MR. WELLS AND GOD
“_Utrum Deus Sit._” “Whether God be.” That is the title of the second
question in the Summa of St. Thomas (2nd article); and it is, out of all
comparison, the most important question which man can put to his own
mind.
There is another question on that same overwhelming subject, put
centuries ago in the tersest form: “_Is Religion from God or from Man_”?
Upon the right answer to these questions the whole meaning of the
Universe and of our own lives depends. If we get it wrong, all is wrong,
down to the least details. All is warped, diseased, increasingly
unsatisfactory, and running down to some chaos. All is sick and
ultimately doomed; not in our speculation, but in our action and being.
If we get it right all falls into order, down to the smallest actions of
daily life. The picture falls into perspective. We are one with reality;
we are sane men; and we may, if we choose, go forward towards our
end—which is an eternal happiness.
If God be and is our Creator, performs in us His works and makes of
Himself our end, then the great structure of doctrine reposes upon a
firm foundation. For there could not but be between That which made all
things and ourselves the link of the intelligent creature with his
Maker. There could not but be some intuition and some communion. Reason
being present in man, there could not but be a process of striving for
the fullness of being. Correspondingly, it becomes rational that the
Creator should reveal Himself. It becomes rational, though awfully
mysterious, that the Fatherhood should accept redemption. The
Incarnation falls into place; and from thence onwards everything—to the
last bead of the Rosary.
But if all this be an illusion, if (to summarize St. Thomas again, in
his famous Two Objections to the Being of God), “Nature be sufficient to
herself” (“_Ea quae sunt naturalia reducuntur in principium quod est
natura_”), then everything of the Creed fails, and so do all mortals.
Whence we come and whither we go, and how we so proceed, are left at
large and appear indifferent. Each man will adopt some petty object of
his own for living, or deny that living has any object at all. Men will
despair and satisfy the moment only. Lacking God, Unity and consecutive
effort are dissolved.
“_Utrum Deus Sit._” “Whether God Be.”
“_Is Religion from God or from Man_”?
Now these questions Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ proposes to answer
simply enough. To the first, “No”: God is Not. He is a figment of man’s
imagination. To the second, “From man”: Man invented the idea of God: it
is a phantasm of his brain.
I owe to a man for whose talents I have so great an admiration (though
none for his culture or instruction) to say here, that I am not judging
Mr. Wells’s private opinion upon the existence or non-existence of God.
Indeed, that is not very important. Further, he is so impressionable, so
carried away by his emotions, and so unaccustomed to close, consecutive
thinking, that his decisions vary, as it would seem, with the last thing
he happens to have read. In such and such a book he invented a new kind
of Trinity. In another place he protests against what he elegantly calls
the “stuffed Nicæan God.” In another he protests against the idea of
God’s omnipotence. In general, he is in a state of flux, very
characteristic of his time. He has thought nothing out.
But in this book (and it is with this book alone that I am concerned
here) he quite definitely answers the essential question in that way
which I have described. Religion is of man. God is a figment of our
human imagining. He sets down again for us in 1926, at too great length
(pp. 68 to 73), the old vacuous guesswork of the seventies and eighties
on how man came to imagine God, first as a projection of a man they
knew, then by extension into a greater and greater being. With
characteristic confusion of mind, he calls this process (p. 72)
“Discovering God.” But that’s exactly what it isn’t. It’s _inventing_
God—and one can’t have it both ways. I know Mr. Wells honestly wants to
have a sort of God, and, being a typical Modernist, he insists on
combining what his emotions crave with what his creed denies. To say
that primitive man “discovers God” when, as a fact, he is making Him up
out of his head, is a contradiction in terms. There are not two truths,
an historic and a moral. There is only one truth.
Of two processes, one must have been the actual process at work in man’s
mind from the moment when a true man existed and could think at all.
Either he first felt instinctively that there was an external power upon
which he was dependent, and later, perhaps, corrupted that instinct by
identifying such power with lesser things; or he had no such intuition,
but from having at first, though intelligent and a true man, no idea
whatever of the spiritual life and of such an invisible external power,
he came later to _imagine_ it, to suffer the _illusion_ of a god, by an
erroneous taking of confused mental habits within for reality without.
No one can say the two processes could mingle or exist side by side.
You do not mix a northward direction with a southward one. There is
contradiction. Either the process was in one direction or the reverse.
If the historical order was in the direction, “First a recognition of
God ... then the corruption of that idea by visible association ...
then idolatry, perversion, and all the rest of it” (as the very slight
evidences and analogies suggest, and as common sense suggests also),
that is one thing. If it was “A confused memory of being bullied by
the Old Man of the Tribe—then perversions such as human
sacrifice—idolatries—later vague imagining of some overshadowing
spirit,” that is the opposite. To postulate the _first_ process is to
say, in terms of Theology, that man had an original apprehension of
God, and later often overlaid it with false worship:—even to the
degree of losing the original idea. To postulate the _second_ is to
lay down the definite affirmation that God is but a fiction, man-made:
and therefore has no being: is _not_. And it is the second which Mr.
Wells repeats once more in this book, from the popular materialist
works of our boyhood.
Those who are of Mr. Wells’s generation, the men who date their birth
from the sixties and seventies of the last century, will remember the
many efforts then made to get rid of God.
What efforts were made to get rid of Him as Creator I have described in
my examination of the birth and death of that crude error known in its
time as “Natural Selection.” There was a moment when those who were
attacking the idea of creation tried to turn this error from a mere
fashion into a dogma. Created beings had no End for which they were
designed. This grossly mechanical system, Natural Selection, thus
invented, has failed. They must seek for another.
But meanwhile they went to the heart of the matter—or at least the
bolder of them did—and proposed to show not only that Creation and
Design were illusions of the human spirit, but that the idea of God
Himself was such an illusion. They made many efforts; they started a
dozen major theories, and scores of minor ones, to account for that
illusion. Mr. Wells in this book characteristically follows one of the
crudest—Grant Allen’s. But while all of them, old or new, differ, they
differ most amicably as fellow-opponents of true religion; for men do
not mind how much their theories disagree so long as they all have for
their root-motive a common antagonism to the Faith and right living.
Note that these people were not out to observe historical record or to
ascertain prehistoric fact upon the actions and the thought of man. That
would have been true science; and true science was not in their line.
They were out to bolster up a theory. Facts must be twisted to meet
theory, or, even more often, invented to support theory. A disciplined
subjection to ascertained truth was abhorrent to them.
Since all can see that God—and God Creative—explains the Universe, some
odd system must be constructed to get rid of that simplest and most
obvious explanation. Since man in his most primitive condition
apparently takes God for granted, and only in later perversions distorts
his vision of that primordial truth, some brief must be got together to
argue an exactly contrary process.
We have had the suggestion that man first thought of spirits because in
his dreams he saw dead friends again; then came to imagine a universal
governing spirit. We have had the suggestion that early man’s vivid
imagination, comparable to that of a child, saw personality in every
natural object that moved and apparently acted with intention—wind,
trees, clouds, rivers—put gods into these, and so, very late, came to
unite them in one Universal God. We have had a totally different
suggestion that man, perceiving the action of the sun upon the earth,
both beneficent and maleficent, got his illusion of God from that. This
piece of foolery ran riot in my youth, and was made to explain not only
the idea of God, but even great poems, until the very heroes of Homer
and Patriarchs of the Bible became “Sun-myths”—as the silly jargon went.
How it all dates, to be sure! As I read Mr. Wells on the Evolution of
the idea of God, I recall those successive cataracts of nonsense in this
country alone: Grant Allen’s, Max Müller’s, and the rest of them. I am
back in my youth. I am back in the days of the Bustle and the Bang, of
Knowles’s old _Nineteenth Century_, of _Sweetness and Light_, and many
another faded picture and phrase that turn me cold with the mere memory
of them, and yet give me a sort of homely feeling. I smell the gas of
the old gas-burners, and I hear the wheels of the hansom cab along the
London streets, and the clatter of horse hoofs in Pall Mall.
Mr. Wells brings out one only of these venerable contraptions. He goes
in for “The Old Man Theory.” It dates from about forty years ago.
Here—as in the case of “Natural Selection,” or of the Croll theory of
glaciation—he reposes upon his early manhood; he is not even immediately
pre-war, as he was in the case of Eoanthropos. He is as modern as the
days before the _Daily Mail_. How it dates! How it dates!
But, like Cyrano, we elder men must be just as we approach the tomb, and
I must do Mr. Wells the justice to admit that the “Old Man” theory is
something a good number of his contemporaries still swear by. He is not
so high and dry here as he is in the more antiquated passages of the
book.
The “Old Man” theory is, briefly, this:
When man was not yet fully man, but still of a bestial type, the brutes
went about in little groups, consisting of a father, several mothers,
and a lot of young. The father was a vile bullying beast, and the
subordinate members of the little group lived in terror of him. As the
younger males grew up he got jealous of them and chased them out. What
with one thing and another his horrid cruelty, his vicious temper, his
jealousy—the dread of him filled the mind of all his wretched
dependants. The mothers would tell their children hair-raising stories
about him. He became an obsession. When this “Old Man” grew to be a
little over forty, and lost some of his original vigour, he was knocked
on the head by a younger male, or if that did not happen to him,
something else got rid of him. He went off to die, or another rather
younger “Old Man” supplanted him. But his legend was firmly fixed, and
_that’s_ where we got the idea of God.
Personally, I think it a more unpleasant suggestion by far than the
still older ineptitudes of men making God up out of Dreams, or the Sun,
or even than that ubiquitous modern mania of Sex and the rest of it. In
my judgment, the “Old Man” rubbish is an awful example of what happened
to the nineteenth-century child who suffered a Calvinistic upbringing.
There must, I fear, have been many “Old Men” at the head of suburban
households forty to fifty years ago to give rise to this disgusting
vision.
But what I would like to point out is not so much the offensiveness of
the picture (and of the minds that entertain it) as its gratuitous
inanity.
It is one thing to confuse hypothesis with fact—and bad enough, God
knows—but it is a still more degraded thing for the human intelligence
to descend to mere unsupported affirmation.
Let us get this point quite clear—for it applies to the whole of Mr.
Wells’s work. Not only is hypothesis stated as fact, but things are
stated as fact which aren’t even hypothesis—which have _no_ evidence at
all in their favour.
If I see a man throw away an old pair of boots by the roadside, I can
register the fact that he threw them away. That is science; that is
ascertained fact.
If I see an old pair of boots by the roadside I can, if I like, attempt
to account for their presence by an hypothesis, that is, by a suggestion
which (if I am a reasonable man who can distinguish knowledge from
guessing) I do not _affirm_, but only put forward as a possible
explanation. I say, “These boots _may have been_ thrown away by the man
who stole a new pair of boots from my neighbour Brown.”
But what should we say of a man who, although no old boots had been
found, made up a circumstantial story of the thief, saying, “This is
where he threw away his old boots. His name was Archie Williams, he had
red hair, he was a teetotaller, a widower, and had been in gaol for
assaulting the police”?
Now this exactly corresponds to the process by which the Victorian
Materialist group got its idea of God deriving from the “Old Man.”
He is not even an hypothetical “Old Man,” for he corresponds to no known
human habit. All vertebrates have fathers, and all fathers grow old.
Some sorts are polygamous, others pair in couples. But of a vertebrate
ancestral to man, polygamous, and possessing these habits of bullying
his “group” of terrorized wives and young, there is no trace. There is
not a shred of evidence in bone or flint or prehistoric painting or
tradition. The whole thing was spun entirely out of the Victorian
writer’s head. It gave him pleasure in this, as in other points, to
think himself much nicer than his ancestors, because that flattered his
pride. He liked to suppose the idea of God a figment of man’s brain,
because that left him free from moral responsibility; but of _evidence_
there is not a fragment. This fairy (or ogre) tale corresponds to
nothing in the human spirit; it has no relation to the reverence, the
exaltation, the affection which we instinctively feel for that by which
we come to be: not only for God, but for our parents and our country. It
is not the way in which our minds work from childhood to maturity—at
least it is not the way in which the minds of normal children work. I
cannot answer for the workings of the mind in children brought up in
strange heresies.
I say of positive evidence there is nothing whatsoever. The whole thing
is as much like sober history as “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It is
invented from beginning to end.
Mr. Wells is less to blame for this absurdity than if he had made it up
himself out of his own head, and I hasten to spare him such ridicule. He
did no more than copy it out of other people’s old books. But he cannot
be spared the ridicule of having copied it. He had far better for his
reputation have left it alone. It looks silly enough to-day, and in a
few years’ time it will look far sillier.
But the reader here may say, “It is true that those whom our Author
copies had no evidence for the theory that primitive man suffered from
base illusions, out of which grew up the illusion of a general God. But
neither have we any evidence to show that early man had intuitions of
the One God.”
But is that so? Have we, indeed, no evidence leading towards, probably,
a true answer?
Now, in the nature of things, evidence of such a sort must be vague in
quality and very insufficient in amount. But it is converging evidence,
and it is striking.
In the first place, we also are men. We can examine our own minds and
find how they work upon the matter. The old-fashioned doctrinaires, the
“Natural Selection” men, who are now rapidly becoming museum specimens,
may tell us that such an examination is no guide because man is always
changing; so what we feel to-day is no guide to what our remote
forefathers felt. But they have been proved wrong. _Man is a fixed
type._ We have just as much right to infer Early Man from ourselves as
we have to infer the reindeer he hunted from the reindeer of to-day.
It is the neglect of this elementary truth that _Man is a fixed type_
which renders ridiculous all the monstrous recent mythology on man. And,
indeed, why is it that they only apply this mythology to man? They infer
the habits and reactions of all other existing animals in the remote
past from their present habits and reactions. Why is man alone treated
as an unique anomaly, perpetually changing not his implements but the
very nature of his mind, and changing vastly in a few centuries, while
his fellow creatures stand unchanged for countless generations? Because
their theories have for object a denial of man’s Divine connection, and
these theories break down unless facts are twisted to fit them.
Whether Man became a fixed type by this or by that process may be
debated, but that when he had once appeared as true Man he remained a
fixed type is certain.
Now when we consult our own Man-mind upon this problem of God and ask
ourselves (as we are perfectly capable of doing), “How should I have
felt about it had I not the traditions and teaching which I have had?”
the answer is not far to seek. We should wonder at the unity and
diversity of life of the world around us. We should suppose an origin
for such things. Probably we should think of it vaguely, but undoubtedly
we should think of it personally. We should conceive governance and a
Being behind it all.
Here is another line of approach.
Nothing is more common in anti-Christian argument than the appeal to
contemporary savages as examples of what Early Man was like. It is true
that this cardinal doctrine, the close similarity of the modern savage
with primitive man, having been turned against them, the materialists
have recently been warning us against too close a parallel, and have
begun repeating something we Christians talked of long ago (it ought to
be obvious enough) that the savage has been at it just as long as we
have, and that often he may have degraded rather than have risen. But
they can’t have it both ways. They can’t use the savage to make out the
origins of Man as abominable as possible, and then, when the savage
gives evidence on our side, say that they won’t accept it.
Now the evidence from the savage in this respect is very remarkable. Not
only is its general trend clear, but the more it is examined the
stronger it becomes.
It is twofold. First, the very simple (and therefore, presumably, the
very primitive) peoples are precisely those which have, as a rule (not
always) the primary conception of a Universal God. That is true of the
Pigmies, it is true of certain striking cases in Australasia; it seems
less certain of the Esquimaux.
Secondly, when you get successive layers of culture, _it is precisely
the later layers in which this idea fades away, and local immediate gods
begin to obscure it_. The whole process has every appearance of being
that of an original concept of a Universal God, later modified by
particular tangible relations with immediate things, or, in plain words,
Idolatry.
You get all the successive stages: The Supreme God still believed in,
but regarded as indifferent; the Supreme God half-forgotten; the Supreme
God wholly forgotten. They are like geological strata.
As an example of the way in which closer examination confirms this
succession, I may take the case of the Andaman islanders and those who
have observed them.
It was at first generally admitted, on the witness of an original
observer, that these primitives held the idea of one Universal God. Then
came a later observer who made his enquiries and decided that they had
no such idea at all. Then came the careful scientific critic of this
later observer (Andrew Lang), and showed, to the delight of all those
who enjoy the comic, that the _first_ witness spoke the language and
lived intimately with the natives for years, while the _second_ was a
passing traveller who could not speak a word of it.
To all this add a third form of evidence. Primitive man, unless he was
quite unlike contemporary savages, and unless his thought did not follow
the ordinary rules of thinking, could not possibly turn a local God or
deified chieftain or what not into the Universal God. That is a wholly
gratuitous assumption born of modern academic speculation. In the actual
practice of the mind the two things are quite apart.
When a statement is continually repeated and is also simple, it easily
comes to be an accepted commonplace. We ought always to test such
ambient ideas by close inspection, and this one of many gods coalescing
with one God won’t hold water. Our minds do not generalize local
attachments: they concentrate them.
They may extend the field of operation of such attachments, as when the
patriotism of the city is extended to a nation or empire. But they
remain fiercely exclusive. There is no “patriotism of the Universe.”
Local gods are essentially competitive, active in a defined sphere. They
are, by definition, many. Their very nature is to conflict one with
another. There is no mental process whereby they can coalesce into a
totally different kind of being. Far from it. They should, in the nature
of things, and they do in actual historical example, degrade yet
further, until they fall of their own insufficiency; but they don’t turn
into the one Universal God. There is no case of it in all History.
One body of Men—the ancient Jews—did indeed say that their God was the
only true God and the Universal God. But they were unique in this, _and_
they didn’t begin by imagining many Gods. The whole point of their
peculiarity was their affirmation of unity. That was what separated them
from all other religions around them. The worshippers of local gods
mocked this Jewish Jehovah (as on the Moabite Stone), but they never
called _their_ gods universal.
More than that we cannot say, and we do not know. The beginnings of the
race are hidden from us, so far as scientific examination is concerned,
save for certain analogies. There is no record of a contemporary sort,
there is no direct archæological evidence. But such analogy as there is,
and such examination of mental processes as is possible, leave the old
anti-Christian theories—sun-myth and sexual and animistic and
somniac—wrecked; and none more derelict than the unpleasant “Old Man.”
* * * * *
So much for that one, and much the most important, point.
If anyone would support the contention that man had not in him the idea
of God, nor came to fulfil it, but acquired it as an illusion from
circumstance, he must make up some better theory than this. It is even
stupider than those still older exploded attempts which Mr. Wells has
wisely left alone. After all, there is such a thing as the sun, and
there are such things as dreams: and children, and all people with vivid
imaginations, and in a healthy spiritual state, feel separate spiritual
forces behind the world which well might be erroneously deified. But the
“Old Man” is fictitious altogether. He is as unreal as Santa Claus; but
we lose him with less regret.