogony here set forth is ancient; one can
171

172 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
trace it appearing and disappearing and recurring
in the mutilated records of many different schools
of speculation; the conception of God as finite is
one that has been discussed very illuminatingly in
recent years in the work of one I am happy to write
of as my friend and master, that very great Amer
ican, the late William James. It was an idea that
became increasingly important to him towards the
end of his life. And it is the most releasing idea
in the system.
Only in the most general terms can I trace the
other origins of these present views. I do not think
modern religion owes much to what is called Deism
or Theism. The rather abstract and futile Deism
of the eighteenth century, of "votre Etre su
preme " who bored the friends of Robespierre, was
a sterile thing, it has little relation to these mod
ern developments, it conceived of God as an infinite
Being of no particular character whereas God is a
finite being of a very 'especial character. On the
other hand men and women who have set them
selves, with unavoidable theological preconceptions,
it is true, to speculate upon the actual teachings
and quality of Christ, have produced interpreta
tions that have interwoven insensibly with thoughts
more apparently new. There is a curious moder-

THE ENVOY 173
nity about very many of Christ's recorded say
ings. Revived religion has also, no doubt, been the
receiver of many religious bankruptcies, of Posi
tivism for example, which failed through its bleak
abstraction and an unspiritual texture. Religion,
thus restated, must, I think, presently incorporate
great sections of thought that are still attached to
formal Christianity. The time is at hand when
many of the organised Christian churches will be
forced to define their positions, either in terms
that will identify them with this renascence, or that
will lead to the release of their moreN liberal ad
herents. Its probable obligations to Eastern
thought are less readily estimated by a European
writer. Modern religion has no revelation and no
founder; it is the privilege and possession of no
coterie of disciples or exponents; it is appearing
simultaneously round and about the world exactly
as a crystallising substance appears here and there
in a super-saturated solution. It is a process of
truth, guided by the divinity in men. It needs no
other guidance, and no protection. It needs noth
ing but freedom, free speech, and honest statement.
Out of the most mixed and impure solution's a grow
ing crystal is infallibly able to select its substance.

174 GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
The diamond arises bright, definite, and pure out of
a dark matrix of structureless confusion.
This metaphor of crystallisation is perhaps the
best symbol of the advent and growth of the new
understanding. It has no church, no authorities,
no teachers, no orthodoxy. It does not even thrust
and struggle among the other things; simply it
grows clear. There will be no putting an end to it.
It arrives inevitably, and it will continue to sepa
rate itself out from confusing ideas. It becomes,
as it were the Koh-i-noor ; it is a Mountain of Light,
growing and increasing. It is an all-pervading lu
cidity, a brightness and clearness. It has no head
to smite, no body you can destroy; it overleaps all
barriers ; it breaks out in despite of every enclosure.
It will compel all things to orient themselves to it.
It comes as the dawn comes, through whatever
clouds and mists may be here or whatever smoke
and curtains may be there. It comes as the day
comes to the ships that put to sea.
St is the Kingdom of God at hand.

THE END

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