Chapter 3

You find yourself, then, in the distressful case described by Hamlet and Mr. Wells. "Man delights you not, no, nor woman neither." You cannot muster up energy even to kill King Claudius. You go about gloomily soliloquizing on suicide and kindred topics. Then, "in some way the idea of God comes into the distressed mind" (p. 21). It develops through various stages, outlined by Mr. Wells in the passage cited. In the modern man, it would seem, one great difficulty lies in "a curious resistance to the suggestion that God is truly a person" (p. 22). It is here, no doubt, that faith comes in; at all events, you ultimately get over this stumbling-block. "Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes. The cardinal experience is an undoubting immediate sense of God. It is the attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in oneself" (p. 23). You have come, in fact, to the gate of Damascus. You have found salvation.

Yes, salvation!--there is no other word for it. Mr. Wells does not hesitate to use both that word and its correlative, damnation. From what, then, are you saved? Why, from quite a number of things. You are saved "from the purposelessness of life" (p. 18). God's immortality has "taken the sting from death" (p. 22). You have escaped "from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation" (p. 73). "Salvation is to lose oneself" (p. 73); it is "a complete turning away from self" (p. 84). "Damnation is really over-individuation, and salvation is escape from self into the larger being of life" (p. 76). In another place we are told that salvation is "escape from the individual distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the Kingdom of God, and damnation can be nothing more and nothing less than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape" (p. 148). On the next page we have another definition of damnation (borrowed, it would seem, from Mr. Clutton Brock), with which I hasten to express my cordial and enthusiastic agreement: "_Satisfaction with existing things is damnation._" I have always thought that hell was the headquarters of conservatism, and am delighted to find such influential backing for that pious opinion.

As for sin, it seems to be a falling away from the state of grace attained through conversion. You can and do sin while you are still unconverted; for we are told that "repentance is the beginning and essential of the religious life" (p. 165). Probably (though this is not clear) your unregenerate condition is in itself sinful, "individuation" being not very different from the Original Sin of the theologians. But it is sin after regeneration that really matters. "Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds not one inch to our spiritual and moral nature" (p. 146). "It is the amazing and distressful discovery of every believer so soon as the first exaltation of belief is past, that one does not remain always in touch with God" (p. 149). One backslides. One reverts to one's unregenerate type. The old Adam makes disquieting resurgences in the swept and garnished mansion from which he seemed to have been for ever cast out. "This is the personal problem of Sin. _Here prayer avails; here God can help us_" (p. 150). And what is still more consoling, "though you sin seventy times seven times, God will still forgive the poor rest of you.... There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented of, can stand between God and man" (p. 156).

We shall have to consider later what useful purpose (if any) is served by this free-and-easy use of the dialect of revivalism. In the meantime, one would be sorry to seem to write without respect of the depth of conviction which Mr. Wells throws into his account of the supreme spiritual experience of finding God. "Thereafter," he says, "one goes about the world like one who was lonely and has found a lover, like one who was perplexed and has found a solution" (pp. 23-24). God is a "huge friendliness, a great brother and leader of our little beings" (p. 24). "He is a stimulant; he makes us live immortally and more abundantly. I have compared him to the sensation of a dear strong friend who comes and stands quietly beside one, shoulder to shoulder" (p. 39). It certainly takes some courage for a modern Englishman, not by profession a licensed dealer in spiritual sentimentality, to write like this.

And now comes the question, What does God do? What does he aim at? And how does he effect his purposes? The answer seems to be that, in a literal, tangible sense, he does nothing. He operates solely in and through the mind of man; and even through the mind of man he does not influence external events. This, it may be said, is impossible, since all those external events which we call human conduct flow from the mind of man. Perhaps it would be correct to say (for here Mr. Wells gives us no explicit guidance) that external events are only a by-product of the influence of God: that, having begotten a certain spiritual state which he feels to be generally desirable, he takes no responsibility for the particular consequences that are likely to flow from it. So, at least, one can best interpret Mr. Wells's repeated disclaimer of the idea that "God is Magic or God is Providence" (p. 27), that "all the time, incalculably, he is pulling about the order of events for our personal advantages" (p. 35-6). Commenting on Mr. Edwyn Bevan's phrase for God, "the Friend behind phenomena," Mr. Wells insists that the expression "carries with it no obligation whatever to believe that this Friend is in control of the phenomena" (p. 87). Perhaps not; but it is a question for after consideration whether lucidity is promoted by giving the name God to a Power which has no power--which does not seem even to make directly purposive use of the influence which it possesses over the minds of believers. Once, in a coasting steamer on the Pacific, I nearly died of sea-sickness. A friend was with me, the soul of kindness, such a lovable old man that I write this down partly for the pleasure of recalling him. He used to come to my cabin every hour or so, shake his head mournfully, and go away again. I felt his good will and was grateful for it; but it would be affectation to pretend that I would not have been still more grateful had he possessed some "control of phenomena"--had he brought with him a remedy. Since those days, more than one efficacious preventive of sea-sickness has been discovered; and I own to counting the nameless chemists who have achieved this marvel among the most authentic friends to poor humanity of whom we have any knowledge. Where is the God (as Mr. Zangwill has pertinently enquired) who will give us a cure for cancer?

This, however, is a digression, or at any rate an anticipation. What the Invisible King actually does, without meddling with phenomena, is to assume the "captaincy" of the "racial adventure" in which we are engaged (p. 76). "God must love his followers as a great captain loves his men ... whose faith alone makes him possible. It is an austere love. The Spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and bodily death" (p. 67). And what is this "racial adventure"? It is, in the first place, the achievement of Mr. Wells's political ideals--an object which has all my sympathy, since they happen to be, generally speaking, my own. "As a knight in God's service," says Mr. Wells, "I take sides against injustice, disorder, and against all those temporal kings, emperors, princes, landlords, and owners, who set themselves up against God's rule and worship" (p. 97). By all means! Only one does not see how, if the kings, emperors and landlords declare that they, too, have found God, and found him on the side of monarchy and landlordism, this contention of theirs is to be confuted. If God does not control phenomena, the actual controllers of events will be able to maintain in the future, as in the past, that he is on the side of the big battalions--an argument which it will be hard to meet, except by raising bigger battalions. In the meantime we have to note that God's political opinions are only provisional, and that he himself is open to conviction. "The first purpose of God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to power" (p. 98-9). And the object to which he will apply this power is "the conquest of death: first the overcoming of death in the individual by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an undying purpose, and then the defeat of that death which seems to threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun" (p. 99). Ultimately, then, it would seem that God does intend to undertake the control of phenomena. Dealing with ice-caps is not so entirely outside his province as one had hastily assumed. The Invisible King is not, after all, a _roi fainéant_. He will begin to do things as soon as he knows how: any other course would be obviously rash. One would like to live a few hundred thousand years, to see him come into overt action. Yet, in this far-reaching program, there seems to lurk a certain contradiction, or at least an ambiguity. If, for the believer in God, death has, here and now, lost its sting--if "we come staggering through into the golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth, until, at last, we are altogether taken up into his being" (p. 68)--one does not quite see the reason for this long campaign against death. Surely the logical consummation would be an ultimate racial euthanasia, an absorption of humanity into God, a vast apotheosis-nirvana, after which the earth and sun could go on cooling at their leisure.

* * * * *

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

V

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD?

Though many of Mr. Wells's asseverations of the substantive reality of his Invisible King have been quoted above, it would be easy to lengthen their array. There is nothing on which he is so insistent. For example, "God is no abstraction nor trick of words....[3] He is as real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace" (p. 56). And again, on the same page: "He feels us and knows us; he is helped and gladdened by us. He hopes and attempts." There is no limit to the anthropomorphism of the language which Mr. Wells currently employs. Or rather, there is only one limit: he disclaims the notion that his God is actually existent in space, that he has parts and dimensions, and inhabits a form in any way analogous to ours. He is the Invisible King, not merely, like the Spanish Fleet, because he "is not yet in sight," but because he has no material or "astral" integument. Being outside space (though inside time) he can be omnipresent (p. 61). But of course Mr. Wells would not pretend that no deity can be called anthropomorphic who is not actually conceived as incarnate in the visible figure of a man. An anthropomorphic God is one who reflects the mental characteristics of his worshippers; and that Mr. Wells's God does, if ever God did in this world.

[3] The words here omitted, "no Infinite," are nothing to the present purpose. Mr. Wells has started by making this declaration, which we accept without difficulty. No one will suspect the Invisible King of being an "Infinite" in disguise.

Yet almost in the same breath in which he is claiming for his God the fullest independent reality--thinking of him "as having moods and aspects, as a man has, and a consistency we call his character" (p. 63)--he will use language implying that he is that very abstraction of the better parts of human nature which has been proposed for worship in all the various "religions of humanity," "ethical churches," and so forth, for two or three generations past. Listen to this: "Though he does not exist in matter or space, he exists in time, just as a current of thought may do; he changes and becomes more even as a man's thought gathers itself together; somewhere in the dawning of mankind he had a beginning, an awakening, and as mankind grows he grows.... _He is the undying human memory, the increasing human will_" (p. 61). When, in the last chapter, I discussed the date of the divinity's birth, I had overlooked this text. Here we have it in black and white that he did not precede mankind--that, of course, would have implied independence--but began with the "dawning" of the race, and has grown with its growth. Moreover, the analogy of a "current of thought" is expressly suggested--reinforcing the suspicion which has all along haunted us that the God of Mr. Wells is nothing else than what is known to less mythopoeic thinkers as a "stream of tendency." But Mr. Wells will by no means have it so. Indeed he evidently regards this as the most annoying, and perhaps damnable, of heresies. On the very next page he proceeds to rule out the suggestion that "God is the collective mind and purpose of the human race." "You may declare," he says, "that this is no God, but merely the sum of mankind. But those who believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that. God is, they say, not an aggregate but a synthesis." And he goes on to suggest various analogies: a temple is more than a gathering of stones, a regiment more than an accumulation of men: we do not love the soil of our back garden, or the chalk of Kent, or the limestone of Yorkshire; yet we love England, which is made up of these things. So God is more than the sum or essence of the nobler impulses of the race: he is a spirit, a person, a friend, a great brother, a captain, a king: he "is love and goodness" (p 80); and without him the Service of Man is "no better than a hobby, a sentimentality or a hypocrisy" (p. 95).

Let us reflect a little upon these analogies, and see whether they rest on any solid basis. Why is a temple more than a heap of stones? Because human intelligence and skill have entered into the stones and organized them to serve a given purpose or set of purposes: to delight the eye, to elevate the mind, to express certain ideas, to afford shelter for worshippers against wind, rain and sun. Why is a regiment more than a mob? Again because it has been deliberately and elaborately organized to fulfil certain functions. Why is England more than the mere rocks of which it is composed? Because these materials have been grouped, partly by nature, but very largely by the labor of untold generations of our fathers, into forms which give pleasure to the eye and appeal to our most intimate and cherished associations. Besides, when we speak of "England," we do not think only or mainly of its physical aspects. We think of it as a great community, with an ancient, and in some ways admirable, tradition of political life, with a splendid record of achievement in both material and spiritual things, with a great past, and (we hope) a greater future. In all these cases the parts have been fused into a whole by human effort, either consciously or instinctively applied; and it is in virtue of this effort alone that the whole transcends its parts. But in the case of a God "synthetized" out of the thought and feeling of untold generations of men, the analogy breaks down at every point. To assume that portions of psychic experience are capable of vital coalescence, is to beg the whole question. We know that stone can be piled on stone, that men can be trained to form a platoon, a cohort, a phalanx; but that detached fragments of mind are capable of any sort of cohesion and organization we do not know at all. And, even if this point could be granted, where is the organizing power? We should have to postulate another God to serve as the architect or the drill-sergeant of our synthetic divinity. Nor would it help matters to suggest that the God (as it were) crystallized himself; for that is to assume structural potentialities in his component parts which must have come from somewhere, so that again we have to presuppose another God. It is true, no doubt, that portions of thought and feeling can be collected, arranged, edited, in some sense organized, by human effort; but the result is an encyclopædia, a thesaurus, an anthology, a liturgy, a bible--not a God. It may, like the Vedas, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Koran, become an object of idolatry; but even its idolaters see in it only an emanation from God, not the God himself. All this argument may strike the reader as extremely nebulous, but I submit that the fault is not mine. It was not I who sought to demonstrate the reality of a figure of speech by placing it on all fours with a cathedral and a regiment. The whole contention is so baffling that reason staggers and flounders as in a quicksand. It rests upon a mixture of categories, as palpable and yet as elusive as anything in _The Hunting of the Snark_.

If you tell me that Public Opinion is a God, I am quite willing to consider whether the metaphor is a luminous and helpful one. But if you protest that it is no metaphor at all, but a literal statement of fact, like the statement that Mr. Woodrow Wilson is President of the United States, I no longer know where we are. Mr. Wells's "undying human memory and increasing human will" cannot exactly be identified with Public Opinion, but it belongs to the same order of ideas. Here there is an actual workable analogy. But there is no practicable analogy between a purely mental concept and a physical construction. You will not help me to believe in (say) the doctrine of Original Sin, by assuring me that it is built, like the Tower Bridge, on the cantilever principle.

It is quite certain that, if passionate conviction and the free use of anthropomorphic language can make a figure of speech a God, the Invisible King is an individual entity, as detached from Mr. Wells as Michelangelo's Moses from Michelangelo. Paradoxically enough, he has put on "individuation" that his worshippers may escape from it. Mr. Wells's book teems with expressions--I have given many examples of them--which are wholly inapplicable to any metaphor, however galvanized into a semblance of life by ecstatic contemplation in the devotional mind. For example, when we are told that it is doubtful whether "God knows all, or much more than we do, about the ultimate Being," the mere assertion of a doubt implies the possibility of knowledge of a quite different order from any that exists in the human intelligence. Mr. Wells explicitly assures us that knowledge of the Veiled Being is (for the present at any rate) inaccessible to our faculties; but he implies that such knowledge _may_ be possessed by the Invisible King; and as knowledge cannot possibly be a synthesis of ignorances, it follows that the Invisible King has powers of apprehension quite different from, and independent of, any operation of the human brain. These powers may not, as a matter of fact, have solved the enigma of existence; but it is clearly implied that they might conceivably do so; and indeed the text positively asserts that God knows _something_ more of the Veiled Being than we do, though perhaps not "much." In view of this passage, and many others of a like nature, we cannot fall back on the theory that Mr. Wells is merely trying, by dint of highly imaginative writing, to infuse life into a deliberate personification, like Robespierre's Goddess of Reason or Matthew Arnold's Zeitgeist. However difficult it may be, we must accustom ourselves to the belief that his assertions of the personal existence of his God represent the efficient element in his thought, and that if other passages seem inconsistent with that idea--seem to point to mere abstraction or allegorization of the mind of the race--it is these passages, and not the more full-blooded pronouncements, that must be cancelled as misleading or inadequate. There can be no doubt that the God to whom Mr. Wells seeks to convert us is (in his apostle's conception) much more of a President Wilson than of a Zeitgeist.

* * * * *

It would be possible, of course, for a God, however dubious and even inconceivable the method of his "synthesis," to manifest himself in his effects--to prove his existence by his actions. But this, as we have seen, the Invisible King scorns to do. His adherents, we are told, "advance no proof whatever of the existence of God but their realization of him" (p. 98). There is a sort of implication that the Deity will not descend to vulgar miracle-working. "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it"--not even "the sign of Jonah the prophet."

But to ask for some sort of visible or plausibly conjecturable effect is not at all the same thing as to ask for miracles. Mr. Wells proclaims with all his might that the Invisible King works the most marvellous and beneficent changes in the minds of his devotees; why, then, do these changes produce no recognizable effect on the course of events? The God who can work upon the human mind has the key to the situation in his hands--why, then, does he make such scant use of it? Is God only a luxury for the intellectually wealthy? The champagne of the spiritual life? A stimulant and anodyne highly appreciated in the best circles, but inaccessible to the man of small spiritual means, whether he be a dweller in palaces or in the slums?

To say that a given Power can and does potently affect the human mind, and yet cannot, or at least does not, produce any appreciable or demonstrable effect on the external aspects of human life, is like asking us to believe that a man is a heaven-born conductor who can get nothing out of his orchestra but discords and cacophonies.

Mr. Wells may perhaps reply that his God _does_ recognizably influence the course of events--indeed, that everything in history which we see to be good and desirable is the work of the Invisible King--but that he does not advance this fact as a proof of God's existence, because it is discernible only to the eye of faith and cannot be brought home to unregenerate reason. I do not imagine that he will take this line, for it would come dangerously near to identifying God with Providence--a heresy which he abhors. But supposing some other adept in "modern religion" were to make this claim on behalf of the Invisible King, would it go any way towards persuading us that we owe him our allegiance?