It is quite certain that, if pa.s.sionate conviction and the free use of anthropomorphic language can make a figure of speech a G.o.d, the Invisible King is an individual ent.i.ty, 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 "G.o.d knows all, or much more than we do, about the ultimate Being," the mere a.s.sertion of a doubt implies the possibility of knowledge of a quite different order from any that exists in the human intelligence. Mr. Wells explicitly a.s.sures 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 a.s.serts that G.o.d knows _something_ more of the Veiled Being than we do, though perhaps not "much." In view of this pa.s.sage, 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 G.o.ddess of Reason or Matthew Arnold"s Zeitgeist. However difficult it may be, we must accustom ourselves to the belief that his a.s.sertions of the personal existence of his G.o.d represent the efficient element in his thought, and that if other pa.s.sages seem inconsistent with that idea--seem to point to mere abstraction or allegorization of the mind of the race--it is these pa.s.sages, and not the more full-blooded p.r.o.nouncements, that must be cancelled as misleading or inadequate.
There can be no doubt that the G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d _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 G.o.d"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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sumption would be, as I understand it, that of a finite G.o.d, unable to modify the operations of matter, but with an unlimited, or at any rate a very great, power of influencing the workings of the human mind. He would have no control over meteorological conditions: he could not "ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm"; he could not subdue the earthquake or prevent the Greenland glacier from "calving" icebergs into the Atlantic. He could not release the human body from the rhythms of growth and decay; he could not eradicate that root of all evil, the a.s.sociation of consciousness with a mechanism requiring to be constantly stoked with a particular sort of fuel which exists only in limited quant.i.ties. If G.o.d could arrange for life to be maintained on a diet of inorganic substances--if he could enable animals, like plants, to go direct to minerals and gases for their sustenance, instead of having it, so to speak, half-digested in the vegetable kingdom--or even if, under the present system, he could make fecundity, in any given species, automatically proportionate to the supply of food--he would at one stroke refashion earthly life in an extremely desirable sense. But this we a.s.sume to be beyond his competence: the Veiled Being has autocratically imposed the struggle for existence as an inexorable condition of the Invisible King"s activities, except in so far as it can be eluded by and through the human intelligence. His problem, then, will be to guide the minds of men towards a realization that their higher destiny lies in using their intelligence to subst.i.tute ordered co-operation for the sanguinary compet.i.tion above which merely instinctive organism are incapable of rising.
Observe that in exercising this power of psychical influence there would be no sort of miracle-working, no interference with the order of nature. The influence of mind upon mind, even without the intervention of words or other symbols, is a part of the order of nature which no one to-day dreams of questioning. Hypnotic suggestion is a department of orthodox medical practice, and telepathy is more and more widely admitted, if only as a refuge from the hypothesis of survival after death. If, then, we have a divine mind applying itself to the problems of humanity, and capable of suggesting ideas to the mind of man--appealing, as a "still small voice" (p. 18), to his intelligence, his emotions and his will--one cannot but figure its power for good as almost illimitable. What is to prevent it from achieving a very rapid elimination of the ape and the tiger, the Junker and the Tory, and subst.i.tuting social enthusiasms for individual pa.s.sions as the motive-power of human conduct? We may admit that the brain of man must first be developed up to a certain point before divine suggestion could effectively work upon it. But we know that men and races of magnificent brainpower must have existed on the planet thousands and thousands of years ago. What, then, has the Invisible King made of his opportunities?
Frankly, he has made a terrible hash of them. It is hard to see how the progress of the race could possibly have been slower, more laborious, more painful than in fact it has been. No doubt there have been a few splendid spurts, which we may, if we please, trace to the genial goading of the Invisible King. But all the great movements have dribbled away into frustration and impotence. There was, for example, the glorious intellectual efflorescence of Greece. There, you may say, the Invisible King was almost visibly at work. But, after all, what a flash-in-the-pan it was! h.e.l.las was a little island of light surrounded by gloomy immensities of barbarism; yet, instead of stablishing and fortifying a political cosmos, its leading men had nothing better to do than to plunge into the b.l.o.o.d.y chaos of the Peloponnesian War, and set back the clock of civilization by untold centuries. What was the Invisible King about when that catastrophe happened? Similarly, the past two centuries, and especially the past seventy-five years, have witnessed a marvellous onrush in man"s intellectual apprehension of the universe and mastery over the latent energies of matter. But because moral and political development has lagged hopelessly behind material progress, the world is plunged into a war of unexampled magnitude and almost unexampled fury, wherein the heights of the air and depths of the sea are pressed into the service of slaughter. Where was the Invisible King in July, 1914? Or, for that matter, what has he been doing since July, 1870? "Either he was musing, or he was on a journey, or peradventure he slept." Truly it would seem that he might have advised Mr. Wells to wait for the "Cease fire!" before proclaiming his G.o.dhead.
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 G.o.d. But the plea does not quite tally with the facts. In the first place (as we have seen) the Invisible King is _going_ to do things--he is going to do very remarkable things as soon as he knows how. And in the second place it is impossible to conceive that the tremendous psychical influence which is claimed for this G.o.d can be exercised without producing external reactions. Why, he is actually stated to be--like another G.o.d, his near relative, whom he rather unkindly disowns--he is stated to be "the light of the world" (p. 18). Is there any meaning in such a statement if it be not pertinent to ask what sort of light has led the world into the ghastly quagmire in which it is to-day agonizing? The truth is that Mr. Wells attributes to his G.o.d powers which, even if he had no greater knowledge than Mr. Wells himself possesses, could be used to epoch-making advantage. Fancy an omnipresent H. G. Wells, able to speak in a still small voice to all men of good-will throughout the world! What a marvellous revolution might he not effect! Mr. Wells himself has outlined such a revolution in one of his most thoughtful romances, _In the Days of the Comet_. From the fact that it does not occur, may we not fairly suspect that the Invisible King is a creation of the same mythopoeic faculty which engendered the wonder-working comet with its aura of sweet-reasonableness?
If we turn to Mr. Britling, we find that that eminent publicist was distressed by a sense of the difficulty of conveying G.o.d"s message to the world; only he modestly attributed it to defects in his own equipment rather than to powerlessness on the part of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d? Always the world has been all ears for a clear, convincing, compulsive message from G.o.d; always, or at any rate for many thousands of years, there have been men who seemed the predestined mouthpieces of such a message; always what purported to be the word of G.o.d has proved to be either powerless to make itself heard, or powerful only to the begetting of hideous moral and social corruptions. G.o.d spoke (it is said) through the Vedic _rishis_, the sages of the Himalayas--and the result has been caste, cow-worship, suttee, abominations of asceticism, and nameless orgies of sensuality. G.o.d spoke through Moses, and the result was--Judaism!
G.o.d spoke through Jesus, and the result was Arianism and Athanasianism, the Papacy, the Holy Office, the Thirty Years" War, ma.s.sacres beyond computation, and the slowly calcined flesh of an innumerable army of martyrs. All this, no doubt, was due to gross and palpable misunderstanding of the message delivered through Jesus; but since it was so fatally open to misunderstanding, would it not better have remained undelivered? Could the world have been appreciably worse off without it? The question is rather an idle one, since it turns on "might have beens." That the element of good in the message of Jesus has been to some extent efficient, no one would deny. But the alloy of potential evil has made itself so overpoweringly actual that to strike a balance between the two forces is impossible, and the question is generally decided by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into one scale or the other.
There has never been a time when a really well-informed revelation, uttered with charm and power, might not have revolutionized the world.
"A well-informed revelation!" the reader may cry: "What terrible bathos!" Mr. Wells, moreover, speaks slightingly of revelation (pp.
19, 163) in a tone that seems to imply that "modern religion" would have nothing to do with it even if it could. But the demand for a revelation is eminently reasonable and justified; and the only trouble about the historic revelations is that they have all been so shockingly ill-informed, and have revealed nothing to the purpose.
Robert Louis Stevenson antic.i.p.ated 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 G.o.d From a gentleman like me.
But why this irony? What an infinity of trouble and pain would have been saved if such a "clean account, writ fair and broad," had been vouchsafed, and had been found to tally with the facts! Nor have the reputedly wise and good of this world seen any presumption in desiring such a _communique_. Most of them thought they had received it, and many wasted half their lives in attempting to reconcile new knowledge with old ignorance, promulgated under the guarantee of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d who can teach us nothing? who has to be taught by us before he can do anything worth mentioning? The old G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds. Yet Mr. Wells will surely not deny that an approximately true conception of the process of nature, and of his own origin and history, was an indispensable basis for all right and lasting social construction. What colossal harm has been wrought, for instance, by the fairy-tale of the Fall, and all its theological consequences! Yet, age after age, the Invisible King did nothing to shake its calamitous prestige. Of late it is true that the progress of knowledge has seemed no longer slow, but amazingly rapid; but that is because the amount of energy devoted to it has been multiplied a hundredfold. Each new step is still a very short one: it is generally found that several investigators have independently arrived at the verge of a new discovery, and it is often a matter of chance which of them first crosses the line and is lucky enough to a.s.sociate 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 a.s.sistance from any Invisible King or other potentate. To-day there are doubtless beneficent secrets under our very noses, so to speak, which one word of a still small voice might enable us to grasp, but which may remain undiscovered, to our great detriment, for centuries to come. There is, in short, no single point, either in history or in contemporary life, where "the light of the world" can be shown, or plausibly conjectured, to have lighted us to any practical purpose. And it is futile to urge, I repeat, that it could not have done so without a miraculous disturbance of the order of nature. The influence of mind upon mind, however conveyed, is the most natural thing in the world; and, short of transplanting mountains, inhibiting earthquakes, and teaching people to subsist on air, there is nothing that mind cannot do.
Besides, when we come to think of it, why this prejudice against miracles? Why is Mr. Wells so sternly opposed to the bare idea of Providence? "Fear and feebleness," he says, "go straight to the Heresies that G.o.d is Magic or that G.o.d is Providence" (p. 27)--as though it were disgracefully pusillanimous to prefer a well-governed to an ungoverned world. G.o.d, in the ordinary sense of the word, the sense we all understand, is unquestionably magic, whether we like it or not. He is none the less magic because he works through one great spell, and not through a host of minor, petti-fogging miracles. Upon the matter of fact we are all agreed, Mr. Chesterton only dissenting; but Mr. Wells writes as if it were an essentially G.o.dlike thing, and greatly to the credit of any and every G.o.d, to give Nature its head, and take no further trouble about the matter. I cannot share that view. My only objection to Providence is that it manifestly does not exist. If it did exist, and made the world an appreciably better place to live in, why should we grudge it a few miracles? There is a touch of the sour-grapes philosophy in the rationalist att.i.tude on this matter which Mr. Wells attributes to his Invisible King. Because we can"t have any miracles, we say we don"t want them. Also, no doubt, we see that the alleged miracles of the past were childish futilities, doing at most a little temporary good to individuals, never rendering any permanent service to a city or a nation, and much less to mankind at large. They were a sort of n.i.g.g.ardly alms from omnipotence, not a generous endowment or a liberal compensation. But is that any reason why an intelligent Power should be unable to devise a really helpful miracle? Another plausible objection is that, even if we could admit the justice of a system of rewards and punishments, good and evil are so inextricably intermixed in this world that it is impossible to distribute benefits on a satisfactory moral scheme. It is impossible to manipulate the rainfall so that the righteous farmer shall have just what he wants at the appropriate seasons, while his wicked neighbour suffers from alternate drought and floods; nor can it be arranged that the midday express shall convey all the good people safely, while the 4.15, which is wrecked, carries none but undesirable characters. To this it might be replied that the inconceivable complexity of the chess-board of the world exists only in relation to our human faculties; but what is far more to the point is the indubitable fact that many salutary miracles might be wrought which would raise no question whatever as to the moral merits or defects of the beneficiaries. Miracles of alleged justice may reasonably be deprecated; but where is the objection to miracles of mercy, falling, like the blessed rain from heaven, on both just and unjust?
The haughty soul of Mr. Wells may prefer a deity who offers us no tangible bribes--who not only does not work miracles, but will not even utilize to material ends that great system of wireless telegraphy between his mind and ours which he has, by hypothesis, at his disposal. Mine, I confess, is a humbler spirit. I should be perfectly willing to accept even thaumaturgic benefits if only they came in my way; and I cannot regard it as a merit in a G.o.d that he should carefully abstain from using even his powers of suggestion to do some practical good in the world, and, incidentally, to demonstrate his own existence.
It is difficult, in the course of a long discussion, to keep the attention fixed on the precise point at issue. I therefore sum up in a few words the argument of this chapter.
In the first place, I have shown that, if words mean anything, Mr.
Wells does actually wish us to believe that his G.o.d is not a figure of speech, but a person, an individual, as real and independent an ent.i.ty 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 ent.i.ty disengaging itself from the mind of the race, and have regretfully been led to the conclusion that the genesis of this G.o.d remains at least as insoluble a mystery as that of any other G.o.d 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 G.o.d--arriving once more at a negative conclusion. With the best will in the world, I can discover nothing in this Invisible King but a sort of new liqueur--or old liqueur with a new label--suited, no doubt, to the const.i.tutions of certain very exceptional people. Mr. Wells avers that he himself finds it supremely grateful and comforting, and further appeals to the testimony of a number of other (unnamed) believers--"English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French ... Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans" (p. 4)--a quaint Pentecostal gathering. It is true, of course, that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and of the liqueur in the drinking. But some of us are inveterately sceptical of the virtues of alcohol, even in non-intoxicant doses, and are apt to think that the man who discovers a remedy for sea-sickness or a prophylactic against typhoid is a greater benefactor of the race than a G.o.d whose special characteristic it is to be not only invisible himself but equally imperceptible in his workings.
VI
FOR AND AGAINST PERSONIFICATION
For those of us who cannot accept Mr. Wells"s Invisible King as a G.o.d 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 "G.o.d," we should thereby lose something which might have been of the utmost value to us. Let us not run the risk of throwing out the baby with the bath-water.
Take the case of a very similar personification with which we are all familiar--to wit, John Bull. Is he a helpful or a detrimental "synthesis"? It is not quite easy to say. There is a certain geniality, a bluff wholesomeness, a downright honesty about him, which has doubtless its value; but on the other hand he is the incarnation of Philistinism and Toryism, the perfect expression of the average sensual man. I am told that in one of his avatars he has something like two million worshippers, on whom his influence is of the most questionable, precisely because they have implicit "faith" in him, and regard him as a "Friend behind phenomena," a "great brother," a "strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and lovable." That is an ill.u.s.tration of the dangers which may lurk in prosopopoeia. But in the main we can regard John Bull without too much misgiving, because we cannot regard him seriously. His worship will always be seasoned with the saving grace of humor. He can do service in two capacities--sometimes as an ideal, often as a deterrent. Whatever religious revolutions may await us, we are not likely to see St. Paul"s Cathedral solemnly re-dedicated to the worship of John Bull. He and his sister divinity, Mrs. Grundy, have never lacked adorers in that basilica; but their cult is probably not on the increase.
The Invisible King, on the other hand, is a personage to be taken with the utmost seriousness. If he has anything like the success Mr. Wells antic.i.p.ates for him, it is quite on the cards that he might oust the present Reigning Family from one or all of the cathedrals. It is true that Mr. Wells deprecates any ritual worship; but "religious thought finely expressed" would always be in order; and he "does not see why there should not be, under G.o.d, a.s.sociations for building cathedrals and such like great still places urgent with beauty, into which men and women may go to rest from the clamor of the day"s confusions" (p.
168). If cathedrals may be built, all the more clearly may they be appropriated--if you can convert or evict the dean and chapter. If the Invisible King should take the fancy of the nation and the world, as Mr. Wells would have us think that he is already doing, he is bound to become the object of a formal cult. We shall very soon see a prayer-book of the "modern religion" with marriage, funeral and perhaps baptismal services, with daily lessons, and with suitable forms of prayer for persons who cannot trust themselves to extempore communings even with a "great brother."
Well, there might be no great harm in this. Some solemn form for the expression of cosmic, and even of mundane or political, emotion would doubtless be useful; and if the "modern religion" could be saved from degenerating into a hysterical superst.i.tion on the one hand, or a petrified, persecuting orthodoxy on the other, it would certainly be a vast improvement on many of the religions of to-day.
But the ambitions of the Invisible King go far beyond the mere presidency of an Ethical Church on an extended scale. He is to be a King and no mistake; not even a King of Kings, but "sole Monarch of the universal earth." Autocracies, oligarchies, and democracies are alike to be swept out of his path. The "implicit command" of the modern religion "to all its adherents is to make plain the way to the world theocracy" (p. 97). How the fiats of the Invisible King are to be issued, we are not informed. If through the ballot-box--"vox populi, vox dei"--then the distinction between theocracy and democracy will scarcely be apparent to the naked eye. And one does not see how, in the transition stage at any rate, recourse to the ballot-box is to be avoided, if only as a lesser evil than recourse to howitzers, tanks and submarines. We read that "if you do not feel G.o.d then there is no persuading you of him"; but if you do, "you will realize more and more clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method and intention"
(p. 98). Now, a.s.suming (no slight a.s.sumption) that the oracles of G.o.d, the message of the still small voice, will be identically interpreted by all believers, the unbelievers, those who "do not feel G.o.d," 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 G.o.d is a man of war; like that other whom he disowns but strangely resembles, "he brings mankind not rest but a sword" (p. 96). But we may confidently hold that this, at any rate, is but a manner of speaking. Even if the G.o.d 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 G.o.d by direct intuition, as though it were written in letters of fire across the firmament--then, indeed, the ballot-box may join the throne, sceptre and crown in the historical museum. But even the robust optimism of the _gottestrunken_ Mr. Wells can scarcely conceive this millennium to be at hand. So that in the meantime it seems unwise to speak slightingly of democracy, lest we thereby help the Powers, both here and elsewhere, which are fighting for something very much worse. For I take it that the worst enemy of the Wellsian G.o.d 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 "G.o.d"? He himself admits that "G.o.d trails with him a thousand misconceptions and bad a.s.sociations: his alleged infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange preferences, his vindictive Old Testament past" (p. 8)--and, it may fairly be added, his blood-boltered, Kultur-stained present. Is it possible to deodorize a word which comes to us redolent of "good, thick stupefying incense-smoke," mingled with the reek of the auto-da-fe? Can we beat into a ploughshare the sword of St. Bartholomew, and a thousand other deeds of horror? G.o.d has been by far the most tragic word in the whole vocabulary of the race--a spell to conjure up all the worst fiends in human nature: arrogance and abjectness, fanaticism, hatred and atrocity. Religious reformers--with Jesus at their head--have time and again tried to divest it of some, at least, of its terrors, but they have invariably failed. Will Mr. Wells succeed any better? Is it not apparent in the foregoing discussion that, even if the word had no other demerits, it leads us into regions in which the mind can find no firm foothold? I have done my best to accept Mr. Wells"s definitions, but I am sure he feels that I have constantly slipped from the strait and narrow path. Has he himself always kept to it? I think not. And, waiving that point, is it at all likely that people in general will be more successful than I have been in grasping and holding fast to the differentiating attributes of Mr. Wells"s divinity? If the word is at best a confusion and at worst a war-whoop, should we not try to dispense with it, to avoid it, to find a subst.i.tute 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 a.s.sociations. As a term of pure philosophy, if safeguarded by careful definition, it is a convenient piece of shorthand, obviating the necessity for a constant recourse to c.u.mbrous formulas. But politics is not one of these regions of thought; and it is precisely in politics that the intervention of G.o.d has from of old been most disastrous. "Theocracy" has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained, tyranny. Why seek to revive and rehabilitate a word of such a dismal connotation? I suggest that even if the Invisible King _were_ a G.o.d, it would be tactful to pretend that he was not. As he is _not_ a G.o.d, in any generally understood sense of the term, it seems a curious perversity to pretend that he is.
Even in the region of morals it is a backward step to restore G.o.d to the supremacy from which he has with the utmost difficulty been deposed. I am sure Mr. Wells does not in his heart believe that any theological sanction is required for the plain essentials of social well-doing, or any theological stimulus for the rare sublimities of virtue. Incalculable mischief has been wrought by the clerical endeavour to set up a necessary a.s.sociation between right conduct and orthodoxy, between heterodoxy and vice. This Mr. Wells knows as well as I do; yet he can use such phrases as "Without G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude adopted by the Bishop of London in a recent address to the sailors of the Grand Fleet. His Lordship told his hearers--we have it on his own authority--that "there was in everyone a good man and a bad man. And I have not known a case," he added, "where the good man conquered the bad man without religion." Can there be any doubt that the Bishop was either telling--well, not the truth--or shamelessly playing with words? Of course it may be said that any man who keeps his lower instincts in control does so by aid of a feeling that there are higher values in life than sensual gratification or direct self-gratification of any sort; and we may, if we are so minded, call this feeling religion. But it is a very inconvenient meaning to attach to the word, and we cannot take it to be the meaning the Bishop had in view. What he meant, in all probability--what he desired his simple-minded hearers to understand--was that he had never known a good man who did not believe, if not in all the dogmas of the Church of England, at any rate in the Christian Trinity, the fall of man, redemption from sin, and the inspiration of the Scriptures. He meant that no man could be good who did not believe that G.o.d has given us in writing a synopsis of his plan of world-government, and has himself sojourned on earth and submitted to an appearance of death, some two thousand years ago, in fulfilment of the said plan. If he did _not_ mean that, he was, I repeat, playing with words and deceiving his hearers, who would certainly understand him to mean something to that effect; and if he _did_ mean that, he departed very palpably from the truth. The Bishop of London is no recluse, shut up in a monastery among men of his own faith. He is a man of the modern world, and he must know, and know that he knows, scores of men as good as himself who have no belief in anything that he would recognize as religion. Perhaps he was not directly conscious of telling a falsehood, for "faith" plays such havoc with the intellect that men cease to attach any living meaning to words, and come to deal habitually in those unrealized phrases which we call cant. But whatever may have been his excuses to his conscience, he was saying a very noxious thing to the simple, gallant souls who heard him. Many of them must have been well aware that they had no faith that would have satisfied the Bishop of London, and that whatever religious ideas lurked in their minds were of very little use to them in struggling with the temptations of a sailor"s life. Where was the sense in telling them that the ordinary motives which make for good conduct--prudence, self-respect, loyalty, etc., etc.--are of no avail, and that they must inevitably be bad men if they had not "found religion"? If such talk does no positive harm, it is only because men have learnt to discount the patter of theology. Yet here we find Mr.
Wells, after vigorously disclaiming any partic.i.p.ation in the Bishop"s beliefs, falling into the common form of episcopal patter, and telling me, for example--a benighted but quite well-intentioned heathen--that I can do no good in my generation unless I believe in a G.o.d whom he and a number of Eastern sages, Parthians, Medes, Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia, have recently "synthetized" out of their inner consciousnesses! It is not Mr. Wells"s fault if I do not abandon the steep and th.o.r.n.y track of austerity which I have hitherto pursued, invest all my spare cash either in whiskey or in whiskey shares, and go for my philosophy in future to the inspiring author of _Musings without Method_ in "Blackwood."
It is not quite clear why Mr. Wells should accept so large a part of the Christian ethic and yet refuse to identify his Invisible King with Christ. One would have supposed it quite as easy to divest the Christ-figure of any inconvenient attributes as to eliminate omniscience and omnipotence from the G.o.d-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 G.o.d coming "in his own time" and bringing "not rest but a sword." To those instances may be added such phrases as "death will be swallowed up in victory" (p. 39), "by the grace of the true G.o.d" (p. 44), "G.o.d is Love" (p. 65), "the Son of Man" (p. 86), "I become my brother"s keeper" (p. 97), "he it is who can deliver us "from the body of this death"" (p. 99). But the clearest indication of Christian influence is to be found in Mr. Wells"s unhesitating and emphatic adoption of the idea that "Salvation is indeed to lose oneself" (p. 73). "The difference," he says, "between ... the unbeliever and the servant of the true G.o.d is this ... that the latter has experienced a complete turning away from self. This only difference is all the difference in the world" (p. 84). It is curious what a fascination this turn of phrase has exercised upon many and diverse intelligences. Mr. Bernard Shaw, for instance, adopts it with enthusiasm. Henrik Ibsen--if it is ever possible to tie a true dramatist down to a doctrine--preaches in _Peer Gynt_ that "to be thyself is to slay thyself." Mr. Wells has a cloud of witnesses to back him up; and yet it is very doubtful whether the turn of phrase is a really helpful one--whether it does not rather get in the way of the natural man in his quest for a sound rule of life.
It is a commonplace that the entirely self-centred man--the Robinson Crusoe of a desert island of egoism--is unhappy. At least if he is not he belongs to a low intellectual and moral type: the proof being that all development above the level of the oyster and the slug has involved more or less surrender of the immediate claims of "number one" to some larger unity. Progress has always consisted, and still consists, in the widening of the ideal concept which appeals to our loyalty. Is it not Mr. Wells"s endeavour in this very book to claim our devotion for the all-embracing and ultimate ideal--the human race?
So far, we are all at one. But when we are told that "conversion" or "salvation" consists in a "_complete_ turning away from self," common sense revolts. It is not true either in every-day life or in larger matters of conduct. In every-day life the incurably "unselfish" person is an intolerable nuisance. Here the common-sense rule is very simple: you have no right to seek your own "salvation," or, in non-theological terms, your own self-approval, at the cost of other people"s; you have no business to offer sacrifices which the other party ought not to accept. It is true that in the application of this simple rule difficult problems may arise; but a little tact will generally go a long way towards solving them. In these matters an ounce of tact is worth a pound of casuistry. And in our every-day England, in all cla.s.ses, it is my profound conviction that a reasonable selflessness is very far from uncommon, very far from being confined to the "converted" of any religion. For forty years I have watched it growing and spreading before my very eyes. Reading the other way _The Roundabout Papers_, I was greatly struck by the antiquated cast of the manners therein described. Of course Thackeray, in his day, was reputed a cynic, and supposed to have an over-partiality for studying the seamy side of things. But even if that had been true (which I do not believe) it would not have accounted for all the difference between the world he saw and that in which we move to-day. I suggest, then, that so far as the minor moralities are concerned, no new religion is required, and we have only to let things pursue their natural trend.
And what of the great selflessnesses? What of the ideal loyalties?
What of the long-acc.u.mulated instincts which tell a man, in tones which brook no contradiction, that the shortest life and the cruellest death are better than the longest life of sensual self-contempt? Here, as it seems to me, Mr. Wells"s apostolate of a new religion is very conspicuously superfluous--much more so than it would have been five years ago. For have not he and I been privileged to witness one of the most beautiful sights that the world ever saw--the flocking of Young England, in its hundreds upon hundreds of thousands, to endure the extremity of hardship and face the high probability of a cruel death, not for England alone, not even for England, France and Belgium, but for what they obscurely but very potently felt to be the highest interests of the very same ideal ent.i.ty which Mr. Wells proposes to our devotion--the human race? I am sure he would be the last to minimize the significance of that splendid uprising. No doubt there were other motives at work: in some, the mere love of change and adventure; in others, the pressure of public opinion. But my own observation a.s.sures me that, on the whole, these unideal motives played a very small part. The young men simply felt that he who held back was unfaithful to his fathers and unworthy of his sons; and they "turned away from self" without a moment"s hesitation, and streamed to the colors with all the more eagerness the longer the casualty-lists grew, and the more clearly the horrors they had to face were brought home to them. Has there been any voluntary "slaying of self" on so huge a scale since the world began? I have not heard of it. And Mr.