YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY Gift of

Frank C. Porter, Y'86

GOD AND MR. WELLS

issued for
The Rationalist Press Association, Limited

GOD AND MR. WELLS

A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF
"GOD THE INVISIBLE KING"

BY
WILLIAM ARCHER

London :
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C. 4
1917

FOREWORD
As I look through the proofs of this little
treatise, a twinge of compunction comes upon me.
That humane philosopher, Mr. Dooley, has some
where a saying to this effect : " When an astro
nomer tells me that he has discovered a new
planet, I would be the last man to brush the fly
off the end of his telescope." Would not this have
been a good occasion for a similar exercise of
urbanity ? Nay, may it not be said that my criti
cism of God the Invisible King is a breach of
discipline, like duelling in the face of the enemy ?
I am proud to think that Mr. Wells and I are
soldiers in the same army; ought we not at all
costs to maintain a united front ? On the destruc
tive side (which I have barely touched upon) his
book is brilliantly effective; on the constructive
side, if unconvincing, it is thoughtful, imaginative,
stimulating, a thing on the whole to be grateful
for. Ought one not rather to hold one's peace than
to afford the common enemy the encouragement
of witnessing a squabble in the ranks ?
But we must not yield to the obsession of mili
tary metaphor. It is not what the enemy thinks
or what Mr. Wells or I think that matters — it is

vi FOREWORD
what the men of the future ought to think, as
being consonant with their own nature and with
the nature of things. Ideas, like organisms, must
abide the struggle for existence, and if the Invisible
King is fitted to survive, my criticism will rein
force and not invalidate him. Even if he should
come to life in a way one can scarcely anticipate,
his proceedings will have to be carefully watched.
He cannot claim the reticences of a " party truce."
He will be all the better for a candid, though I
hope not captious, Opposition.
I thought of printing on my title-page a motto
from Mr. Bernard Shaw; but it will perhaps come
better here. " The fact," says Mr. Shaw, " that
a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to
the point than the fact that a drunken man is
happier than a sober one. The happiness of
credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of
happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of
life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a
nation of Socrateses would be much safer and
happier than a nation of Wesleys ; and its indi
viduals would be higher in the evolutionary scale.
At all events, it is in the Socratic man and not in
the Wesleyan that our hope lies now."
Besides, it has yet to be proved that the believer
in the Invisible King is happier than the sceptic.
London, May 24, 1917.

CONTENTS

i
PAGE
THF. GREAT ADVENTURER . ... 9

II
A GOD WHO " GROWED " . . 11
III
NEW MYTHS FOR OLD ..... 15
IV
THE APOSTLE'S CREED . . . . 36
V
WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? . .49
VI
FOR AND AGAINST PERSONIFICATION . . 72
VII
BACK TO THE VEILED BEING . . 96

THE GREAT ADVENTURER
When it was known that Mr. H. G. Wells had
set forth to discover God, all amateurs of intellec
tual adventure were filled with pleasurable excite
ment and anticipation. For is not Mr. Wells the
great Adventurer of latter-day literature ? No
quest is too perilous for him, no forlorn-hope too
daring. He led the first explorers to the moon.
He it was who lured the Martians to earth and
exterminated them with microbes. He has en
snared an angel from the skies and expiscated a
mermaid from the deep. He has mounted a Time
Machine (of his own invention) and gone careering
down the vistas of the Future. But these were
comparatively commonplace feats. After all, there
had been a Jules Verne, there had been a Gulliver
and a Peter Wilkins, there had been a More, a
Morris and a Bellamy. It might be that he was
fitted for far greater things. "There remains," we
said to ourselves, " the blue ribbon of intellectual
adventure, the unachieved North Pole of spiritual
exploration. He has had countless predecessors in
9

10 GOD AND MR. WELLS
the enterprise, some of whom have loudly claimed
success ; but their log-books have been full of mere
hallucinations and nursery tales. What if it should
be reserved for Mr. Wells to bring back the first
authentic news from a source more baffling than
that of Nile or Amazon — the source of the
majestic stream of Being ? What if it should be
given him to sign his name to the first truly-
projected chart of the scheme of things ? "
We almost held our breath in eager anticipation,
just as we did when there came from America a
well-authenticated rumor that the problem of flying
had at last been solved. Were we on the brink of
another and much more momentous discovery ?
Was Mr. Wells to be the Peary of the great quest ?
Or only the last of a thousand Dr. Cooks ?

II
A GOD WHO "GROWED"
Our excitement, our suspense, were so much
wasted emotion. Mr. Wells's enterprise was not at
all what we had figured it to be.
GOD
THE INVISIBLE KING
is a very interesting, and even stimulating, disquisi
tion, full of a fine social enthusiasm, and marked, in
many passages, by deep poetic feeling. But it is
not a work of investigation into the springs of
Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from the
outset any dealings with " cosmogony." It is a
description of a way of thinking, a system of
nomenclature, which Mr. Wells declares to be ex
tremely prevalent in " the modern mind," from
which he himself extracts much comfort and forti
fication, and which he believes to be destined to
regenerate the world.
But Mr. Wells will not have it that what is in-

12 GOD AND MR. WELLS
volved is a mere system of nomenclature. He avers
that he, in common with many other like-minded
persons, has achieved, not so much an intellectual
discovery, as an emotional realisation, of something
actual and objective which he calls God. He does
not, so far as I remember, use the term "objec
tive " ; but as he insists that God is " a spirit, a per
son, a strongly marked and knowable personality "
(p. 6), " a single spirit and a single person " (p. 21),
" a great brother and leader of our little beings "
(p. 29), with much more to the same purpose, it
would seem that he must have in his mind an object
external to us, no mere subjective " stream of ten
dency," or anything of that sort. It would of
course be foolish to doubt the sincerity of the con
viction which he so constantly and so eagerly
asserts. Nevertheless, one cannot but put forward,
even at this stage, the tentative theory that he is
playing tricks with his own mind, and attributing
reality and personality to something that was in its
origin a figure of speech. He has been hypnotized
by the word God :
As when we dwell upon a word we know,
Repeating, till the word we know so well
Becomes a wonder, and we know not why.
At all events, "God the Invisible King " is not
the creator and sustainer of the universe. As to
the origin of things Mr. Wells professes the most
profound agnosticism. " At the back of all known
things," he says, " there is an impenetrable cur-

A GOD WHO "GROWED" 13
tain ; the ultimate of existence is a Veiled Being,
which seems to know nothing of life or death or
good or ill. . . . The new religion does not pretend
that the God of its life is that Being, or that he has
any relation of control or association with that
Being. It does not even assert that God knows all,
or much more than we do, about that ultimate
Being " (p. 16). Very good; but — here is the first
question which seems to arise out of the Wellsian
thesis — are we not entitled to ask of " the new
religion " some more definite account of the rela
tion between "God" and "the Veiled Being"?
Surely it is not enough that it should simply refrain
from " asserting " anything at all on the subject.
If " God " is outside ourselves (" a Being, not us
but dealing with us and through us," p. 8), we can
not leave him hanging in the void, like the rope
which the Indian conjurer is fabled to throw up
into the air till it hooks itself on to nothingness. If
we are to believe in him as a lever for the righting
of a world that has somehow run askew, we want
to know something of his fulcrum. Is it possible
thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, and
proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God ?
Do we really get over any difficulty — do we not
rather create new difficulties, — by saying, as Mr.
Wells practically does, "Our God is no meta
physician. He does not care, and very likely does
not know, how this tangle of existence came into
being. He is only concerned to disentangle it a

14 GOD AND MR. WELLS
little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort
of seemliness and order " ? Is it an idle and pre
sumptuous curiosity which enquires whether we are
to consider him co-ordinate with the Veiled Being,
and in that case probably hostile, or subordinate,
and in that case instrumental ? Are we, in a word,
to consider the earth a little rebel state in the
gigantic empire of the universe, working out its
own salvation under its Invisible King ? Or are
we to regard God as the Viceroy of the Veiled
Being, to whom, in that case, our ultimate alle
giance is due ?
I talked the other day to a young Australian
who had been breaking new land for wheat-growing.
" What do you do," I asked, "with the stumps of
the trees you fell ? It must be a great labour to
clear them out." " We don't clear them out," he
replied. " We use ploughs that automatically rise
when they come to a stump, and take the earth
again on the other side." I cannot but conjecture
that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is fitted with
some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily
over the snags that stud the ploughlands of
theology.

IH
NEW MYTHS FOR OLD
Before examining the particular attributes and
activities of the Invisible King, let us look a little
more closely into the question whether a God
detached alike from man below and (so to speak)
from heaven above, is a thinkable God in whom
any satisfaction can be found. Mr. Wells must
not reply (he probably would not think of doing
so) that " satisfaction " is no test : that he asserts
an objective truth which exists, like the Nelson
Column or the Atlantic Ocean, whether we find
satisfaction in it or not. Though he does not men
tion the word "pragmatism," his standards are
purely pragmatist. He offers no jot or tittle of
evidence for the existence of the Invisible King,
except that it is a hypothesis which he finds to
work extremely well. Satisfaction and nothing else
is the test he applies. So we have every right to
ask whether the renunciation of all concern about
the Veiled Being, and concentration upon the
thought of a finite God, practically unrelated to
the infinite, can bring us any reasonable sense of
IS

1 6 GOD AND MR. WELLS
reconciliation to the nature of things. For that,
I take it, is the essence of religion.
It was in no spirit of irony that I began this
essay by expressing the lively interest with which
I learned that Mr. Wells was setting out on the
quest for God. The dogmatic agnosticism which
declares it impossible ever to know anything about
the whence, how and why of the universe, does not
seem to me more rational than any other dogma
which jumps from "not yet" to "never." Mr.
Wells himself disclaims that dogma. He says : " It
may be that minds will presently appear among
us of such a quality that the face of that Unknown
will not be altogether hidden" (p. 128). And in
another place (p. 17) he suggests that " our God,
the Captain of Mankind," may one day enable us
to " pierce the black wrappings," or, in other
words, to get behind the veil. There is nothing,
then, unreasonable or absurd in man's incurable
inquisitiveness as to God, in the non-Wellsian sense
of the term. God simply means the key to the
mystery of existence ; and though the keys hitherto
offered have all either jammed or turned round
and round without unlocking anything, it does not
follow that no real key exists, within the reach of
human investigation or speculation. Therefore one
naturally feels a little stirring of hope at the news
that a fresh and keen intellect, untrammelled by
the folk-lore theologies of the past, is applying
itself to the problem. It is always possible, how-

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 17
ever improbable, that we may be helped a little
forwarder on the path towards realisation. One
comes back to the before-mentioned analogy of
flying. We had been assured over and over again,
on the highest authority, that it was an idle dream.
When we wanted to express the superlative degree
of the impossible, we said " I can no more do it
than I can fly." But the irrepressible spirit of man
was not to be daunted by a priori demonstrations
of impossibility. One day there came the rumour
that the thing had been achieved, followed soon
by ocular demonstration; and now we rub
shoulders every day with men who have outsoared
the eagle, and — alas ! — carried death and destruc
tion into the hitherto stainless empyrean.
It would seem, then, that there is no reason
absolutely to despair of some advance towards a
conception of the nature and reason of the uni
verse. And it is certain that Mr. Wells's God
would stand a better chance of satisfying the innate
needs of the human intelligence if he had not
(apparently) given up as a bad job the attempt
to relate himself to the causal plexus of the All.
Is he outside that causal plexus, self-begotten, self-
existent? Then he is the miracle of miracles, a
second mystery superimposed on the first. If, on
the other hand, he falls within the system, he
might surely manage to convey to his disciples
some glimmering notion of his place in it. The
birth-stories of Gods are always grotesque and un-

18 GOD AND MR. WELLS
edifying, but that is because they belong to folk
lore. If this God does not belong to folk-lore,
surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be
indicated without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we
have seen, hints that his reticence may be due to
the fact that he does not know. In that case this
" modern " God is suspiciously like all the ancient
Gods, whose most unfortunate characteristic was
that they never knew anything more than their
worshippers. The reason was not far to seek —
namely, that they were mere projections of the
minds of those worshippers, fashioned in their own
image. But Mr. Wells assures us that this is not
the case of the Invisible King.
Mr. Wells will scarcely deny that, if it were pos
sible to compress his mythology and merge his
Invisible King in his Veiled Being, the result would
be a great simplification of the problem. But this
is not, in fact, possible ; for it would mean the
positing of an all-good and all-powerful Creator,
which is precisely the idea which Mr. Wells rebels
against,* in common with everyone who realizes
* In Mr. Britling Sees it Through, which is in some sense a
prologue to God the Invisible King, we find an emphatic re
nunciation of the all-good and all-powerful God. "The
theologians," says Mr. Britling, "have been extravagant about
God. They have had silly, absolute ideas — that he is all-
powerful. That he's omni-everything. . . . Why ! if I thought
there was an omnipotent God who looked down on battles and
deaths and all the waste and horror of this war — able to
prevent these things — doing them to amuse himself — I would
spit in his empty face " (p. 397).

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 19
the facts of life and the meaning of words. Short
of this, however, is no other simplification pos
sible ? Would it not greatly clarify our thought
if we could bring the Invisible King into action,
not, indeed, as the creator of all things, but as the
organizer and director of the surprising and almost
incredible epiphenomenon which we call life ? Our
scheme would then take this shape : an inconceiv
able unity behind the veil, somehow manifesting
itself, where it comes within our ken, in the dual
form of a great Artificer and a mass of terribly
recalcitrant matter — the only medium in which he
can work. In other words, the Veiled Being would
be as inscrutable as ever, but the Invisible King,
instead of dropping in with a certain air of futility,
like a doctor arriving too late at the scene of a
railway accident, would be placed at the begin
ning, not of the universe at large, but of the atomic
re-arrangements from which consciousness has
sprung. Can we, on this hypothesis (which is prac
tically that of Manichseanism), hazard any guess
at the motives or forces actuating the Invisible
King — or, to avoid confusion, let us say the
Artificer — which should acquit him of the charge
of being a callous and mischievous demon rather
than a well-willing God ? Can we not only place
pain and evil (a tautology) to the account of
sluggish, refractory matter, but also conjecture a
sufficient reason why the Artificer should have
started the painful evolution of consciousness, in-
b 2

20 GOD AND MR. WELLS
stead of leaving the atoms to whirl insentiently in
the figures imposed on them by the stupendous
mathematician behind the veil ?
A complete answer to this question would be a
complete solution of the riddle of existence. That,
if it be ever attainable, is certainly far enough off.
But there are some considerations, not always
sufficiently present to our minds, which may per
haps help us, not to a solution, but to a rational
restatement, of the riddle.
It is possible to suppose, in the first place, that
the Artificer, though entirely well-meaning, was
not a free agent. We can construct a myth in
which an Elder Power should announce to a
Younger Power his intention of setting a number
of sentient puppets dancing for his amusement,
and regaling himself with the spectacle of their
antics, in utter heedlessness of the agonies they
must endure, which would, indeed, lend an addi
tional savor to the diversion. This Elder Power,
with the " sportsman's " preference for pigeons as
against clay balls, would be something like the
God of Mr. Thomas Hardy. Then we can imagine
the Younger Power, after a vain protest, demand
ing, as it were, the viceroyalty of the new king
dom, in order that he might shape its polity to
high and noble ends, educe from tragic imperfec
tion some approach to perfection, and, in short,
make the best of a bad business. We should thus
have (let us say) Marcus Aurelius claiming a pro-

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 21
consulate under Nero, and, with very limited
powers, gradually substituting order and humanity
for oppression and rapine. This fairy-tale is not
unlike Mr. Wells's ; but I submit that it has the
advantage of placing the Invisible King, or his
equivalent, in a conceivable relation to the whole
mundane process.
Now let us proceed to the alternative hypothesis.
Let us suppose that the Artificer was a free agent,
and that he voluntarily, and in full view of the
consequences, engineered the conjunction of atoms
from which consciousness arose. He could have
let it alone ; he could have suffered life to remain
an abortive, slumbering potentiality, like the fire
in a piece of flint; yet he deliberately clashed the
flint and steel, and kindled the torch which was to
be handed on, not only from generation to genera
tion, but from species to species, through all the
stages of a toilsome, slaughterous, immeasurable
ascent. If we accept this hypothesis, can we acquit
the Artificer of wanton cruelty ? Can we view his
action with approval, even with gratitude? Or
must we, like Mr. Wells, if we wish to find an
outlet for religious emotion, postulate another,
subsequent, intermeddling Power — like, say, an
American consul at the scene of a Turkish mas
sacre — wholly guiltless of the disaster of life, and
doing his little best to mitigate and remedy it ?
In the present state of our knowledge, it is
certainly very difficult to see how the kindler of the

22 GOD AND MR. WELLS
vital lampada, supposing him to have been respon
sible for his actions, can claim from a jury of
human beings a verdict of absolute acquittal. But
we can, even now, see certain extenuating circum
stances, which evidence not yet available may
one day so powerfully reinforce as to enable
him to leave the Court without a stain on his
character. For one thing, we are too much impressed and
oppressed by the ideas of magnitude and multi
tude. Since we have realized the unspeakable in
significance of the earth in relation to the un
imaginable vastness of star-sown space, we have
come to feel such a disproportion between the
mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in
our own experience, that we have a vague sense
of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal carelessness,
in the responsible Power, whoever that may be.
" What is it all," we say, " but a trouble of ants
in the gleam of a million million of suns ? " We
feel like insects whom the foot of a heedless giant
may at any moment crush. We dream of the
swish of a comet's tail wiping out organic life on
the planet ; and we see, as a matter of fact, great
natural convulsions, such as the earthquake of
Lisbon or the eruption of Mont Pelee, treating
human communities just as an elephant might
treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasur
able disproportion in things that a pessimist poet
has expressed in the well-known sonnet : —

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 23
Know you, my friend, the sudden ecstasy
Of thought that time and space annihilates,
Creation in » moment uncreates,
And whirls the mind, from secular habit free,
Beyond the spheres, beyond infinity,
Beyond the empery of the eternal Fates,
To where the Inconceivable ruminates,
The unthinkable "To be or not to be"?
Then, as Existence flickers into sight,
A marsh-flame in the night of Nothingness —
The great, soft, restful, dreamless, fathomless night —
We know the Affirmative the primal curse,
And loathe, with all its imbecile strain and stress,
This ostentatious, vulgar Universe.
The mood here recorded is one that must be
familiar to most thinking people. " The undevout
astronomer is mad," said eighteenth-century
deism : to-day we are more apt to think that the
uncritical astronomer is dense. There is a sort of
colossal stupidity about the stars in their courses
that overpowers and disquiets us. If (as Alfred
Russel Wallace has argued) the geocentric theory
was not so far out after all, and the earth, holding
a specially favored place in the universe, is the
only home of life, then the disproportion of
mechanism to result seems absolutely appalling.
If, on the other hand, all the million million of
suns are pouring out vital heat to a like number
of inhabited planetary systems, the sheer quantity
of life, of struggle, of suffering implied, seems a
thought at which to shudder. We are inclined to
say to the inventor of sentience : " Since this in
genious combination of yours was at best such a

24 GOD AND MR. WELLS
questionable boon, surely you might have been
content with one experiment."
But all such criticism rests upon a fallacy, or
rather a brace of interrelated fallacies. There can
be no disproportion between consciousness and the
unconscious, because they are absolutely incom
mensurable; and number, in relation to conscious
ness, is an illusion. Consciousness, wherever it
exists, is single, indivisible, inextensible ; and other
consciousnesses, and the whole external universe,
are, to the individual percipient, but shapes in a
more or less protracted dream.
Why should we trouble about vastness — mere
extension in space ? There is a sense in which the
infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more
disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant,
the flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really
a more startling phenomenon than all the
mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In
worrying about the bigness and the littleness of
things, we are making the human body our stan
dard — the . body, whose dimensions are no doubt
determined by convenience in relation to terres
trial conditions, but have otherwise no sort of
sanctity or superiority, Tightness or fitness. It
happens to be the object to which is attached the
highest form of consciousness we know; but con
sciousness itself has neither parts nor magnitude.
And consciousness itself is essentially greater than
the very vastness which appals us, seeing that it

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 25
embraces and envelops it. Enormous depths of
space are pictured in my brain, through my optic
nerve; and what eludes the magic mirror of my
retina, my mind can conceive, apprehend, make its
own. It is not even true to say that the mind
cannot conceive infinity — the real truth (if I may
for once be Chestertonian), the real truth is that it
can conceive nothing else. " When Berkeley said
there was no matter " — it mattered greatly what
he said. Nothing can be more certain than that,
apart from percipience, there is no matter that
matters. From the point of view of pantheism
(the only logical theism) God, far from being a
Veiled Being, or an Invisible King, is precisely the
mind which translates itself into the visible, sen
sible universe, and impresses itself, in the form of
a never-ending pageant, upon our cognate minds.
It has been thought that human consciousness may
have come into being because God wanted an
audience. He was tired of being a cinematograph-
film unreeling before empty benches. Some people
have even carried the speculation further, and
wondered whether the attachment of percipience to
organized matter, as in the case of human beings,
may not be a necessary stage in the culture of a
pure percipience, capable of furnishing the pageant
of the universe with a permanent and appreciative
audience. In that case the Scottish Catechism
would be justified, which asks " What is the chief
end of man ? " and answers (as Stevenson says)

26 GOD AND MR. WELLS
nobly if obscurely: "To glorify God and to enjoy
Him for ever." But enough of these idle fantasies.
What is certain is that we can hold up our heads
serenely among the immensities, knowing that we
are immenser than they. Even if they were male
volent — and that they do not seem to be — they
are ho more terrible than the familiar dangers
of our homely earth. They cannot hurt us
more than we can be hurt — an obvious truism,
but one which is often overlooked. And this
brings us to the consideration of the second
fallacy which sometimes warps our judgment
as to the responsibility of the Power which
invented life.
We are all apt to speak and think as though
sentience were an article capable of accumulation,
like money or merchandise, in enormous aggre
gates — as though pleasure, and more particularly
pain, were subject to the ordinary rules of arith
metic, so that minor quantities, added together,
might mount up to an indefinitely gigantic total.
Poets and philosophers, time out of mind, have been
heartbroken over the enormous mass of evil in the
world, and have spoken as though animated nature
were one great organism, with a brain in which
every pang that afflicted each one of its innumer
able members was piled up into a huge, pyramidal
agony. But this is obviously not so. That very
" individuation " which to some philosophies is the
primal curse— the condition by all means to be

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 27
annulled and shaken off * — forbids the adding up
of units of sentience. If " individuation " is the
source of human misery (which seems a rather
meaningless proposition), it is beyond all doubt its
boundary and limit. We are each of us his own
universe. With each of us the universe is born
afresh; with each of us it dies — assuming, that is
to say, that consciousness is extinguished at death.
There never has been and never can be in the world
more suffering than a single organism can sustain
— which is another way of saying that nothing can
hurt us more than we can be hurt. Is this an opti
mistic statement ? Far from it. The individual is
capable of great extremities of suffering; and
though not all men, or even most, are put to the
utmost test in this respect, there are certainly
cases not a few in which a man may well curse the
day he was born, and see in the universe that was
born with him nothing but an instrument of tor
ture. But such an one must speak for himself. It
is evident that, take them all round, men accept
life as no such evil gift. It cannot even be said
that, in handing it on to others, they are driven by
a fatal instinct which they know in their hearts
to be cruel, and would resist if they could. The
vast majority have been, and still are, entirely
light-hearted about the matter, thus giving the
best possible proof that they cherish no grudge
* Mr. Wells hims.elf is not far from this view. See God the
Invisible King, pp. 87, 91, and this book, p. 42,

28 GOD AND MR. WELLS
against the source of being, but find it, on the
balance, acceptable enough. If it be said that
this is due to stupidity, then stupidity is one of
the factors in the case which the great Artificer
must be supposed to have foreseen and reckoned
upon. All these considerations must be taken into
account when we try to sum up the responsibility
of an organizer and director of life, acting of his
own free will, although he knew that the conditions
under which he had to work would make the
achievement of any satisfactory result a slow,
laborious and painful business.
"But sympathy ! " it may be said — " You have
left sympathy out of the reckoning. Unless we are
not only ' individuals ' but ironclad egotists, we
suffer with others more keenly, sometimes, than
in our own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is,
like the summer sun and the frost of winter, a fact
of common experience causing us alternate joy and
pain ; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of
" individuation." Our nearest and dearest are
simply factors in our environment, most influential
factors, but as external to us as the trees or the
stars. We cannot, in any real sense, draw away
their pains and add them to our own, any more
than they, in their turn, can relieve us of our
toothache or our sciatica. They are the points,
doubtless, at which our environment touches us
most closely; but neither incantation nor Act of
Parliament, neither priest nor registrar, can make

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 29
even man and wife really " one flesh." It was
necessary for the conservation of the species that
a strict limit should be set to the operation of
sympathy. Had that emotion been able to pierce
the shell of individuality, so that one being could
actually add the sufferings of another, or of
many others, to his own, life would long ago
have come to an end. As it is, sympathy im
plies an imaginative extension of individuality,
which is of enormous social value. But we
remain, none the less, isolated each in his own
universe, and our fellow-men and women are but
shapes in the panorama, the strange, fantastic
dream, which the Veiled Showman unrolls
before us.
In these post-Darwinian days, moreover, we are
inclined to give way to certain morbid and senti
mental exaggerations of sympathy, which do some
injustice to the great Artificer whom we are for
the moment assuming to be responsible for sentient
life. Many of us are much concerned about
"Nature, red in tooth and claw." It is a sort of
nightmare to us to think of the tremendous fecun
dity of swamp and jungle, warren and pond, and
of the ruthless struggle for existence which has
made earth, air, and sea one mighty battle-ground.
In this we are again letting the fallacy of number
take hold of us. There can be no aggregate of
suffering among lower, any more than among
higher, organisms; and the amount of pain which

30 GOD AND MR. WELLS
individual animals have to endure — even animals
of those species which we can suppose to possess
a certain keenness of sensibility — is probably, in
the vast majority of cases, very trifling. Half the
anguish of humanity proceeds from the power of
looking before and after. The animal, though he
may suffer from fear of imminent, visible danger,
cannot know the torture of long-drawn apprehen
sion. For most of his life he is probably aware of
a vague well-being; then of a longer or shorter —
often a very short — spell of vague ill-being; and
so, the end. Nor is it possible to doubt that the
experience of some animals includes a great deal
of positive rapture. If the lark be not really the
soul of joy, he is the greatest hypocrite under the
sun. Many insects seem to be pin-points of vibrant
vitality which we can scarcely believe to be un
accompanied by pleasurable sensation. The mos
quito which I squash on the back of my hand, and
which dies in a bath of my own blood, has had a
short life but doubtless a merry one. The moths
which in a tropic night, lie in calcined heaps around
the lamp, have probably perished in pursuit of
some ecstatic illusion. It does not seem, on the
whole, that we need expend much pity on the
brute creation, or make its destinies a reproach to
the great Artificer. Which is not to say, of course,
that we ought not to detest, and try with all our
might to abolish, the cruelties of labor, commerce,
sport and war.

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 31
Again, as to the great calamities — the earth
quakes, shipwrecks, railway accidents, even the
wars — which are often made a leading count in the
arraignment of the Author of Sentience, we must
not let ourselves be deceived by the fallacy of
number. Their spectacular, dramatic aspect
naturally attracts attention; but the death-roll of
a great shipwreck is in fact scarcely more terrible
than the daily bills of mortality of a great city.
It is true that a violent death, overtaking a
healthy man, is apt to involve moments, perhaps
hours of acute distress which he might have escaped
had he died of gradual decay or of ordinary well-
tended disease; and a very short space of the
agony sometimes attendant upon (say) a railway
accident, probably represents itself to the sufferer
as an eternity. But there is also another side to
the matter. Instantaneous death in a great cata
strophe must be reckoned as mere euthanasia ; and
even short of this, the attendant excitement has
often the effect of an anodyne. In the upshot, no
doubt, such occurrences are rightly called dis
asters, since their tendency is to cause needlessly
painful death, under circumstances, which, in the
main, enhance its terrors; but the sufferings of
the victims cannot be added together because they
occur within a limited area, any more than if they
had been spread over an indefinite tract of space.
As for war, it increases the liability of every indi
vidual who comes within its wide-flung net to

32 GOD AND MR. WELLS
intense bodily and mental suffering, and to pre
mature and painful death. Moreover, it destroys
social values which can be added up. In this
respect it leaves the world face to face with an
appalling deficit. But we must not let it weigh
upon us too heavily, or make it too great a re
proach to the Artificer of human destiny. For the
soldier, like every other sentient organism, is im
mured in his own universe, and his individual
debit-and-credit account with the Power which
placed him there would be no whit different if he
were indeed the only real existence, and the world
around him were naught but a dance of shadows.
If there were a country of a hundred million
people, in which every citizen was born to an
allowance of five pounds, which in all his life he
could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock
enterprises, though he might leave some of it
unexpended — we should not, in spite of the
£500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy
country. Its effective wealth would be precisely
a five-pound note. Similarly, given a world in
which everyone is born with a limited capacity of
sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we
should do wrong to call that world a multi-million
aire in misery, even if it could be proved that in
each individual account the balance of sensation
was on the wrong side of the ledger. It is true
that if, in one man's account, the balance were
largely to the bad, he would be entitled to reproach

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 33
the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred
or five thousand of his fellows declared themselves
satisfied with the result of their audit. But if the
Banker, in opening business, had good reason to
think that, in the long run, the contents would
largely outvote the non-contents, we could scarcely
blame him for going ahead. And what if, for
contents and malcontents alike, he had an un-
covenanted bonus up his sleeve ?
In this disquisition, with its shifting personifica
tions, its Artificer, Author, Banker and the like,
l we may seem to have wandered far away from
Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the
reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us re
capitulate. Starting from the idea that its total
renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as
to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's sys
tem, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these
matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual
outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not
be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence,
omniscience and omni-benevolence, and yet to
conceive a doctrine of origins into which a well-
willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible
King, as a sort of remedial afterthought, but as
a prime mover in this baffling business of life. We
put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed
more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than
Mr. Wells's scheme of things. We imagined a
c

34 GOD AND MR. WELLS
wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly setting
up combinations in matter which it knew would
work out in cruelty and misery, and another co
ordinate though not quite equal Power interfering
from the first to introduce into the combinations
of the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards
the good. Then we proposed an alternative
hypothesis, logically simpler, though more difficult
from the moral point of view. We conceived at
the source of organic life an intelligent and well-
willing Power constrained, by some necessity
" behind the veil," to carry out his purposes
through the sluggish, refractory, hampering
medium of matter. Supposing this Power free to
act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether
he could take the affirmative course — choose the
" Everlasting Yea " as Carlyle would phrase it —
without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for
the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of
the term. In a tentative way, not exempt, per
haps, from a touch of special pleading, we advanced
certain considerations which seemed to suggest
that his decision to kindle the torch of life might,
after all, be justified. Our provisional conclusion
was that though, as at present advised, we might
not quite see our way to hail him as a beneficent
Invisible King, yet we need not go to the opposite
extreme of writing him down a mere Ogre God,
indifferent to the vast and purposeless process of
groaning and travail, begetting and devouring,

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 35
which he had wantonly initiated. That is the
point at which we have now arrived.
I hope it need not be said I do not attribute
any substantive value to the hypothetical myths
here put forward and discussed — that I do not
accept either of them, or propose that anyone else
should accept it, as a probable adumbration of
what actually occurred " in the beginning " — a
first chapter in a new Book of Genesis. My pur
pose was simply, since myth-making was the order
of the day, to hint a criticism of Mr. Wells's myth,
by placing beside it one or two other fantasies,
perhaps as plausible as his, which had the advan
tage of not entirely eluding the question of origins.
I submit, with great respect, that my Artificer
comes a little less out of the blue than his Invisible
King — that is all I claim for him.
But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not with
out indignation. Myth-making, he declares, is not
the order of the day. Had he wanted to indulge
in myth-making, he could easily have found some
metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King.
What he has done is to record a profound spiritual
experience, common to himself and many other
good men and true, which has culminated in the
recognition of an actual Power, objectively extant
in the world, to which he has felt it a sacred duty
to bear witness. Very good; so be it; let us now
look more in detail into the gospel according to
Wells. C 2

IV
THE APOSTLE'S CREED
A gospel it is, in all literalness ; an evangel ; a
message of glad tidings. It is not merely a truth,
it is " the Truth " (p. 2). Let there be no mistake
about it : Mr. Wells's ambition is to rank with St.
Paul and Mahomet, as the apostle of a new world-
religion. He does not in so many words lay claim
to inspiration, but it is almost inevitably deducible
from his premises. He is uttering the first clear
and definite tidings of a God who is endowed with
personality, character, will and purpose. To that
Deity he has submitted himself in enthusiastic
devotion. If the God does not seize the oppor
tunity to speak through such a marvellously suit
able, such an ideal, mouthpiece, then practical
common-sense cannot be one of his attributes.
Which of the other Gods who have announced
themselves from time to time has found such a
megaphone to reverberate his voice ? St. Paul was
a poor tent-maker, whose sermons were not even
reported in the religious press, while his letters
probably counted their public by scores, or at most
3°

THE APOSTLE'S CREED 37
by hundreds. Mr. Wells, from the outset of his
mission, has the ear of two hemispheres.
What, then, does he tell us of his God ? The first
characteristic which differentiates him from all the
other Gods with a big G — for of course we pay no
heed to the departmental gods of polytheism — the
first fact we must grasp and hold fast to, is that
he lays no claim to infinity. " This new faith . . .
worships a finite God " (p. 6; Mr. Wells's italics).
" He has begun and he never will end " (p. 21).
" He is within time and not outside it " (p. 8).
Nothing can be more definite than that. There
was a time when God did not exist; and then
somehow, somewhen, he came into being.
Perhaps to ask " When ? " would be to trespass
on the department of origins, from which we are
explicitly warned off. It would be to trench upon
" cosmogony." Yet we are not quite without
guidance. " The renascent religion," we are told,
" has always been here; it has always been visible
to those that had eyes to see " (p. 2). " Always,"
in this context, can only mean during the whole
course of human history. Therefore God must have
come into being some time between the issue of the
creative fiat and the appearance of man on the
planet. This is a pretty wide margin, but it is
something to go upon. He may have been con
temporary with the amoeba, or with the ichthyo
saurus, or haply with the earliest quadrumana.
At the very latest (if " always " is accurate) he

38 GOD AND MR. WELLS
must have made his appearance exactly at the
same time as man; and if I were to give my
opinion, I should say that was extremely probable.
At all events, even if he preceded man by a few
thousand or million years, we are compelled to
assume that he came in preparation for the advent
of the human species, determined to be on hand
when wanted. For we do not gather that the lower
animals stand in need of his services, or are capable
of benefiting by them. One might be tempted to
conceive him as guiding the course of evolution and
hastening its laggard process; but (as we shall
see) he scorns the r61e of Providence, and reso
lutely abstains from any intromission in organic
or meteorological concerns. It would be pleasant
to think that he had something to do with (for
instance) the retreat of the ice-cap in the northern
hemisphere ; but we are not encouraged to indulge
in any such speculation. It would appear that the
activity of God is purely psychical and moral —
that he has no interest in biology, except as it
influences, and is influenced by, sociology. In
short, from all that one can make out, this God is
strictly correlative to Man ; and that is a significant
fact which we shall do well to bear in mind.
As we have already seen, the Infinite (or Veiled)
Being is not God (p. 15) ; nor is God the Life Force,
the " impulse thrusting through matter and cloth
ing itself in continually changing material forms
. . . the Will to Be " (p. 18). As we have also

THE APOSTLE'S CREED 39
seen, Mr. Wells refuses to define the relation of his
God, this " spirit," this " single spirit and single
person," to either of these inscrutable entities.
" God," he says, " comes to us neither out of the
stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a still
small voice within " (p. 21). It is by " faith " that
we " find " him (p. 15) ; but Mr. Wells " doubts
if faith can be complete and enduring if it is not
secured by the definite knowledge of the true God "
(p. 160). What, then, is " faith " in this context ?
It would be too much to say, with the legendary
schoolboy, that it is " believing what you know
isn't true." The implication seems rather to be
that if you begin by believing on inadequate
grounds, you will presently attain to belief on ade
quate grounds, or, in other words, knowledge. Thus,
when you go to a spiritual seance in a sceptical
frame of mind, the chill of your aura frightens the
spirits away, and you obtain no manifestations ;
but if you go in a mood of faith, which practically
means confident expectation, the phenomena
follow, and you depart a convert. I use this illus
tration in no scoffing spirit. The presupposition is
not irrational. It amounts, in effect, to saying that
you must go some way to meet God before God
can or will come to you. This seems a curious coy
ness; but as God is finite and conditioned, a bit
of a character (" a strongly marked and knowable
personality," p. 6.), there is nothing contradictory
in it. Even when we read that " the true God

40 GOD AND MR. WELLS
goes through the world like fifes and drums and
flags, calling for recruits along the street " (p. 48),
we must not seize upon the letter of a similitude,
and talk about inconsistency. You must go out
to meet even the Salvation Army. It offers you
salvation in vain if you obstinately bolt your door,
and insist that an Englishman's house is his castle.
The finding of this God is very like what revival
ists call " conversion " (p. 25). You are oppressed
by " the futility of the individual life " ; you fall
into " a state of helpless self-disgust " (p. 25) ;
you are, in short, in the condition described by
Hamlet when he says : *' It goes so heavily with my
disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems
to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent
canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden
fire, why it appears no other thing to me but a
foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." The
condition may result, as in Hamlet's case, from an
untoward conjunction of outward circumstances ;
or it may be of physiological (liverish) origin. The
methods of treatment are many — some of them
(such as the administration of alcohol in large
doses) disastrously unwise. In some states of
society and periods of history, religion is the popu
lar specific; and there have been, and are, forms
of religion to which alcohol would be preferable.
Fortunately, one can say without a shadow of
hesitancy that " the modern religion " lies under

THE APOSTLE'S CREED 41
no such suspicion. As dispensed by Mr. Wells, it
is entirely wholesome. If it is found to cheer, it will
certainly not inebriate. Indeed, the doubt one feels
as to its popular success lies in the very fact that it
contains but an innocuous proportion of alcohol.
You find yourself, then, in the distressful case
described by Hamlet and Mr. Wells. "Man de
lights you not, no, nor woman neither." You
cannot muster up energy even to kill King
Claudius. You go about gloomily soliloquizing on
suicide and kindred topics. Then, " in some way
the idea of God comes into the distressed mind "
(p. 25). It develops through various stages, out
lined by Mr. Wells in the passage cited. In the
modern man, it would seem, one great difficulty
lies in " a curious resistance to the suggestion that
God is truly a person " (p. 26). It is here, no
doubt, that faith comes in; at all events, you
ultimately get over this stumbling-block. " Then
suddenly, in a little while, fn his own time, God
comes, v The cardinal experience is an undoubting
immediate sense of God. It is the attainment of
an absolute certainty that one is not alone in one
self " (p. 27). You have come, in fact, to the gate
of Damascus. You have found salvation.
Yes, salvation ! — there is no other word for it.
Mr. Wells does not hesitate to use both that word
and its correlative, damnation. From what, then,
are you saved ? Why, from quite a number of
things. You are saved " from the purposelessness

42 GOD AND MR. WELLS
of life " (p. 22). God's immortality has " taken
the sting from death " (p.* 26). You have escaped
" from the painful accidents and chagrins of in
dividuation " (p. 87). " Salvation is to lose one
self " (p. 87) ; it is "a complete turning away
from self " (p. 100). " Damnation is really over-
individuation, and salvation is escape from self
into the larger being of life " (p. 91). In another
place we are told that salvation is " escape from
the individual distress at disharmony and the in
dividual defeat by death, into the Kingdom of
God, and damnation can be nothing more and
nothing less than the failure or inability or dis
inclination to make that escape " (p. 174). On the
next page we have another definition of damna
tion (borrowed, it would seem, from Mr. Clutton
Brock), with which I hasten to express my cordial
and enthusiastic agreement : " Satisfaction with
existing things is damnation." I have always
thought that hell was the headquarters of con
servatism, and am delighted to find such influential
backing for that pious opinion.
As for sin, it seems to be a falling away from the
state of grace attained through conversion. You
can and do sin while you are still unconverted;
for we are told that " repentance is the beginning
and essential of the religious life " (p. 194). Prob
ably (though this is not clear) your unregenerate
condition is in itself sinful, " individuation " being
not very different from the Original Sin of the

THE APOSTLE'S CREED 43
theologians. But it is sin after regeneration that
really matters. " Salvation leaves us still dis
harmonious, and adds not one inch to our spiritual
and moral nature " (p. 172). "It is the amazing
and distressful discovery of every believer so soon
as the first exaltation of belief is past, that one
does not remain always in touch with God" (p.
176). One backslides. One reverts to one's un-
regenerate type. The old Adam makes disquieting
resurgences in the swept and garnished mansion
from which he seemed to have been for ever cast
out. " This is the personal problem of Sin. Here
prayer avails; here God can help us" (p. 177).
And what is still more consoling, " though you sin
seventy times seven times, God will still forgive
the poor rest of you. . . . There is no sin, no state
that, being regretted and repented of, can stand
between God and man " (p. 184).
We shall have to consider later what useful pur
pose (if any) is served by this free-and-easy use
of the dialect of revivalism. In the meantime, one
would be sorry to seem to write without respect
of the depth of conviction which Mr. Wells throws
into his account of the supreme spiritual ex
perience of finding God. " Thereafter," he says,
" one goes about the world like one who was lonely
and has found a lover, like one who was perplexed
and has found a solution " (p. 28). God is a
" huge friendliness, a great brother and leader of
our little beings" (p. 29). "He is a stimulant;

44 GOD AND MR. WELLS
he makes us live immortally and more abundantly.
I have compared him to the sensation of a dear
strong friend who comes and stands quietly beside
one, shoulder to shoulder " (p. 47). It certainly
takes some courage for a modern Englishman, not
by profession a licensed dealer in spiritual senti
mentality, to write like this.
And now comes the question, What does God do ?
What does he aim at ? And how does he effect his
purposes? The answer seems to be that, in a
literal, tangible sense, he does nothing. He
operates solely in and through the mind of man;
and even through the mind of man he does not in
fluence external events. This, it may be said, is
impossible, since all those external events which
we call human conduct flow from the mind of man.
Perhaps it would be correct to say (for here Mr.
Wells gives us no explicit guidance) that external
events are only a by-product of the influence of
God : that, having begotten a certain spiritual state
which he feels to be generally desirable, he takes
no responsibility for the particular consequences
that are likely to flow from it. So, at least, one
can best interpret Mr. Wells's repeated disclaimer
of the idea that " God is Magic or God is Provi
dence " (p. 32), that "all the time, incalculably,
he is pulling about the order of events for our
personal advantages " (p. 43). Commenting on
Mr. Edwyn Bevan's phrase for God, "the Friend
behind phenomena," Mr. Wells insists that the

THE APOSTLE'S CREED 45
expression " carries with it no obligation whatever
to believe that this Friend is in control of the
phenomena" (p. 104). Perhaps not; but it is a
question for after consideration whether lucidity
is promoted by giving the name God to a Power
which has no power — which does not seem even to
make directly purposive use of the influence which
it possesses over the minds of believers. Once, in
a coasting steamer on the Pacific, I nearly died
of sea-sickness. A friend was with me, the soul of
kindness, such a lovable old man that I write this
down partly for the pleasure of recalling him. He
used to come to my cabin every hour or so, shake
his head mournfully, and go away again. I felt
his good will and was grateful for it ; but it would
be affectation to pretend that I would not have
been still more grateful had he possessed some
" control of phenomena " — had he brought with
him a remedy. Since those days, more than one
efficacious preventive of sea-sickness has been dis
covered ; and I own to counting the nameless
chemists who have achieved this marvel among the
most authentic friends to poor humanity of whom
we have any knowledge. Where is the God (as
Mr. Zangwill has pertinently enquired) who will
give us a cure for cancer ?
This, however, is a digression, or at any rate
an anticipation. What the Invisible King actually
does, without meddling with phenomena, is to
assume the " captaincy " of the " racial adven-

46 GOD AND MR. WELLS
ture " in which we are engaged (p. 91). " God
must love his followers as a great captain loves his
men . . . whose faith alone makes him possible.
It is an austere love. The Spirit of God will not
hesitate to send us to torment and bodily death "
(p. 81). And what is this " racial adventure " ?
It is, in the first place, the achievement of Mr.
Wells's political ideals — an object which has all
my sympathy, since they happen to be, generally
speaking, my own. "As a knight in God's ser
vice," says Mr. Wells, " I take sides against in
justice, disorder, and against all those temporal
kings, emperors, princes, landlords, and owners,
who set themselves up against God's rule and wor
ship " (p. 116). By all means ! Only one does
not see how, if the kings, emperors and landlords
declare that they, too, have found God, and found
him on the side of monarchy and landlordism, this
contention of theirs is to be confuted. If God
does not control phenomena, the actual controllers
of events will be able to maintain in the future, as
in the past, that he is on the side of the big bat
talions — an argument which it will be hard to
meet, except by raising bigger battalions. In the
meantime we have to note that God's political
opinions are only provisional, and that he himself
is open to conviction. " The first purpose of God
is the attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge
as a means to more knowledge, and of knowledge
as a means to power " (p. 117). And the object

THE APOSTLE'S CREED 47
to which he will apply this power is " the conquest
of death : first the overcoming of death in the in
dividual by the incorporation of the motives of his
life into an undying purpose, and then the defeat
of that death which seems to threaten our species
upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun "
(p. 118). Ultimately, then, it would seem that
God does intend to undertake the control of
phenomena. Dealing with ice-caps is not so en
tirely outside his province as one had hastily
assumed. The Invisible King is not, after all, a
roi faineant. He will begin to do things as soon
as he knows how : any other course would be ob
viously rash. One would like to live a few hundred
thousand years, to see him come into overt action.
Yet, in this far-reaching program, there seems to
lurk a certain contradiction, or at least an am
biguity. If, for the believer in God, death has,
here and now, lost its sting — if " we come stagger
ing through into the golden light of his kingdom,
to fight for his kingdom henceforth, until, at last,
we are altogether taken up into his being " (p. 81)
— one does not quite; see the reason for this long cam
paign against death. Surely the logical consum
mation would be an ultimate racial euthanasia, an
absorption of humanity into God, a vast apotheosis-
nirvana, after which the earth and sun could go
on cooling at their leisure.
Apart from one or two irrepressible "asides,"

48 GOD AND MR. WELLS
I have attempted in this chapter to let Mr. Wells
speak for himself, proclaim the faith that is in
him, and draw the portrait of his God. Many
details are of course omitted, for which the reader
must turn to the original text. He will find it a
pleasant and profitable task. The remainder of
my present undertaking falls into three parts.
First I must ask the reader to consider with me
whether Mr. Wells's gospel can be accepted as a
real addition to knowledge, like (say) the discovery
of radium, or whether it is only a re-description
in new language (or old language slightly refur
bished) of familiar facts of spiritual experience.
In the second place, assuming that we have to fall
back on the latter alternative, we shall enquire
whether anything would be gained by the general
acceptance of this new-old, highly emotionalized
terminology. Thirdly, I shall venture to suggest
that when Mr. Wells says " The first purpose of
God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of know
ledge as a means to more knowledge, and of know
ledge as a means to power," he is only choosing a
mythological way of expressing the fact that if
God (in the ordinary, non-Wellsian sense of the
word) is ever to be found, it must be through
patient investigation of the phenomena in which
he clothes himself.

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD?
Though many of Mr. Wells's asseverations ol
the substantive reality of his Invisible King have
been quoted above, it would be easy to lengthen
their array. There is nothing on which he is so
insistent. For example, " God is no abstraction
nor trick of words. . . ,* He is as real as a bayonet
thrust or an embrace " (p. 67). And again, on the
same page : " He feels us and knows us ; he is
helped and gladdened by us. He hopes and
attempts." There is no limit to the anthropo
morphism of the language which Mr. Wells cur
rently employs. Or rather, there is only one limit :
he disclaims the notion that his God is actually
existent in space, that he has parts and dimensions,
and inhabits a form in any way analogous to ours.
He is the Invisible King, not merely, like the
Spanish Fleet, because he "is not yet in sight,"
but because he has no material or " astral "
* The words here omitted, "no Infinite," are nothing to the
present purpose. Mr. Wells has started by making this
declaration, which we accept without difficulty. No one will
suspect the Invisible King of being an "Infinite" in disguise.
49 D

50 GOD AND MR. WELLS
integument. Being outside space (though inside
time) he can be omnipresent (p. 73). But of course
Mr. Wells would not pretend that no deity can be
called anthropomorphic who is not actually con
ceived as incarnate in the visible figure of a man.
An anthropomorphic God is one who reflects the
mental characteristics of his worshippers ; and that
Mr. Wells's God does, if ever God did in this
world. Yet almost in the same breath in which he is
claiming for his God the fullest independent reality
— thinking of him " as having moods and aspects,
as a man has, and a consistency we call his char
acter " (p. 75) — he will use language implying that
he is that very abstraction of the better parts of
human nature which has been proposed for worship
in all the various " religions of humanity,"
"ethical churches," and so forth, for two or three
generations past. Listen to this : " Though he
does not exist in matter or space, he exists in time,
just as a current of thought may do; he changes
and becomes more even as a man's thought gathers
itself together ; somewhere in the dawning of man
kind he had a beginning, an awakening, and as
mankind grows he grows. . . . He is the undying
human memory, the increasing human will "
(p. 73). When, in the last chapter, I discussed the
date of the divinity's birth, I had overlooked this
text. Here we have it in black and white that
he did not precede mankind — that, of course,

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 51
would have implied independence — but began
with the " dawning " of the race, and has grown
with its growth. Moreover, the analogy of a
" current of thought " is expressly suggested — re
inforcing the suspicion which has all along haunted
us that the God of Mr. Wells is nothing else than
what is known to less mythopceic thinkers as a
" stream of tendency." But Mr. Wells will by no
means have it so. Indeed he evidently regards this
as the most annoying, and perhaps damnable, of
heresies. On the very next page he proceeds to
rule out the suggestion that " God is the collective
mind and purpose of the human race." "You
may declare," he says, " that this is no God, but
merely the sum of mankind. But those who
believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that.
God is, they say, not an aggregate but a syn
thesis." And he goes on to suggest various analo
gies : a temple is more than a gathering of stones,
a regiment more than an accumulation of men :
we do not love the soil of our back garden, or the
chalk of Kent, or the limestone of Yorkshire; yet
we love England, which is made up of these things.
So God is more than the sum or essence of the
nobler impulses of the race : he is a spirit, a person,
a friend, a great brother, a captain, a king : he
" is love and goodness " (p. 180) ; and without
him the Service of Man is " no better than a hobby,
a sentimentality or a hypocrisy " (p. 113).
Let us reflect a little upon these analogies, and
D 2

52 GOD AND MR. WELLS
see whether they rest on any solid basis. Why is
a temple more than a heap of stones ? Because
human intelligence and skill have entered into the
stones and organized them to serve a given pur
pose or set of purposes : to delight the eye, to
elevate the mind, to express certain ideas, to afford
shelter for worshippers against wind, rain and sun.
Why is a regiment more than a mob ? Again be
cause it has been deliberately and elaborately
organised to fulfil certain functions. Why is Eng
land more than the mere rocks of which it is com
posed ? Because these materials have been
grouped, partly by nature, but very largely by the
labor of untold generations of our fathers, into
forms which give pleasure to the eye and appeal
to our most intimate and cherished associations.
Besides, when we speak of "England," we do not
think only or mainly of its physical aspects. We
think of it as a great community, with an ancient,
and in some ways admirable, tradition of political
life, with a splendid record of achievement in both
material and spiritual things, with a great past,
and (we hope) a greater future. In all these cases
the parts have been fused into a whole by human
effort, either consciously or instinctively applied;
and it is in virtue of this effort alone that the
whole transcends its parts. But in the case of a God
" synthetized " out of the thought and feeling of
untold generations of men, the analogy breaks
down at every point. To assume that portions of

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD 53
psychic experience are capable of vital coalescence,
is to beg the whole question. We know that stone
can be piled on stone, that men can be trained to
form a platoon, a cohort, a phalanx; but that de
tached fragments of mind are capable of any sort
of cohesion and organization we do not know at
all. And, even if this point could be granted,
where is the organizing power ? We should have
to postulate another God to serve as the architect
or the drill-sergeant of our synthetic divinity. Nor
would it help matters to suggest that the God (as
it were) crystallized himself ; for that is to assume
structural potentialities in his component parts
which must have come from somewhere, so that
again we have to presuppose another God. It is
true, no doubt, that portions of thought and
feeling can be collected, arranged, edited, in some
sense organized, by human effort; but the result
is an encyclopaedia, a thesaurus, an anthology, a
liturgy, a bible — not a God. It may, like the
Vedas, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Koran, be
come an object of idolatry; but even its idolaters
see in it only an emanation from God, not the
God himself. All this argument may strike the
reader as extremely nebulous, but I submit that
the fault is not mine. It was not I who sought to
demonstrate the reality of a figure of speech by
placing it on all fours with a cathedral and a regi
ment. The whole contention is so baffling that
reason staggers and flounders as in a quicksand.

54 GOD AND MR. WELLS
It rests upon a mixture of categories as palpable
and yet as elusive as anything in The Hunting of
the Snark.
If you tell me that Public Opinion is a God, I
am quite willing to consider whether the metaphor
is a luminous and helpful one. But if you protest
that it is no metaphor at all, but a literal state
ment of fact, like the statement that Mr. Woodrow
Wilson is President of the United States, I no
longer know where we are. Mr. Wells's " undying
human memory and increasing human will " can
not exactly be identified with Public Opinion, but
it belongs to the same order of ideas. Here there
is an actual workable analogy. But there is no
practicable analogy between a purely mental con
cept and a physical construction. You will not
help me to believe in (say) the doctrine of Original
Sin, by assuring me that it is built, like the Tower
Bridge, on the cantilever principle.
It is quite certain that, if passionate conviction
and the free use of anthropomorphic language can
make a figure of speech a God, the Invisible King
is an individual entity, as detached from Mr. Wells
as Michelangelo's Moses from Michelangelo. Para
doxically enough, he has put on " individuation "
that his worshippers may escape from it. Mr.
Wells's book teems with expressions — I have given ¦
many examples of them — which are wholly in
applicable to any metaphor, however galvanized
into a semblance of life by ecstatic contemplation

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 55
in the devotional mind. For example, when we
are told that it is doubtful whether "God knows
all, or much more than we do, about the ultimate
Being," the mere assertion of a doubt implies the
possibility of knowledge of a quite different order
from any that exists in the human intelligence.
Mr. Wells explicitly assures us that knowledge of
the Veiled Being is (for the present at any rate)
inaccessible to our faculties; but he implies that
such knowledge may be possessed by the Invisible
King ; and as knowledge cannot possibly be a syn
thesis of ignorances, it follows that the Invisible
King has powers of apprehension quite different
from, and independent of, any operation of the
human brain. These powers may not, as a matter
of fact, have solved the enigma of existence; but
it is clearly implied that they might conceivably
do so ; and indeed the text positively asserts that
God knows something more of the Veiled Being
than we do, though perhaps not " much." In view
of this passage, and many others of a like nature,
we cannot fall back on the theory that Mr. Wells
is merely trying, by dint of highly imaginative
writing, to infuse life into a deliberate personifica
tion, like Robespierre's Goddess of Reason or
Matthew Arnold's Zeitgeist. However difficult it
may be, we must accustom ourselves to the belief
that his assertions of the personal existence of his
God represent the efficient element in his thought,
and that if other passages seem inconsistent with

56 GOD AND MR. WELLS
that idea — seem to point to mere abstraction or
allegorization of the mind of the race — it is these
passages, and not the more full-blooded pronounce
ments, that must be cancelled as misleading or
inadequate. There can be no doubt that the God
to whom Mr. Wells seeks to convert us is (in his
apostle's conception) much more of a President
Wilson than of a Zeitgeist.
It would be possible, of course, for a God, how
ever dubious and even inconceivable the method
of his "synthesis," to manifest himself in his
effects — to prove his existence by his actions. But
this, as we have seen, the Invisible King scorns
to do. His adherents, we are told, " advance no
proof whatever of the existence of God but their
realization of him" (p. 116). There is a sort of
implication that the Deity will not descend to
vulgar miracle-working. " An evil and adulterous
generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no
sign be given to it "—not even " the sign of Jonah
the prophet."
But to ask for some sort of visible or plausibly
conjecturable effect is not at all the same thing as
to ask for miracles. Mr. Wells proclaims with all
his might that the Invisible King works the most
marvellous and beneficent changes in the minds of
his devotees; why, then, do these changes produce
no recognizable effect on the course of events ? The
God who can work upon the human mind has the

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 57
key to the situation in his hands — why, then, does
he make such scant use of it ? Is God only a
luxury for the intellectually wealthy ? The cham
pagne of the spiritual life ? A stimulant and
anodyne highly appreciated in the best circles, but
inaccessible to the man of small spiritual means,
whether he be a dweller in palaces or in the slums ?
To say that a given Power can and does potently
affect the human mind, and yet cannot, or at least
does not, produce any appreciable or demonstrable
effect on the external aspects of human life, is like
asking us to believe that a man is a heaven-born
conductor who can get nothing out of his orchestra
but discords and cacophonies.
Mr. Wells may perhaps reply that his God does
recognizably influence the course of events — indeed,
that everything in history which we see to be good
and desirable is the work of the Invisible King —
but that he does not advance this fact as a proof
of God's existence, because it is discernible only to
the eye of faith and cannot be brought home to
unregenerate reason. I do not imagine that he will
take this line, for it would come dangerously near
to identifying God with Providence — a heresy
which he abhors. But supposing some other adept
in "modern religion " were to make this claim on
behalf of the Invisible King, would it go any way
towards persuading us that we owe him our
allegiance ?
The assumption would be, as I understand it,

58 GOD AND MR. WELLS
that of a finite God, unable to modify the opera
tions of matter, but with an unlimited, or at any
rate a very great, power of influencing the workings
of the human mind. He would have no control
over meteorological conditions : he could not " ride
in the whirlwind and direct the storm"; he could
not subdue the earthquake or prevent the Green
land glacier from " calving " icebergs into the
Atlantic. He could not release the human body
from the rhythms of growth and decay; he could
not eradicate that root of all evil, the association
of consciousness with a mechanism requiring to be
constantly stoked with a particular sort of fuel
which exists only in limited quantities. If God
could arrange for life to be maintained on a diet
of inorganic substances — if he could enable
animals, like plants, to go direct to minerals and
gases for their sustenance, instead of having it, so
to speak, half-digested in the vegetable kingdom
— or even if, under the present system, he could
make fecundity, in any given species, automatic
ally proportionate to the supply of food — he would
at one stroke refashion earthly life in an extremely
desirable sense. But this we assume to be beyond
his competence : the Veiled Being has autocratic
ally imposed the struggle for existence as an in
exorable condition of the Invisible King's activi
ties, except in so far as it can be eluded by and
through the human intelligence. His problem,
then, will be to guide the minds of men towards

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 59
a realization that their higher destiny lies in using
their intelligence to substitute ordered co-opera
tion for the sanguinary competition above which
merely instinctive organisms are incapable of
rising. Observe that in exercising this power of psychical
influence there would be no sort of miracle-working,
no interference with the order of nature. The in
fluence of mind upon mind, even without the in
tervention of words or other symbols, is a part
of the order of nature which no one to-day dreams
of questioning. Hypnotic suggestion is a depart
ment of orthodox medical practice, and telepathy
is more and more widely admitted, if only as a
refuge from the hypothesis of survival after death.
If, then, we have a divine mind applying itself to
the problems of humanity, and capable of sug
gesting ideas to the mind of man — appealmg, as a
" still small voice " (p. 21), to his intelligence, his
emotions and his will — one cannot but figure its
power for good as almost illimitable. What is to
prevent it from achieving a very rapid elimination
of the ape and the tiger, the Junker and the Tory,
and substituting social enthusiasms for individual
passions as the motive-power of human conduct ?
We may admit that the brain of man must first
be developed up to a certain point before divine
suggestion could effectively work upon it. But we
know that men and races of magnificent brain
power must have existed on the planet thousands

60 GOD AND MR. WELLS
and thousands of years ago. What, then, has the
Invisible King made of his opportunities ?
Frankly, he has made a terrible hash of them.
It is hard to see how the progress of the race could
possibly have been slower, more laborious, more
painful than in fact it has been. No doubt there
have been a few splendid spurts, which we may,
if we please, trace to the genial goading of the
Invisible King. But all the great movements have
dribbled away into frustration and impotence.
There was, for example, the glorious intellectual
efflorescence of Greece. There, you may say, the
Invisible King was almost visibly at work. But,
after all, what a flash-in-the-pan it was ! Hellas
was a little island of light surrounded by gloomy
immensities of barbarism ; yet, instead of stab-
lishing and fortifying a political cosmos, its leading
men had nothing better to do than to plunge into
the bloody chaos of the Peloponnesian War, and
set back the clock of civilization by untold cen
turies. What was the Invisible King about when
that catastrophe happened? Similarly, the past
two centuries, and especially the past seventy-five
years, have witnessed a marvellous onrush in man's
intellectual apprehension of the universe and
mastery over the latent energies of matter. But
because moral and political development has
lagged hopelessly behind material progress, the
world is plunged into a war of unexampled mag
nitude and almost unexampled fury, wherein the

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 61
heights of the air and depths of the sea are pressed
into the service of slaughter. Where was the In
visible King in July 1914 ? Or, for that matter,
what has he been doing since July 1870 ? " Either
he was musing, or he was on a journey, or per-
adventure he slept." Truly it would seem that
he might have advised Mr. Wells to wait for the
" Cease fire ! " before proclaiming his godhead.
Of course Mr. Wells will remind me that he claims
for him no material potency; and I must own
that no happier moment could have been chosen
for the annunciation of an impotent God. But the
plea does not quite tally with the facts. In the
first place (as we have seen) the Invisible King is
going to do things — he is going to do very remark
able things as soon as he knows how. And in the
second place it is impossible to conceive that the
tremendous psychical influence which is claimed
for this God can be exercised without producing
external reactions. Why, he is actually stated to
be — -like another God, his near relative, whom he
rather unkindly disowns — he is stated to be " the
light of the world " (p. 22). Is there any meaning
in such a statement if it be not pertinent to ask
what sort of light has led the world into the ghastly
quagmire in which it is to-day agonizing ? The
truth is that Mr. Wells attributes to his God powers
which, even if he had no greater knowledge than
Mr. Wells himself possesses, could be used to
epoch-making advantage. Fancy an omnipresent

62 GOD AND MR. WELLS
H. G. Wells, able to speak in a still small voice
to all men of good-will throughout the world !
What a marvellous revolution might he not effect !
Mr. Wells himself has outlined such a revolution
in one of his most thoughtful romances, In the
Days of the Comet. From the fact that it does
not occur, may we not fairly suspect that the In
visible King is a creation of the same mythopoeic
faculty which engendered the wonder-working
comet with its aura of sweet-reasonableness ?
If we turn to Mr. Britling, we find that that
eminent publicist was distressed by a sense of the
difficulty of conveying God's message to the world;
only he modestly attributed it to defects in his
own equipment rather than to powerlessness on
the part of God. We read on page 427 : — " Never
had it been so plain to Mr. Britling that he was a
weak, silly, ill-informed and hasty-minded writer,
and never had he felt so invincible a conviction
that the Spirit of God was in him, and that it fell
to him to take some part in the establishment of
a new order of living upon the earth. . . . Always
he seemed to be on the verge of some illuminating
and beautiful statement of his cause; always he
was finding his writing inadequate, a thin treachery
to the impulse of his heart." Have we not in such
an experience an irrefutable proof of the inefficacy
of Mr. Britling s God ? Always the world has been
all ears for a clear, convincing, compulsive message
from God; always, or at any rate for many

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 63
thousands of years, there have been men who
seemed the predestined mouthpieces of such a
message; always what purported to be £he word
of God has proved to be either powerless to make
itself heard, or powerful only to the begetting of
hideous moral and social corruptions. God spoke
(it j.s said) through the Vedic rishis, the sages of
the Himalayas — and the result has been caste,
cow-worship, suttee, abominations of asceticism,
and nameless orgies of sensuality. God spoke
through Moses, and the result was — Judaism !
God spoke through Jesus, and the result was
Arianism and Athanasianism, the Papacy, the Holy
Office, the Thirty Years' War, massacres beyond
computation, and the slowly calcined flesh of an
innumerable army of martyrs. All this, no doubt,
was due to gross and palpable misunderstanding
of the message delivered through Jesus; but since
it was so fatally open to misunderstanding, would
it not better have remained undelivered ? Could
the world have been appreciably worse off without
it? The question is rather an idle one, since it
turns on " might have beens." That the element
of good in the message of Jesus has been to some
extent efficient, no one would deny. But the alloy
of potential evil has made itself so overpoweringly
actual that to strike a balance between the two
forces is impossible, and the question is generally
decided by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into
one scale or the other.

64 GOD AND MR. WELLS
There has never been a time when a really well-
informed revelation, uttered with charm and
power, might not have revolutionized the world.
" A well-informed revelation ! " the reader may
cry : " What terrible bathos ! " Mr. Wells, more
over, speaks slightingly of revelation (pp. 22, 192)
in a tone that seems to imply that " modern
religion " would have nothing to do with it even if
it could. But the demand for a revelation is
eminently reasonable and justified ; and the only
trouble about the historic revelations is that they
have all been so shockingly ill-informed, and have
revealed nothing to the purpose. Robert Louis
Stevenson anticipated Mr. Wells's view of the
matter when he wrote ironically : —
It's a simple thing that I demand,
Though humble as can be —
A statement fair in my Maker's hand
To a gentleman like me —
A clean account, writ fair and broad,
And a plain apologee —
Or deevil a ceevil word to God
From a gentleman like me.
But why this irony ? What an infinity of trouble
and pain would have been saved if such a " clean
account, writ fair and broad," had been vouch
safed, and had been found to tally with the facts !
Nor have the reputedly wise and good of this
world seen any presumption in desiring such a
communique. Most of them thought they had

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 65
received it, and many wasted half their lives in
attempting to reconcile new knowledge with old
ignorance, promulgated under the guarantee of
God. I cannot but think that the poet got nearer
the heart of the matter who wrote : —
Was Moses upon Sinai taught
How Sinai's mighty ribs were wrought?
Did Buddha, 'neath the bo-tree's shade,
Learn how the stars were poised and swayed?
Did Jesus still pain's raging storm,
And dower the world with chloroform?
Or Mahomet a. jehad decree
'Gainst microbe-harboring gnat and flea?
Has revelation e'er revealed
Aught from its age and hour concealed ?
Or miracle, since time began,
Conferred a single boon on Man?
Truly, we may agree with Mr. Wells that the
Invisible King was probably not in the secrets of
the Veiled Being, else he could scarcely have kept
them so successfully. But have we any use for a
God who can teach us nothing? who has to be
taught by us before he can do anything worth
mentioning ? The old Gods who professed to teach
were much more rational in theory, if only their
teaching had not been all wrong. Man has built
up his knowledge of the universe he lives in by
slow, laborious degrees, not helped, but constantly
and cruelly hindered, by his Gods. Yet Mr.
Wells will surely not deny that an approxi- E

66 GOD AND MR. WELLS
mately true conception of the process of nature,
and of his own origin and history, was an indis
pensable basis for all right and lasting social con
struction. What colossal harm has been wrought,
for instance, by the fairy-tale of the Fall, and all
its theological consequences ! Yet, age after age,
the Invisible King did nothing to shake its calami
tous prestige. Of late it is true that the progress
of knowledge has seemed no longer slow, but
amazingly rapid; but that is because the amount
of energy devoted to it has been multiplied a
hundredfold. Each new step is still a very short
one : it is generally found that several investi
gators have independently arrived at the verge of
a new discovery, and it is often a matter of chance
which of them first crosses the line and is lucky
enough to associate his name with the completed
achievement. All this means that to-day, as from
the beginning, man has to wring her secrets from
Nature in the sweat of his brain, and without the
smallest assistance from any Invisible King or
other potentate. To-day there are doubtless bene
ficent secrets under our very noses, so to speak,
which one word of a still small voice might enable
us to grasp, but which may remain undiscovered,
to our great detriment, for centuries to come.
There is, in short, no single point, either in history
or in contemporary life, where " the light of the
world" can be shown, or plausibly conjectured,
to have lighted us to any practical purpose. And

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 67
it is futile to urge, I repeat, that it could not have
done so without a miraculous disturbance of the
order of nature. The influence of mind upon mind,
however conveyed, is the most natural thing in
the world; and, short of transplanting mountains,
inhibiting earthquakes, and teaching people to
subsist on air, there is nothing that mind can
not do.
Besides, when we come to think of it, why this
prejudice against miracles ? Why is Mr. Wells so
sternly opposed to the bare idea of Providence ?
" Fear and feebleness," he says, " go straight to
the Heresies that God is Magic or that God is
Providence " (p. 32) — as though it were disgrace
fully pusillanimous to prefer a well-governed to an
ungoverned world. God, in the ordinary sense of
the word, the sense we all understand, is unques
tionably magic, whether we like it or not. He is
none the less magic because he works through one
great spell, and not through a host of minor, petti
fogging miracles. Upon the matter of fact we are
all agreed, Mr. Chesterton only dissenting ; but Mr.
Wells writes as if it were an essentially godlike
thing, and greatly to the credit of any and every
God, to give Nature its head, and take no further
trouble about the matter. I cannot share that
view. My only objection to Providence is that it
manifestly does not exist. If it did exist, and
made the world an appreciably better place to live
in, why should we grudge it a few miracles ? There
e 2

68 GOD AND MR. WELLS
is a touch of the sour-grapes philosophy in the
rationalist attitude on this matter which Mr. Wells
attributes to his Invisible King. Because we can't
have any miracles, we say we don't want them.
Also, no doubt, we see that the alleged miracles
of the past were childish futilities, doing at most a
little temporary good to individuals, never render
ing any permanent service to a city or a nation,
and much less to mankind at large. They were a
sort of niggardly alms from omnipotence, not a
generous endowment or a liberal compensation.
But is that any reason why an intelligent Power
should be unable to devise a really helpful miracle ?
Another plausible objection is that, even if we
could admit the justice of a system of rewards and
punishments, good and evil are so inextricably
intermixed in this world that it is impossible to
distribute benefits on a satisfactory moral scheme.
It is impossible to manipulate the rainfall so that
the righteous farmer shall have just what he wants
at the appropriate seasons, while his wicked neigh
bour suffers from alternate drought and floods;
nor can it be arranged that the midday express
shall convey all the good people safely, while the
4.15, which is wrecked, carries none but undesir
able characters. To this it might be replied that
the inconceivable complexity of the chess-board of
the world exists only in relation to our human
faculties ; but what is far more to the point is the
indubitable fact that many salutary miracles might

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 69
be wrought which would raise no question what
ever as to the moral merits or defects of the
beneficiaries. Miracles of alleged justice may
reasonably be deprecated; but where is the
objection to miracles of mercy, falling, like the
blessed rain from heaven, on both just and
unjust ?
The haughty soul of Mr. Wells may prefer a
deity who offers us no tangible bribes — who not
only does not work miracles, but will not even
utilize to material ends that great system of wire
less telegraphy between his mind and ours which
he has, by hypothesis, at his disposal. Mine, I
confess, is a humbler spirit. I should be perfectly
willing to accept even thaumaturgic benefits if
only they came in my way; and I cannot regard
it as a merit in a God that he should carefully
abstain from using even his powers of suggestion
to do some practical good in the world, and, in
cidentally, to demonstrate his own existence.

It is difficult, in the course of a long discussion,
to keep the attention fixed on the precise point at
issue. I therefore sum up in a few words the
argument of this chapter.
In the first place, I have shown that, if words
mean anything, Mr. Wells does actually wish us
to believe that his God is not a figure of speech,
but a person, an individual, as real and

70 GOD AND MR. WELLS
independent an entity as the Kaiser or President
Wilson. In the second place, I have enquired
whether anything he says enables us to conceive
a priori the possibility of such an entity disengag
ing itself from the mind of the race, and have
regretfully been led to the conclusion that the
genesis of this God remains at least as insoluble a
mystery as that of any other God ever placed
before a confiding public. Thirdly, I have
approached the question a posteriori, and enquired
whether history or present experience offers any
evidence from which we can reasonably infer the
existence and activity of such a God — arriving once
more at a negative conclusion. With the best will
in the world, I can discover nothing in this In
visible King but a sort of new liqueur — or old
liqueur with a new label — suited, no doubt, to the
constitutions of certain very exceptional people.
Mr. Wells avers that he himself finds it supremely
grateful and comforting, and further appeals to
the testimony of a number of other (unnamed)
believers — " English, Americans, Bengalis, Rus
sians, French . . . Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs,
Mohammedans " (p. 5) — a quaint Pentecostal
gathering. It is true, of course, that the proof of
the pudding is in the eating, and of the liqueur in
the drinking. But some of us are inveterately
sceptical of the virtues of alcohol, even in non-
intoxicant doses, and are apt to think that the
man who discovers a remedy for sea-sickness or a

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD ? 71
prophylactic against typhoid is a greater bene
factor of the race than a God whose special char
acteristic it is to be not only invisible himself but
equally imperceptible in his workings.

VI
FOR AND AGAINST PERSONIFICATION
For those of us who cannot accept Mr. Wells's
Invisible King as a God in any useful or even
comprehensible sense of the term, there remains
the question whether he is a useful figure of
speech. Metaphors and personifications are often
things of great potency, whether for good or evil.
It might quite well happen that, if we wholly
rejected Mr. Wells's gospel, on account of a mere
squabble as to the meaning of the word " God,"
we should thereby lose something which might
have been of the utmost value to us. Let us not
run the risk of throwing out the baby with the
bath-water. Take the case of a very similar personification
with which we are all familiar — to wit, John Bull.
Is he a helpful or a detrimental " synthesis " ? It
is not quite easy to say. There is a certain
geniality, a bluff wholesomeness, a downright
honesty about him, which has doubtless its value;
but on the other hand he is the incarnation of
Philistinism and Toryism, the perfect expression

PERSONIFICATION 73
of the average sensual man. I am told that in
one of his avatars he has something like two
million worshippers, on whom his influence is of
the most questionable, precisely because they have
implicit "faith" in him, and regard him as a
" Friend behind phenomena," a " great brother,"
a " strongly marked and knowable personality,
loving, inspiring, and lovable." That is an illus
tration of the dangers which may lurk in pros
opopoeia. But in the main we can regard John
Bull without too much misgiving, because we
cannot regard him seriously. His worship will
always be seasoned with the saving grace of humor.
He can do service in two capacities — sometimes as
an ideal, often as a deterrent. Whatever religious
revolutions may await us, we are not likely to see
St. Paul's Cathedral solemnly re-dedicated to the
worship of John Bull. He and his sister divinity,
Mrs. Grundy, have never lacked adorers in that
basilica; but their cult is probably not on the
increase. The Invisible King, on the other hand, is a per
sonage to be taken with the utmost seriousness.
If he has anything like the success Mr. Wells an
ticipates for him, it is quite on the cards that he
might oust the present Reigning Family from one
or all of the cathedrals. It is true that Mr. Wells
deprecates any ritual worship ; but " religious
thought finely expressed " would always be in
order ; and he " does not see why there should not

74 GOD AND MR. WELLS
be, under God, associations for building cathedrals
and such like great still places urgent with beauty,
into which men and women may go to rest from
the clamor of the day's confusions " (p. 198). If
cathedrals may be built, all the more clearly may
they be appropriated — if you can convert or evict
the dean and chapter. If the Invisible King should
take the fancy of the nation and the world, as Mr.
Wells would have us think that he is already doing,
he is bound to become the object of a formal cult.
We shall very soon see a prayer-book of the
" modern religion " with marriage, funeral and
perhaps baptismal services, with daily lessons, and
with suitable forms of prayer for persons who can
not trust themselves to extempore communings
even with a " great brother."
Well, there might be no great harm in this.
Some solemn form for the expression of cosmic, and
even of mundane or political, emotion would doubt
less be useful ; and if the " modern religion " could
be saved from degenerating into a hysterical super
stition on the one hand, or a petrified, persecuting
orthodoxy on the other, it would certainly be a
vast improvement on many of the religions of
to-day. But the ambitions of the Invisible King go far
beyond the mere presidency of an Ethical Church
on an extended scale. He is to be a King and no
mistake ; not even a King of Kings, but " sole
Monarch of the universal earth." Autocracies,

PERSONIFICATION 75
oligarchies, and democracies are alike to be swept
out of his path. The " implicit command " of the
modern religion " to all its adherents is to make
plain the way to the world theocracy " (p. 115).
How the fiats of the Invisible King are to be issued,
we are not informed. If through the ballot-box —
" vox populi, vox dei " — then the distinction be
tween theocracy and democracy will scarcely be
apparent to the naked eye. And one does not see
how, in the transition stage at any rate, recourse
to the ballot-box is to be avoided, if only as a
lesser evil than recourse to howitzers, tanks and
submarines. We read that "if you do not feel
God then there is no persuading you of him " ;
but if you do, " you will realize more and more
clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his
method and intention " (p. 117). Now, assuming
(no slight assumption) that the oracles of God, the
message of the still small voice, will be identically
interpreted by all believers, the unbelievers, those
who " do not feel God," have still to be dealt with ;
and, as they are not open to persuasion, it would
seem that the faithful must be prepared either to
shoot them down or to vote them down — whereof
the latter seems the humaner alternative. It
is true that Mr. Wells's God is a man of war; like
that other whom he disowns but strangely re
sembles, " he brings mankind not rest but a
sword " (p. 114). But we may confidently hold
that this, at any rate, is but a manner of speaking.

76 GOD AND MR. WELLS
Even if the God is real, his sword is metaphoric.
Mr. Wells is not seriously proposing to take his
cue from his Mohammedan friends, raise the cry of
"Allahu Akbar!" and propagate his gospel
scimitar in hand. It is hard to see, then, what
other method there can be of dealing with the
heathen, except the method of the ballot-box —
of course with proportional representation. When
there are no more heathen — when the whole world
can read the will of God by direct intuition, as
though it were written in letters of fire across the
firmament — then, indeed, the ballot-box may join
the throne, sceptre and crown in the historical
museum. But even the robust optimism of the
gottestrunken Mr. Wells can scarcely conceive
this millennium to be at hand. So that in the
meantime it seems unwise to speak slightingly of
democracy, lest we thereby help the Powers, both
here and elsewhere, which are fighting for some
thing very much worse. For I take it that the
worst enemy of the Wellsian God is the Superman,
who has quite a sporting chance of coming out
on top, if not actually in this War, at least in the
welter that will succeed it.
But seriously, is any conceivable sort of theocracy
a desirable ideal ? Or, to put the same question
in more general terms, is it wise of Mr. Wells to
make such play with the word " God " ? He him
self admits that " God trails with him a thousand
misconceptions and bad associations : his alleged

PERSONIFICATION 77
infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange prefer
ences, his vindictive Old Testament past " (p. 9)
— and, it may fairly be added, his blood-boltered,
Kultur-stained present. Is it possible to deodorize
a word which comes to us redolent of "good, thick
stupefying incense-smoke," mingled with the reek
of the auto-da-fe ? Can we beat into a plough
share the sword of St. Bartholomew, and a thou
sand other deeds of horror? God has been by far
the most tragic word in the whole vocabulary of
the race — a spell to conjure up all the worst fiends
in human nature: arrogance and abjectness, fana
ticism, hatred and atrocity. Religious reformers —
with Jesus at their head — have time and again
tried to divest it of some, at least, of its terrors,
but they have invariably failed. Will Mr. Wells
succeed any better ? Is it not apparent in the fore
going discussion that, even if the word had no
other demerits, it leads us into regions in which
the mind can find no firm foothold ? I have done
my best to accept Mr. Wells's definitions, but I
am sure he feels that I have constantly slipped
from the strait and narrow path. Has he him
self always kept to it ? I think not. And, waiving
that point, is it at all likely that people in general
will be more successful than I have been in grasp
ing and holding fast to the differentiating attri
butes of Mr. Wells's divinity? If the word is at
best a confusion and at worst a war-whoop,
should we not try to dispense with it, to avoid

78 GOD AND MR. WELLS
it, to find a substitute which should more
accurately, if less truculently, express our idea?
Is it wise or kind to seek to impose on the
future an endless struggle with its sinister
ambiguities ?
There are, no doubt, regions of thought from
which it is extremely difficult to exclude the word ;
but these, fortunately, are regions in which it is
almost necessarily divested of its historical asso
ciations. As a term of pure philosophy, if safe
guarded by careful definition, it is a convenient
piece of shorthand, obviating the necessity for a
constant recourse to cumbrous formulas. But
politics is not one of these regions of thought ; and
it is precisely in politics that the intervention of
God has from of old been most disastrous. " Theo
cracy " has always been the synonym for a bleak
and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained,
tyranny. Why seek to revive and rehabilitate a
word of such a dismal connotation? I suggest
that even if the Invisible King were a God, it
would be tactful to pretend that he was not. As
he is not a God, in any generally understood sense
of the term, it seems a curious perversity to pre
tend that he is.

Even in the region of morals it is a backward
step to restore God to the supremacy from which
he has with the utmost difficulty been deposed. I

PERSONIFICATION 79
am sure Mr. Wells does not in his heart believe
that any theological sanction is required for the
plain essentials of social well-doing, or any theo
logical stimulus for the rare sublimities of virtue.
Incalculable mischief has been wrought by the
clerical endeavour to set up a necessary association
between right conduct and orthodoxy, between
heterodoxy and vice. This Mr. Wells knows as
well as I do ; yet he can use such phrases as " With
out God, the ' Service of Man ' is no better than a
hobby or a sentimentality or a hypocrisy." No
doubt he has carefully explained that he does not
mean by God or religion what the clergy mean;
but can he be sure that by imitating their phrases
he may not imperceptibly slide into their frame of
mind ? or at any rate tempt the weaker brethren
to do so ? In using such an expression he comes
perilously near the attitude adopted by the Bishop
of London in a recent address to the sailors of the
Grand Fleet. His Lordship told his hearers — we
have it on his own authority — that " there was in
everyone a good man and a bad man. And I have
not known a case," he added, " where the good
man conquered the bad man without religion."
Can there be any doubt that the Bishop was either
telling — well, not the truth— or shamelessly play
ing with words ? Of course it may be said that
any man who keeps his lower instincts in control
does so by aid of a feeling that there are higher
values in life than sensual gratification or direct

80 GOD AND MR. WELLS
self-gratification of any sort; and we may, if we
are so minded, call this feeling religion. But it
is a very inconvenient meaning to attach to the
word, and we cannot take it to be the meaning
the Bishop had in view. What he meant, in all
probability — what he desired his simple-minded
hearers to understand — was that he had never
known a good man who did not believe, if not in
all the dogmas of the Church of England, at any
rate in the Christian Trinity, the fall of man,
redemption from sin, and the inspiration of the
Scriptures. He meant that no man could be good
who did not believe that God has given us in
writing a synopsis of his plan of world-government,
and has himself sojourned on 'earth and submitted
to an appearance of death, some two thousand
years ago, in fulfilment of the said plan. If he did
not mean that, he was, I repeat, playing with
words and deceiving his hearers, who would cer
tainly understand him to mean something to that
effect; and if he did mean that, he departed very
palpably from the truth. The Bishop of London
is no recluse, shut up in a monastery among men
of his own faith. He is a man of the modern world,
and he must know, and know that he knows, scores
of men as good as himself who have no belief in
anything that he would recognise as religion. Per
haps he was not directly conscious of telling a
falsehood, for " faith " plays such havoc with the
intellect that men cease to attach any living mean-

PERSONIFICATION 81
ing to words, and come to deal habitually in those
unrealized phrases which we call cant. But what
ever may have been his excuses to his conscience,
he was saying a very noxious thing to the simple,
gallant souls who heard him. Many of them must
have been well aware that they had no faith that
would have satisfied the Bishop of London, and
that whatever religious ideas lurked in their minds
were of very little use to them in struggling with
the temptations of a sailor's life. Where was the
sense in telling them that the ordinary motives
which make for good conduct — prudence, self-
respect, loyalty, etc., etc. — are of no avail, and that
they must inevitably be bad men if they had not
" found religion " ? If such talk does no positive
harm, it is only because men have learnt to dis
count the patter of theology. Yet here we find
Mr. Wells, after vigorously disclaiming any par
ticipation in the Bishop's beliefs, falling into the
common form of episcopal patter, and telling me,
for example — a benighted but quite well-inten
tioned heathen — that I can do no good in my
generation unless I believe in a God whom he and
a number of Eastern sages, Parthians, Medes,
Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia, have
recently " synthetized " out of their inner con
sciousnesses ! It is not Mr. Wells's fault if I do not
abandon the steep and thorny track of austerity
which I have hitherto pursued, invest all my spare
cash either in whiskey or in whiskey shares, and

82 GOD AND MR. WELLS
go for my philosophy in future to the inspiring
author of Musings without Method in " Black
wood." It is not quite clear why Mr. Wells should accept
so large a part of the Christian ethic and yet refuse
to identify his Invisible King with Christ. One
would have supposed it quite as easy to divest
the Christ-figure of any inconvenient attributes as
to eliminate omniscience and omnipotence from
the God-idea. Mr. Wells constantly allows his
thoughts to run into the stereotype moulds of
biblical phraseology. We have seen how he talks
of " the still small voice," of " the light of the
world," "taking the sting from death" and of
God coming " in his own time " and bringing " not
rest but a sword." To those instances may be
added such phrases as " death will be swallowed
up in victory" (p. 47), " by the grace of the true
God " (p. 53), " God is Love " (p. 78), " the Son
of Man " (p. 102), " I become my brother's
keeper " (p. 116), " he it is who can deliver us
' from the body of this death ' " (p. 118). But the
clearest indication of Christian influence is to be
found in Mr. Wells's unhesitating and emphatic
adoption of the idea that " Salvation is indeed to
lose oneself" (p. 87). "The difference," he says,
"between . . . the unbeliever and the servant of
the true God is this . . . that the latter has ex
perienced a complete turning away from self. This
only difference is all the difference in the world "

PERSONIFICATION 83
(p. 100). It is curious what a fascination this turn
of phrase has exercised upon many and diverse
intelligences. Mr. Bernard Shaw, for instance,
adopts it with enthusiasm. Henrik Ibsen — if it is
ever possible to tie a true dramatist down to a
doctrine — preaches in Peer Gynt that "to be thy
self is to slay thyself." Mr. Wells has a cloud of
witnesses to back him up ; and yet it is very
doubtful whether the turn of phrase is a really
helpful one — whether it does not rather get in the
way of the natural man in his quest for a sound
rule of life.
It is a commonplace that the entirely self-
centred man — the Robinson Crusoe of a desert
island of egoism — is unhappy. At least if he is
not he belongs to a low intellectual and moral
type : the proof being that all development above
the level of the oyster and the slug has involved
more or less surrender of the immediate claims
of " number one " to some larger unity. Progress
has always consisted, and still consists, in the
widening of the ideal concept which appeals to
our loyalty. Is it not Mr. Wells's endeavour in
this very book to claim our devotion for the all-
embracing and ultimate ideal — the human race ?
So far, we are all at one. But when we are told
that "conversion" or "salvation" consists in a
" complete turning away from self," common sense
revolts. It is not true either in every-day life or
in larger matters of conduct. In every-day life
F 2

84 GOD AND MR. WELLS
the incurably " unselfish " person is an intolerable
nuisance. Here the common-sense rule is very
simple : you have no right to seek your own " sal
vation," or, in non-theological terms, your own
self-approval, at the cost of other people's ; you
have no business to offer sacrifices which the other
party ought not to accept. It is true that in the
application of this simple rule difficult problems
may arise ; but a little tact will generally go a long
way towards solving them. In these matters an
ounce of tact is worth a pound of casuistry. And
in our every-day England, in all classes, it is my
profound conviction that a reasonable selflessness
is very far from uncommon, very far from being
confined to the " converted " of any religion. For
forty years I have watched it growing and spread
ing before my very eyes. Reading the other day
The Roundabout Papers, I was greatly struck by
the antiquated cast of the manners therein de
scribed. Of course Thackeray, in his day, was
reputed a cynic, and supposed to have an over-
partiality for studying the seamy side of things.
But even if that had been true (which I do not
believe) it would not have accounted for all the
difference between the world he saw and that in
which we move to-day. I suggest, then, that so
far as the minor moralities are concerned, no new
religion is required, and we have only to let things
pursue their natural trend.
And what of the great selflessnesses? What of

PERSONIFICATION 85
the ideal loyalties ? What of the long-accumulated
instincts which tell a man, in tones which brook
no contradiction, that the shortest life and the
cruellest death are better than the longest life of
sensual self-contempt ? Here, as it seems to me,
Mr. Wells's apostolate of a new religion is very
conspicuously superfluous — much more so than it
would have been five years ago. For have not he
and I been privileged to witness one of the most
beautiful sights that the world ever saw — the
flocking of Young England, in its hundreds upon
hundreds of thousands, to endure the extremity of
hardship and face the high probability of a cruel
death, not for England alone, not even for Eng
land, France and Belgium, but for what they ob
scurely but very potently felt to be the highest
interests of the very same ideal entity which Mr.
Wells proposes to our devotion — the human race ?
I am sure he would be the last to minimize the
significance of that splendid uprising. No doubt
there were other motives at work : in some, the
mere love of change and adventure ; in others, the
pressure of public opinion. But my own observa
tion assures me that, on the whole, these unideal
motives played a very small part. The young men
simply felt that he who held back was unfaithful
to his fathers and unworthy of his sons ; and they
" turned away from self " without a moment's
hesitation, and streamed to the colors with all
the more eagerness the longer the casualty»lists

86 GOD AND MR. WELLS
grew, and the more clearly the horrors they had
to face were brought home to them. Has there
been any voluntary "slaying of self" on so huge
a scale since the world began ? I have not heard
of it. And Mr. Wells will scarcely tell me that
these young men went through the experiences he
describes as " conversion," and escaped from the
burden of " over-individuation " by throwing
themselves into the arms of a synthetic God !
Many of them, no doubt, would have expressed
their idealism, had they expressed it at all, in
terms of Christianity; but that, we are told, is a
delusion, and the only true God is the Invisible
King. If that be so, the conclusion would seem
to be that, in the present stage of the evolution
of human character, no God at all is needed to
enable millions of men, in whom the blood runs
high and the joy of life is at its keenest, to achieve
the conquest of self in one of its noblest forms.
Or (what comes to the same thing) any sort of
God will serve the purpose. Your God (divested
of metaphysical attributes) is simply a name for
your own better instincts and impulses. Many
people, perhaps most, share Mr. Wells's tendency
to externalize, objectivate, personify these im
pulses; and there may be no harm in doing so.
But when it comes to asserting that your own
personification is the only true one, then — I am
not so sure.

PERSONIFICATION 87
Finally there arises the question whether the
personification of the Invisible King can really,
in any comprehensible sense, and for any consider
able number of normal human beings, rob death
of its sting, the grave of its victory ? On this
point discussion cannot possibly be conclusive, for
the ultimate test is necessarily a personal one. If
any sane and sincere person tells me that a certain
idea, or emotion, or habit of mind, or even any
rite or incantation, has deprived death of its terrors
for him, I can only congratulate him, even if I
have to confess that my own experience gives me
no clue to his meaning. It is not even very profit
able to enquire whether a man can be confident
of his own attitude towards death unless he has
either come very close to its brink himself, or
known what it means to witness the extinction of
a life on which his whole joy in the present and
hope for the future depended. All one can do is
to try to ascertain as nearly as possible what the
contemner of death really means, and to consider
whether his individual experience or feeling is, or
is likely to become, typical.
One thing we must plainly realize, and that is
that, for the purposes of his present argument,
Mr. Wells conceives death to be a real extinction
of the individual consciousness. He does not
formally commit himself to a denial of personal
immortality, but it is a contingency which he
declines to take into account. Oddly enough, in

88 GOD AND MR. WELLS
trying to acclimatize our minds to the idea of such
an absolutely incorporeal and immaterial, yet
really existent, being as his Invisible King, he
comes near to clearing away the one great obstacle
to belief in survival after death. " From the
earliest ages," he says, " man's mind has found
little or no difficulty in the idea of something
essential to the personality, a soul or a spirit or
both, existing apart from the body and continuing
after the destruction of the body, and being still
a person and an individual " (p. 71). He does not
actually say that there is no difficulty about this
conception : he only says that, as a matter of
history, the great mass of men have found it easy
and natural to believe in ghosts. But it is hard to
see any force in his argument at this point unless
he means to imply that he himself finds " little or
no difficulty " in conceiving the continued exist
ence of a spiritual consciousness and individuality
after the dissolution of the body to which it has
been attached; and if he does mean this, it is
hard to see why he does not take his stand beside
Sir Oliver Lodge on the spiritist platform. To
many of us, the extreme difficulty of such a con
ception is the one great barrier to the acceptance
of the spiritist theory, for which remarkable evi
dence can certainly be adduced. This, however,
is a digression. So far as God the Invisible King
is concerned, Mr. Wells must be taken as ignoring,
if not rejecting, the idea of personal immortality.

PERSONIFICATION 89
The victory over death, then, which the Invisible
King is said to achieve, does not consist in its
abolition. It may probably be best defined as the
perfect reconcilement of the believer to the ex
tinction of his individual consciousness. And what
are the grounds of that reconcilement ? Let us
search the scriptures. Where the steps are de
scribed by which the catechumen approaches the
full realization of God, it is said that at that stage
he feels that " if there were such a being he would
supply the needed consolation and direction, his
continuing purpose would knit together the
scattered effort of life, his immortality would take
the sting from death " (p. 25). A little further on,
the idea is elaborated in a high strain of mysticism.
God, who " captains us but does not coddle us " (p.
42), will by no means undertake to hold the believer
scatheless among the pitfalls and perils that beset
our earthly pilgrimage. " But God will be with
you nevertheless. In the reeling aeroplane, or the
dark ice-cave, God will be your courage. Though
you suffer or are killed, it is not an end. He will
be with you as you face death; he will die with
you as he has died already countless myriads of
brave deaths. He will come so close to you that
at the last you will not know whether it is you
or he who dies, and the present death will be
swallowed up in his victory " (p. 46). The pas
sage has already been quoted in which it is written
that, at the end of the fight for God's Kingdom,

90 GOD AND MR. WELLS
" we are altogether taken up into his being " (p.
81). In a discussion of " the religion of atheists "
we are told that unregenerate man is " acutely
aware of himself as an individual and unawakened
to himself as a species," wherefore he " finds death
frustration." His mistake is in not seeing that
his own frustration " may be the success and
triumph of his kind " (p. 85). At the point where
we are told that "the first purpose of God is the
attainment of clear knowledge," we are further
informed that " he will apprehend more fully as
time goes on " the purpose to which this know
ledge is to be applied. But already it is possible
to define " the broad outlines " of his purpose.
"It is the conquest of death; first the overcoming
of death in the individual by the incorporation of
the motives of his life into an undying purpose "
(p. 117), and then, as we saw before, the defeat
of the threatened extinction of life through the
cooling of the planet. These, I think, are the chief
texts bearing directly on this particular matter;
but there is one other remark which must not be
overlooked. "A convicted criminal, frankly peni
tent," we are told, ". . . may still die well and
bravely on the gallows, to the glory of God. He
may step straight from that death into the im
mortal being of God."
To what, now, does all this amount? Is there
any more substantial solace in it than in the " Oh,
may I join the Choir Invisible " aspiration of mid-

PERSONIFICATION 91
nineteenth-century positivism? Far be it from
me to speak contemptuously of that aspiration.
It gives a new orientation and consistency to
thought and effort during life; and to the man
who feels that his little note will melt into the
world-harmony that is to be, that thought may
impart a certain serenity under the shadow of the
end. It is certainly better to feel at night, " I
have done a fair day's work," than to lie down
with the confession " My day has been wasted,
and worse." No one wants, I suppose, to say
with Peer Gynt : —
Thou beautiful earth, be not angry with me,
That I trampled thy grasses to no avail;
Thou beautiful sun, thou hast squandered away
Thy glory of light in an empty hut.
Beautiful sun and beautiful earth,
You were foolish to bear and give light to my mother.
But there is also another side to the question.
The more surely you believe that " through the
ages one increasing purpose runs " — the more
intimately you have merged your individual will
in what Mr. Wells would call the will of the In
visible King — the less do you relish the thought
that you can never see that will worked out. The
intenser your interest in the play, the greater your
disinclination to leave the theatre just as the plot
is thickening. Nor does it afford much consolation
to know that the Producer is just (as it were)
getting into his stride, and that, if the house

92 GOD AND MR. WELLS
should become too cold for comfort, arrangements
will be made for the transference of the production
to another theatre, with a better heating-
apparatus. Is there any real escape from the fact that for
each of us the one thing that actually exists is our
individual consciousness ? It is our universe ; and
if its trembling flame is blown out, that particular
universe is no more. If its limits of " individua
tion " are irrecoverably lost, what avails it to tell
us that the flame is absorbed into the light of the
world or the dayspring on high ? Is it possible
to imagine that the rain-drop which falls in the
Atlantic thrills with a great rapture as its mole
cules disperse in the moment of coalescence, be
cause it is now part of an infinite and immortal
entity ? Yes, it is possible to imagine it rejoicing
that its " chagrins of egotism," as an individual
drop, are now over; in fact, this is precisely the
sort of thing that some poets love to imagine ; but
has it any real relevance to our sublunary lot ?
Can it minister any substantial comfort or forti
fication to the normal man in the moment of peril
or agony ? I ask ; I do not answer. Can Mr. Wells
put in the witness-box any flight-lieutenant who
will swear that in his reeling aeroplane, as death
seemed on the point of engulfing him, he felt
uncertain whether it was God or he that was about
to die, and gloriously certain that in any case he
was about to " step straight into the immortal

PERSONIFICATION 93
being of God " ? And even if, in the excitement of
violent action, such hallucinations do mean some
thing to a peculiar type of mind, has any one dying
of pneumonia or Bright 's disease been known to
declare that, though his mortal spark was on the
point of extinction, he felt that " by the incor
poration of the motives of his life into an undying
purpose " he had triumphed over death and the
grave ? The simple soul who says " We shall meet
in Heaven " no doubt enjoys such a triumph — and
even if he fails to keep the appointment, no one
is any the worse. But where are the men and
women who feel the immortality of God, however
we define or construct him, a rich compensation
for their own mortality ?
It may be said that I am applying shockingly
terrestrial tests to Mr. Wells's soaring transcen
dentalisms. I am simply asking : " Will they
work ? " A world-religion cannot be what I have
called a luxury for the intellectually wealthy. It
must be within the reach of plain men and women ;
and plain men and women cannot, as the French
say, "pay themselves with words." Take them
all round, they do not make too much of death.
With or without the aid of religion, they generally
meet it with tolerable fortitude. But it will be
hard to persuade them that annihilation is a thing
to be faced with rapture, because a synthetic God
is indestructible ; or that death is not death because
other people will be alive a hundred or a thousand

94 GOD AND MR. WELLS
years hence. Even if you cannot offer them
another life, you may tell them of the grave as a
place where the wicked cease from troubling and
the weary are at rest, and they will understand.
But will they understand if you tell them that we
triumph over the grave because God dies with us
and yet never dies ? I fear it will need something
clearer and more credible than this to make the
undertaker a popular functionary.
The doctrines of " the modern religion " may
give us a new motive for living ; but how can they
at the same time diminish our distaste for dying?
That might be their effect, no doubt, in cases
where we felt that our death was promoting some
great and sacred cause more than our life could
have done; but such cases must always be ex
tremely rare. Even the soldier on the battlefield
will help his country more by living than by dying,
if he can do so without failing in his duty. His
death is not a triumph, but only a lesser evil than
cowardice and disgrace. And what shall we say,
for example, of the case of a young biologist who
dies of blood-poisoning on the eve of a great and
beneficent discovery? Is not this a case in which
the modern God might with advantage have
swerved from his principles and (for once) played
the part of Providence? It is better, no doubt,
to die in a good cause than to throw away life
in the pursuit of folly or vice ; but is it not playing
with words to say that even the end of a martyr

PERSONIFICATION 95
to science like Captain Scott, or a martyr to
humanity like Edith Cavell, is a triumph over
death and the grave ? It is a triumph over
cowardice, baseness, the love of ease and safety,
all the paltrier aspects of our nature; but a
triumph over death it is not. If it be true (which
I do not believe) that German soldiers sign a de
claration devoting the glycerine in their dead
bodies to their country's service, one may imagine
that some of them feel a species of satisfaction in
resolving upon this final proof of patriotism ; but
it will be a gloomy satisfaction at best; there will
be a lack of exhilaration about it; if the Herr
Hauptmann who witnesses their signatures con
gratulates them on having triumphed over death,
they will be apt to think it a rather empty form
of words. If they had had the advantage of read
ing Jane Austen, they would probably say with
Mr. Bennet, " Let us take a more cheerful view
of the subject, and suppose that I survive."
I fear that not even the companionship offered
by the modern God in the act of dissolution will
make death a cheerful experience, or induce
ordinary, unaffected mortals to glory in their mor
tality. It is too much the habit of Gods to pretend
to die when they don't really die at all — when, in
fact, the whole idea is a mere intellectual hocus-
pocus.

vn
BACK TO THE VEILED BEING
Why has Mr. Wells partly goaded and partly
hypnotized himself into the belief that he is the
predestined prolocutor of a new hocus-poeus ?
Rightly or wrongly, I diagnose his case thus :
What he really cares for is the future of humanity,
or, in more concrete language, social betterment.
He suffers more than most of us from the spec
tacle of the world of to-day, because he has the
constructive imagination which can place alongside
of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision
of a rational world-order which seems easily attain
able if only some malignant spell could be lifted
from the spirit of man. But he finds himself im
potent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-
are. Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible
advantages for the part of a social regenerator.
He has the pen of a ready and sometimes very
impressive writer ; he has a fair training in science ;
he has a fertile and inventive brain; his works of
fiction have won for him a great public, both in
Europe and America; yet he feels that his social
96

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 97
philosophy, his ardent and enlightened meliorism,
makes no more impression than the buzzing of a
gnat in the ear of a drowsy mastodon. At the
same time he has persuaded himself, whether on
internal or on external evidence — partly, I daresay,
on both — that men cannot thrive, either as indi
viduals or as world-citizens, without some relation
of reverence and affection to something outside
and above themselves. He foresees that Christian
ity will come bankrupt out of the War, and yet
that the huge, shattering experience will throw
the minds of men open to spiritual influences. At
the same time (of this one could point to several
incidental evidences) he has come a good deal in
contact with Indian religiosity, and learnt to know
a type of mind to which God, in one form or
another, is indeed an essential of life, while the
particular form is a matter of comparative indiffer
ence. Then the idea strikes him : " Have we not
here a great opportunity for placing the motive-
power of spiritual fervor behind, or within, the
sluggish framework of social idealism ? Here it
lies, well thought-out, carefully constructed, but
inert, like an aeroplane without an engine. By
giving the glow of supernaturalism, of the worship
of a personal God, to the good old Religion of
Humanity, may we not impart to our schemes for
a well-ordered world precisely the uplift they at
present lack ? It was all very well for chilly New
England transcendentalism to ' hitch its waggon
G

98 GOD AND MR. WELLS
to a star,' but the result is that Boston is governed
by a Roman Catholic Archbishop. It is really
much easier and more effective to hitch our wag
gon to God, who, being a synthesis of our own
higher selves, will naturally pull it in whatever
direction we want. Thus the mass of mankind
will escape from that spiritual loneliness which is
so discomfortable to them, and will find, in one
and the same personification, a deity to listen to
their prayers, and a 'boss,' in the Tammany sense
of the term, to herd them to the polling-booths.
What we want is collectivism touched with emo
tion. By proclaiming it to be the will of God, and
identifying sound politics with ecstatic piety, we
may shorten by several centuries the path to a
new world-order."
This is a translation into plain English of the
thoughts which would seem to have possessed Mr.
Wells's mind during the past year or so. I do not
for a moment mean that he put them to himself
in plain English. That would be to accuse him of
insincerity — a thought which I most sincerely dis
claim. I have not the least doubt that the In
visible King does actually supply a " felt want "
in his spiritual outfit, and that he is perfectly con
vinced that most other people are similarly con
stituted and will welcome this new object of loyalty
and devotion. Time will show whether his psycho
logy is correct. If it is, then he has indeed made
an important discovery. To use a very homely

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 99
illustration : a carrot dangled from the end of a
stick before a donkey's nose makes no mechanical
difference in the problem of traction presented by
the costermonger's barrow. If anything, it adds
to the weight to be drawn. But if the sight of it
cheers, heartens, and inspires the donkey, helping
him to overcome those fits of lethargy so charac
teristic of his race, then the carrot may quite
appreciably accelerate the general rate of pro
gress. It all depends on the psychology of the
donkey. Moses doubtless did very wisely in going up
into Mount Sinai and abiding there forty days and
forty nights. Whatever he may have seen and
heard, the semblance of communion with a Higher
Power unquestionably lent a prestige to his scheme
of social reform which it could never have attained
had he offered it on its inherent merits, as the pro
ject of a mere human legislator, or (still worse)
of a man of letters. Moses, in fact, knew his
Children of Israel. Does Mr. Wells know his
modern Englishmen or Anglo-Americans ?
That is the question.
Mr. Bernard Shaw has made a similar and very
ingenious attempt, not exactly to found a new
religion, but to place his ideas in a religious atmo
sphere. In the preface to Androcles and the Lion
(a disquisition just about as long as God the In
visible King) he propounds the question, " Why
not give Christianity a trial? " and opens the dis-
G 2

100 GOD AND MR. WELLS
cussion thus : "The question seems a hopeless one
after 2,000 years of resolute adherence to the old
cry of ' Not this man, but Barabbas.' Yet it is
beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in
spite of his strong right hand, his victories, his
empires, his millions of money, and his moralities
and churches and political constitutions. ' This
man ' has not been a failure yet ; for nobody has
ever been sane enough to try his way." Then he
goes on to shew, by a course of very plausible
reasoning, that the teaching of Jesus was, in all
essentials, an exact anticipation of the economic
and social philosophy of G. B. S. ; so that, in
giving political expression to that philosophy, we
should be, for the first time, establishing the King
dom of Christ upon earth. It is true that there
are passages in the Gospels which no more accord
with Mr. Shaw's sociology than do omnipotence
and omniscience with the theology of Mr. Wells.
But these passages do not embarrass Mr. Shaw.
He simply points out that, at Matthew xvi., 16,
where Peter hailed him as " the Christ, the Son of
the living God," Jesus went mad. Up to that
fatal moment "his history is that of a man sane
and interesting apart from his special gifts as
orator, healer and prophet " ; but from that point
onward he set to work to live up to "his destiny
as a god," part of which was to be killed and to
rise again. Many other prophets have gone mad —
for instance, Ruskin and Nietzsche. Therefore we

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 101
can have no difficulty in simply eliminating as a
morbid aberration whatever is un-Shavian in the
message of Jesus, and accepting the rest as the
sincere milk of the word. Mr. Shaw's attempt to
place his philosophy under divine patronage is not
so serious as Mr. Wells's ; for Mr. Shaw can never
take himself quite seriously for five pages to
gether. But the motive, in each case, in mani
festly the same — to obtain for a system of ideas
the prestige, the power of insinuation, penetration,
and stimulation, that attaches to the very name of
religion. The notion is a very tempting one. What every
prophet wants, in the babel of latter-day thought,
is a magic sounding-board which shall make his
voice carry to the ends of the earth and penetrate
to the dullest understanding. The more he be
lieves in his own reason, the more he yearns for
some method of out-shouting the unreason of his
neighbours. German philosophy thought it had
discovered the ideal reverberator in the artillery
of Herr Krupp von Bohlen ; but the world is
curiously indisposed to conversion by cannon, and
has retorted in a still louder roar of high-explosive
arguments. God, as a politico-philosophical ally,
is certainly cheaper than Herr Krupp ; and,
divested of his mediaeval sword and tinder-box, he
is decidedly humaner. But is the glamour of his
name quite what it once was ? Or can it be re
stored to its pristine potency ?

102 GOD AND MR. WELLS
On a question such as this, on which the evi
dence is too vague, too voluminous and too com
plex to be interpreted with any certainty, our
wishes are apt to take control of our thoughts.
Making all allowance for this source of error, I
nevertheless venture to suggest to Mr. Wells that
we may perhaps be passing out of, not into, an
age of religiosity. May it not be that the time has
come to give the name of God a rest ? Is it not
possible, and even probable, that, while the vast
apocalypse of the observatory and the laboratory
is proceeding with unexampled speed, thinking
people may prefer to await its developments,
rather than pin their faith to an interim, synthetic
God, whom his own still, small voice must, in
moments of candor, confess to be merely make-
believe ? Is it the fact that men, or even women,
of our race are, as a rule, absolutely dependent for
courage, energy, self-control and self-devotion,
upon some " great brother " outside themselves,
" a strongly-marked personality, loving, inspiring
and lovable," whom they conceive to be always
within call ? In making this assumption, is not
Mr. Wells ignoring the great mass of paganism
in the world around him — not all of it, or even
most of it, self-conscious and self-confessed, but
none the less real on that account ? He makes a
curious remark as to the personage whom he calls
" the benevolent atheist," which is, I take, it, his
nickname for the man who is not much interested

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 103
in midway Gods between himself and the Veiled
Being. This hapless fellow-creature, says Mr.
Wells, "has not really given himself or got away
from himself. He has no one to whom he can
give himself. He is still a masterless man " (p.
99). As Mr. Wells has evidently read a good deal
about Japan, he no doubt takes this expression
from Japanese feudalism, which made a distinct
class of the " ronin" or masterless man, who had,
by death or otherwise, lost his feudal superior.
But is it really, to our Western sense, a misfortune
to be a masterless man ? Does the healthy human
spirit suffer from having no one to bow down to,
no one to relieve it of the burden of choice, re
sponsibility, self-control ? If our feudal allegiance
has terminated through the death of the Gods who
asserted a hereditary claim upon it, must we make
haste to build ourselves an idol, or synthetize a
mosaic ikon, to serve as the recipient of our
obeisances, genuflexions, osculations ? I cannot
believe that this is a general, and much less a uni
versal, tendency. If anyone is irked by the con
dition of a " masterless man," the Roman Catholic
Church holds wide its doors for him. It seems very
doubtful whether any less ancient, dogmatic,
hieratic, spectacular form of make-believe will
serve his turn.
It has sometimes seemed to me that the one
great advantage of Western Christianity lies in
the fact that nobody very seriously believes in it.

104 G0D AND MR- WELLS
" Nobody " is not a mathematically accurate ex
pression, but it is quite in the line of the truth.
You have to go to Asia to find out what religion
means. If you cannot get so far, Russia will serve
as a half-way house ; but to study religion on its
native heath, so to speak, you must go to India.
Of course there may be some illusion in the matter,
due to one's ignorance of the languages and in
ability to estimate the exact spiritual significance
of outward manifestations ; but I cannot believe
that, anywhere between Suez and Singapore, there
exists that healthy godlessness, that lack of any
real effective dependence on any outward Power
" dal tetto in su," which is so common in and
around all Christian churches. In China and
Japan it is another matter. There, I fancy, re
ligious " ronins " are common enough. But in the
lands of the Crescent and the land of " OM,"
anything like freedom of the human spirit is prob
ably very rare and very difficult. The difference
does not arise from any lesser stringency in the
claims of Christianity to spiritual dominion, but
rather, I imagine, from a deep-seated divergence
in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have be
hind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of
Greece and Rome. We are accustomed from child
hood to the knowledge that our civilization was
founded by two mighty aristocracies of intellect,
to whom the religions of their day were, as they
are to us, nothing but more or less graceful fairy-

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 105
tales.* We know that many of the greatest men
the world ever saw, while phrasing their relation
to the " deus absconditus " in various ways, were
utterly free from that penitential, supplicatory
abjectness which is the mark of Asian salvation-
ism. And though of course the conscious filiation
to Greece and Rome is rare, the habit of mind
which holds up its head in the world and feels no
childish craving to cling to the skirts of a God, is
not rare at all. Therefore I conceive that people
who are shaken out of their conventional, un
realized Christianity by the earthquake of the war
will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into
the arms of the " great brother " constructed for
them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to picture them
flocking to the banner of the Fabian Jesus — the
Christ uncrucified, and restored to sanity, of Mr.
Bernard Shaw.
Does it really seem to Mr. Wells an arid and
damnable " atheism " that finds in the very mys
tery of existence a subject of contemplation so
inexhaustibly marvellous as to give life the fascina
tion of a detective story ? When Mr. Wells tells
us that " the first purpose of God is the attain
ment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means
* Namque deos didici securum agere aevum,
nee, siquid miri faciat natura, deos id
tristes ex alto caeli demittere tecto.
Horace, Satires I. 5.

106 GOD AND MR. WELLS
to more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means
to power," he states what is, to many of us, the
first and last article of religion — only that we pre
fer to steer clear of hocus-pocus and substitute
"Man" for "God." If we are almost, or even
quite, reconciled to the cruelties and humiliations
of life by the thought of its visual glories, its in
tellectual triumphs, and the mysteries with which
it is surrounded, is that frame of mind wholly un
worthy to be called religious ? If it is, I, for one,
shall not complain; for religion, like God, is a
word that has been —
Defamed by every charlatan
And soil'd with all ignoble use.
But it will be difficult to persuade me of the loftier
spirituality, or even the more abiding solace, in
volved in ecstatic devotion to a figure of speech.
There are two elements of consolation in life :
the things of which we are sure, and the things
of which we are unsure. We are sure that man
has somehow been launched upon the most
romantic adventure that mind can conceive. He
has set forth to conquer and subdue the world,
including the stupidities and basenesses of his own
nature. At first his progress was incalculably
slow; then he came on with a rush in the great
sub-tropical river basins ; and presently, where the
brine of the JEigean got into his blood, he achieved
such miracles of thought and art that his subse
quent history, for well-nigh two thousand years,

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 107
bore the appearance of retrogression. I have
already asked what the Invisible King was about
when he suffered the glory that was Athens to
sink in the fog-bank that was Alexandria. At all
events, that wonderful false-start came to nothing.
Rome succeeded to the world-leadership ; and
Rome, though energetic and capable, was never
brilliant. With her, European free thought, in
vestigation, science flickered out, and Asian re
ligion took its place. Truly the slip-back from
antiquity to the dark ages offers a specious argu
ment to the atheists — the true and irredeemable
atheists — who deny the reality of progress.
Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can
analyze the terrestrial conditions which led to that
catastrophe, and assure ourselves that the bug
bear of their recurrence is nothing more than a
bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestim
able safeguard. If the Greeks had hit upon the
idea of movable types — and it is little to the credit
of the Invisible King that they did not — the on
rush of barbarism and Byzantinism would not have
been half so disastrous. And even through the
Dark Ages the bias towards betterment is still
perceptible, though its operation was terribly
hampered. Then, at last, the sixteenth and seven
teenth centuries took up the thread of progress
where antiquity had dropped it. Science revived,
and bade defiance to dogma. The garnering of
knowledge began afresh; and true knowledge has

108 GOD AND MR. WELLS
this to distinguish it from pseudo-sciences like
astrology, theology, and philately, that it is in
stinct with procreative vigor. Knowledge breeds
knowledge with ever-increasing rapidity; and the
result is that the past hundred years have seen
additions to man's control over the powers of
nature which outstrip the wildest imaginings of
Eastern romance. When Mr. Gladstone first went
to Rome in 1832, his " transportation " was no
swifter and scarcely more comfortable than that
of Caesar in the fifties before Christ. To-day he
could fly over the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa,
and then cover the distance from Milan onwards
at the rate of seventy miles an hour in a limousine
as luxurious as an Empress's boudoir. We are
piling up the knowledge which is power at an
enormous rate — indeed rather too rapidly, since
we have not yet the sense to discriminate between
power for good and power for evil. But " burnt
bairns dread the fire," and after the present awful
experience, there is fair ground for hope that mea
sures will be taken to provide strait-waistcoats
for the criminal lunatics whose vanity and greed
impel them to let loose the powers of destruction.
Can any thinking man say that the world is quite
the same to him since the invention of wireless
telegraphy ? True it is only one among the multi
tude of phenomena behind which the Veiled Being
dissembles himself. But is it not a phenomenon
of a new and perhaps an epoch-marking order?

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 109
It may not make the veil more diaphanous, but
it somehow suggests an alteration — perhaps a pro
gressive alteration — in its texture.
When we say we are sure of the fact of progress,
the atheist comes down on us with the retort that
we thereby confess ourselves naive and credulous
optimists. As well say that when we express our
confidence that the North Western Railway will
carry us to Manchester, we thereby imply the
belief that Manchester is the Earthly Paradise. It
is quite possible — any one who is so minded may
say it is quite probable — that progress means ad
vance towards disillusion. What we are sure of
is merely this : that life may be, and ought to be,
a very different thing from what it now is, and
that it is in our own power to make it so. We
have not the least doubt that the generations
which come after us will say : —
We will not cease from mortal strife,
Nor shall the sword slip from our hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
But whether, when they have built it, they will
think Jerusalem worth the building is quite a
different matter. It may be that Leopardi was
right when he said, " Men are miserable by neces
sity, but resolute in believing themselves to be
miserable by accident." That is a proposition
which the individual can accept or reject so far as
his own little span is concerned, but on which the

i 10 GOD AND MR. WELLS
race, as such, can pass no valid judgment. Life
has never had a fair chance. It has always been
so beset with accidental and corrigible evils that
no man can say what life, in its ultimate essence,
really is. All we know is that many of its miseries
are factitious, inessential, eminently curable; and
till these are eradicated, how are we to determine
whether there are other evils, too deep-rooted for
our surgery? It may be, for example, that the
elimination of Pain would only leave a vacuum
for Tedium to rush in; but how are we to decide
this a priori ? Let us learn what are the true
potentialities of life before we undertake to declare
whether it is worth living or not.
Perhaps I may be allowed to quote at this point
some words of my own which express the idea I
am trying to convey as clearly as I am capable of
putting it. They are part of the last paragraph
of an address entitled Knowledge and Character:
The Straight Road in Education : *
The great, dominant, all-controlling fact of this life is the
innate bias of the human spirit, not towards evil, as the
theologians tell us, but towards good. But for this bias, man
would never have been man; he would only have been one more
species of wild animal ranging a savage, uncultivated globe, the
reeking battle-ground of sheer instinct and appetite. But
somehow and somewhere there germinated in his mind the idea
that association, co-operation, would serve his ends better than
unbridled egoism in the struggle for existence. Instead of "each
man for himself " his motto became ' ' each man for his family,
or his tribe, or his nation, or — ultimately — for human-kind."
* London : George Allen and Unwin, 1916.

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING in
And, at a very early stage, what made for association, co
operation, brotherhood, came to be designated " good," while
that which sinned against these upward tendencies was stig
matized as "evil." From that moment the battle was won, and
the transfiguration of human life became only a matter of time.
The prejudice in favour of the idea of good is the fundamental
fact of our moral nature. It has an irresistible, a magical
prestige. We have made, and are still making, a myriad mis
takes — tragic and horrible mistakes — in striving for good things
which are evils in disguise. A few of us (though relatively not
very many) try to overcome the prejudice altogether, and say,
"Evil, be thou my good!" But even these recreants and
deserters from the great army of humanity have to express
themselves in terms of good, and to take their stand on a sheer
contradiction. Evil, as such, has simply not a fighting chance.
The prestige of good is stupendous. We are all hypnotized by
it ; and the reason we are slow in realizing the ideal is, not
that we are evil, but that we are stupid.
"Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst ver-
gebens " — no one had a better right to say that
than a German poet. But though the Invisible
King has made a poor fight against human
stupidity, it is not really unconquerable. If Gods
cannot conquer it, men can. Its strongholds are
falling one by one, and, though a long fight is
before us, its end is not in doubt.
We may even hope, not without some plausi
bility, that moral progress may be all the more
rapid in the future because the limit of what may
be called mechanical progress cannot be so very far
off. The conquest of distance is the great material
fact that makes for world-organization; and
distance cannot, after all, be more than annhilated
— it cannot be reduced to a minus quantity. Now
that we can whisper round the globe as we whisper

112 GOD AND MR. WELLS
round the dome of St. Paul's, we cannot get much
further on that line of advance, until immaterial
thought-transference shall enable us "to flash
through one another in a moment as we will." We
may before long have reduced the crossing of the
Atlantic from five days to one, or even less ; but
in that direction, too, there is a limit to progress;
no invention will enable us to arrive before we
start. The conquest of physical disease seems to
be well within view; the possibilities of intensive
cultivation and selective breeding in plants and
animals are likely to be rapidly developed. When
such material problems cease to exercise the first
fascination upon the enquiring mind, the mental
sciences, psychology and sociology, with the great
neglected art of education, may come into their
kingdom. Then the atheism which avers that the
world stands still, or moves only in a circle, will
no longer be possible. Then all reasonable men
will feel themselves soldiers in " a mighty army
which has won splendid victories (though here and
there chequered with defeats) on its march out of
the dim and tragic past, and is clearly destined to
far greater triumphs in the future, if only each
man does, with unflinching loyalty, the duty
assigned to him." That loyalty will then be the
conscious and acknowledged rule of life, as it is
now in an instinctive and half-realized fashion. It
will help us, more than all the personifications in
the world, to " turn away from self." It will not

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 113
take the sting from death, but it will enable us to
feel that we have earned our rest, and brought no
disgrace upon the colors of our regiment.
Is it necessary to protest once more that this
assurance of progress towards the good is not to
be confounded with optimism ? For it is clear
that " good " is a question-begging word. The
only possible definition of " good " is " that which
makes for life " — for life, not only measured by
quantity, but by quality and intensity — " that ye
may have life more abundantly." Why is egoism
evil ? Because a world in which it reigned supreme
would very soon come to an end, or at any rate
could not support anything like the abundance of
life which is rendered possible by mutual aid and
co-operation. Why are order, justice, courage,
humanity good ? Because they enable more people
to lead fuller lives than would be possible in the
absence of such guiding principles. But in all this
we assume the validity of the standard — " life "
— which is precisely what pessimism denies. And
pessimism may quite conceivably be in the right
on't. It is quite conceivable that, having made
the best that can possibly be made of life, a world-
weary race might decide that the best was not
good enough, and deliberately turn away from it.
But that is a contingency, a speculation, which
no sane man would allow to affect his action here
and now, or to impair his loyalty to his comrades
in the great terrestrial adventure. H

114 GOD AND MR. WELLS
And is not this question of the ultimate value
of life precisely one of the uncertainties which lend
— if the flippancy may be excused — a "sporting
interest " to our position ? I have said that we
have two elements of consolation : the things which
are sure and the things which are unsure : in other
words, the axioms and the mysteries. Reason is
all very well so far as it goes, and we do right to
trust to it; but it may prove, after all, that the
things that are behind and beyond and above
reason are the things that really matter. Does
this seem a concession to obscurantism? Not at
all — for the things obscurantism glories in are
things beneath reason, which is quite another
affair. At the same time, we are too apt to think
that reason has drawn a complete outline-map of
its " sphere of influence," in which there are many
details to be filled in, but no boundaries to be
shifted, no regions wholly unexplored. It is, for
instance, very unreasonable to hold that we can
draw a hard and fast line between the materially
possible and impossible. There is certainly a
curious ragged edge to our purely scientific know
ledge, and it may well be that in following up the
frayed-out threads we may come upon things very
surprising and important. For example, the ques
tion whether consciousness can exist detached from
organized matter, or attached to some form of
matter of which we have no knowledge, I regard
as purely a question of evidence; and I not only

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 115
admit but assert that the evidence pointing in that
direction is worthy of careful examination. The
interpretation which sees in it a proof of personal
immortality may be wrong, but that does not
prove that the right interpretation is not worth
discovering. The spiritist voyagers may not have
reached the Indies of their hopes, yet may have
stumbled upon an unsuspected America. Nor does
the fact that they are eager and credulous in
validate the whole, or anything like the whole, of
their evidence.
After all, is it a greater miracle that conscious
ness should exist detached from matter than that
it should exist attached to matter ? Yet the latter
miracle nobody doubts, except in the nursery games
of the metaphysicians.
To define, or rather to adumbrate, the realm of
mystery, which is yet as indisputably real as the
realm of reason and sense, we naturally turn to
the poets, the seers. Here is a glimpse of it
through the eyes of Francis Thompson, that crea
ture of transcendent vision who made a strange
pretence of wearing the blinkers of the Roman
Catholic Church. Thus he writes in his "Anthem
of Earth " :— Ay, Mother ! Mother !
What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed,
Thou lustingly engender'st,
To sweat, and make his brag, and rot,
Crowned with all honour and all shamef ulness ?
From nightly towers
H 2

116 GOD AND MR. WELLS
He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,
Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,
And yet is he successive unto nothing
But patrimony of a little mould,
And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth
Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
All beauty and all starry majesties,
And dim transtellar things; — even that it may,
Filled in the ending with a ptiff of dust,
Confess — "It is enough." The world left empty
What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded
For pride, for potency, infinity,
All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
Arras'd with purple like the house of kings, —
To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm
Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries !
Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues,
Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark
As we ourselves, thy darkest !
Surely this is the very truth. Man is a hiero
glyph to which reason supplies no key — nay,
reason itself is the heart of the enigma. And does
not this lend a strange fascination to the adven
ture of life ?
Another singer, in a very much simpler strain,
puts something of the same idea : —
Marooned on an isle of mystery,
From .1 stupor of sleep we woke,
And gazed at each other wistfully,
A wondering, wildered folk.
There were flowery valleys and mountains blue,
And pastures, and herds galore,
And fruits that were luscious to bite into,
Though bitter at the core.

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 117
So we plucked up heart, and we dree'd our weird
Through flickering gleam and gloom,
And still for rescue we hoped — or feared —
From our island home and tomb.

But never over the sailless sea
Came messenger bark or schooner
With news from the far-off realm whence we
Set sail for that isle of mystery,
Or a whisper of apology
From our mute, malign marooner.
The strain of pessimism in this is even more
marked than in Thompson's " Anthem " ; and in
deed it is hard to deny that the resolute silence of
the " Veiled Being," the " Invisible King," and all
the Gods and godlings ever propounded to mortal
piety, is one of their most suspicious character
istics. Yet it may be that this reproach, however
natural, does the Veiled Being — or the Younger
Power of our alternative myth — a measure of in
justice. It may be that the great Dramaturge
keeps his plot to himself precisely in order that the
interest may be maintained up to the fall of the
curtain. It may be that its disclosure would upset
the conditions of some vast experiment which he
is working out. Where would be the interest of
a race if its result were a foregone conclusion ?
Where the passion of a battle if its issue were
foreknown ? What if we should prove to be som
nambulists treading some dizzy edge between two
abysses, and able to reach the goal only on con
dition that we are unconscious of the process ?

118 GOD AND MR. WELLS
Perhaps the sanest view of the problem is that pre
sented in Bliss Carman's haunting poem
The Juggler
Look how he throws them up and up,
The beautiful golden balls!
They hang aloft in the purple air,
And there never is one that falls.
He sends them hot from his steady hand,
He teaches them all their curves ;
And whether the reach be little or long,
There never is one that swerves.
Some, like the tiny red one there,
He never lets go far ;
And some he has sent to the roof of the tent
To swim without a jar.
So white and still they seem to hang,
You wonder if he forgot
To reckon the time of their return
And measure their golden lot.
Can it be that, hurried or tired out,
The hand of the juggler shook?
O never you fear, his eye is clear,
He knows them all like a book.
And they will home to his hand at last,
For he pulls them by a cord
Finer than silk and strong as fate,
That is just the bid of his word.
Was ever there such a sight in the world ?
Like a, wonderful winding skein, —
The way he tangles them up together
And ravels them out again !

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 119
If I could have him at the inn
All by myself some night, —
Inquire his country, and where in the world
He came by that cunning sleight !
Where do you guess he learned the trick
To hold us gaping here,
Till our minds in the spell of his maze almost
Have forgotten the time of year?
One never could have the least idea.
Yet why be disposed to twit
A fellow who does such wonderful things
With the merest lack of wit?
Likely enough, when the show is done
And the balls all back in his hand,
He'll tell us why he is smiling so,
And we shall understand.
I am not, perhaps, very firmly assured of this
consummation. Yet I am much more hopeful
of one day understanding the Juggler and the Balls
than of ever getting into confidential relations with
Mr. Wells's Invisible King.

One is conscious of a sort of churlishness in thus
rejecting the advances of so amiable a character
as the Invisible King. But is Mr. Wells, on his
side, quite courteous, or even quite fair, to the
Veiled Being ? " Riddle me no riddles ! " he
seems to say; " I am tired of your guessing games.
Let us have done with ' distressful enquiry into
ultimate origins,' and ' bring our minds to the
conception of a spontaneous and developing God'

120 GOD AND MR. WELLS
— one of whose existence and benevolence we are
sure, since we made him ourselves. I want some
thing to worship, to take me out of myself, to
inspire me with brave phrases about death. How
can one worship an insoluble problem? Will an
enigma die with me in a reeling aeroplane ? While
you lurk obstinately behind that veil, how can I
even know that your political views are sound ?
Whereas the Invisible King gives forth oracles of
the highest political wisdom, in a voice which I
can scarcely distinguish from my own. You are
a remote, tantalizing entity with nothing comfort
ing or stimulating about you. But as for my In
visible King, ' Closer is he than breathing, and
nearer than hands and feet.' "
A little way back, I compared Mr. Wells to
Moses ; but, looked at from another point of view,
he and his co-religionists may rather be likened
to the Children of Israel. Tired of waiting for
news from the God on the cloudy mountain-top,
did they not make themselves a synthetic deity,
finite, friendly, and very like the Invisible King,
inasmuch as he seems to have worked no miracles,
and done, in fact, nothing whatever ? But the
God on the mountain-top was wroth, and accused
them of idolatry, surely not without reason. For
what is idolatry if it be not manufacturing a God,
whether out of golden earrings or out of humani
tarian sentiments, and then bowing down and wor
shipping it ?

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 121
The wrath of the tribal God against his bovine
rival was certainly excessive — yet we cannot regard
idolatry as one of the loftier manifestations of the
religious spirit. The man who can bow down and
worship the work of his hands shows a morbid
craving for self-abasement. It is possible, no
doubt, to plead that the graven image is a mere
symbol of incorporeal, supersensible deity ; and the
plea is a good one, if, and in so far as, we can
believe that the distinction between the sign and
the thing signified is clear to the mind of the
devotee. The difficulty lies in believing that the
type of mind which is capable of focussing its devo
tion upon a statuette is also capable of dis
tinguishing between the idea of a symbol and the
idea of a portrait. But when we pass from the
work of a man's hands to the work of his brain
— from an actual piece of sculpture to a mental
construction — the plea of symbolism can no longer
be advanced. This graven image of the mind, so
to speak, is the veritable God, or it is nothing;
and Mr. Wells, as we have seen, is profuse in his
assurances that it is the veritable God. That is
what makes his whole attitude and argument so
baffling. One can understand an idolater who
says " I believe that my God inhabits yonder
image," or " Yonder image is only a convenient
point of concentration for the reverence, gratitude,
and love which pass through it to the august and
transcendent Spirit whom it symbolizes." But

122 GOD AND MR. WELLS
how are we to understand the idolater who adores,
and claims actual divinity for, an emanation from
his own brain and the brains of a certain number
of like-minded persons ? Is it not as though a
ventriloquist were to prostrate himself before his
own puppet ?
This craving for something to worship points to
an almost uncanny recrudescence of the spirit of
Asia in a fine European intelligence. For my own
part, as above stated, I cannot believe Mr. Wells's
case to be typical ; but in that I may be mistaken.
It is possible that an epidemic of Asiatic religiosity
may be one of the sequels of the War. If that be
so — if there are many people who shrink from
the condition of the spiritual " ronin," and are in
search of a respectable " daimio " to whom to
pay their devotion — I beg leave strongly to urge
the claims of the Veiled Being as against the
Invisible King.
He has at the outset the not inconsiderable ad
vantage of being an entity instead of a non-entity.
Whoever or whatever he may be, we are com
pelled by the very constitution of our minds to
assume his (or its) existence; whereas there is
manifestly no compulsion to assume the existence
of the Invisible King.
Then, again, the Veiled Being is entirely unpre
tentious. There is no bluster and no cant about
him. He does not claim our gratitude for the
doubtful boon of life. He does not pretend to be

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 123
just, while he is committing, or winking at, the
most intolerable injustices. He does not set up
to be long-suffering, while in fact he is childishly
touchy. He does not profess to be merciful,
while the incurable ward, the battlefield — nay,
even the maternity home and the dentist's parlor
— are there to give him the lie. (Here, of course,
I am not contrasting him with the Invisible King,
but with more ancient and still more Asian divini
ties.) It is the moral pretensions tagged on by
the theologians to metaphysical Godhead that
revolt and estrange reasonable men — Mr. Wells
among the rest. If you tell us that behind the
Veil we shall find a good-natured, indulgent old
man, who chastens us only for our good, is pleased
by our flatteries (with or without music), and is
not more than suitably vexed at our naughtinesses
in the Garden of Eden and elsewhere — we reply
that this is a nursery tale which has been riddled,
time out of mind, not by wicked sceptics, but by
the spontaneous, irrepressible criticism of babes and
sucklings. But if you divest the Veiled Being of
all ethical — or in other words of all human — attri
butes, then there is no difficulty whatever in ad
miring, and even adoring, the marvels he has
wrought. Tennyson went deeper than he realized
into the nature of things when he wrote —
"For merit lives from man to man,
But not from man, 0 Lord, to thee."
Once put aside all question of merit and demerit,

124 GOD AND MR. WELLS
of praise and blame, and more especially (but this
will shock Mr. Wells) of salvation and damnation
— and nothing can be easier than to pay to the
works of the Veiled Being the meed of an illimit
able wonder. When we think of the roaring vor
tices of flame that spangle the heavens night by
night, at distances that beggar conception : when we
think of our tiny earth, wrapped in its little film of
atmosphere, spinning safely for ages untold amid
all these appalling immensities : and when we
think, on the other hand, of the battles of claw
and maw going on, beneath the starry vault, in
that most miraculous of jewels, a drop of water :
we cannot but own that the Power which set all
this whirl of atoms agoing is worthy of all admira
tion. And approbation? Ah, that is another
matter; for there the moral element comes in. It
is possible (and here lies the interest of the enigma)
that the Veiled Being may one day justify himself
even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing
so behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely
useless to speculate. Light may one day come to
us, but it will come through patient investigation,
not through idle pondering and guessing. In the
meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the
microcosm, ourselves including both extremes, and
being, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle of all,
we cannot deny to this amazing frame of things
the tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be
religion, I profess myself as religious as Mr. Wells.

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 125
I am even willing to join him in some outward,
ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if he can
suggest one that shall not be ridiculously inade
quate. What about kneeling through the C Minor
Symphony ? That seems to me about as near as
we can get. Or I will go with him to Primrose
Hill some fine morning (like the Persian Ambas
sador fabled by Charles Lamb) and worship the
Sun, chanting to him William Watson's magni
ficent hymn : —
"To thee as our Father we bow,
Forbidden thy Father to see,
Who is older and greater than thou, as thou
Art greater and older than we."
The sun, at any rate, is not a figure of speech,
and is a symbol which runs no risk of being mis
taken for a portrait. If Mr. Wells would be con
tent with some such " bright sciential idolatry,"
I would willingly declare myself a co-idolater. But
alas ! he is the hierophant of the Invisible King,
and prayer to that impotent potentate is to me
a moral impossibility. I would rather face dam
nation, especially in the mild form threatened by
Mr. Wells, which consists (pp. 174, 175) in not
knowing that you are damned.
And if Mr. Wells maintains that in the worship
of the non-moral Veiled Being there is no practical,
pragmatic comfort, I reply that I am not so sure
of that. When all is said and done, is there not
more hope, more solace, in an enigma than in a

126 GOD AND MR. WELLS
facon de parler f I should be quite willing to
accept the test of the reeling aeroplane. The
aviator can say to his soul : " Here am I,
one of the most amazing births of time, the
culmination of an endless series of miracles. Per
haps I am on the verge of extinction — if so, what
does it all matter ? But perhaps, on the contrary,
I am about to plunge into some new adventure, as
marvellous as this. More marvellous it cannot be,
but it may perhaps be more agreeable. At all
events, there is something fascinating in this leap
in the dark. Good bye, my soul ! Good bye, my
memory !
' If we should meet again, why, we shall smile ;
If not, why then this parting was well made.' "
I cannot but think that there is as much religion
and as much solace in such a shaking-off of " the
bur o' the world " as in the thought that the last
new patent God is going to die with you, and that
you, unconsciously and indistinguishably merged in
him, are going to live for ever.

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THE WORLDS
WONDER STORIES
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS.
By ADAM GOWANS WHYTE,
Author of "A Comedy of Ambition," "The Templeton
Tradition," "Yellowsands,'' etc.

Hebe is a really novel book for children. It responds to their
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Never before has so broad a theme been attempted in a book
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London : WATTS & CO., Johnson's Coukt, Fleet Street, E.C.4.

A Delightful Book for Children— and Grown-Ups.

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by r. McMillan,
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London : WATTS & CO., Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, K.C.4.

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