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 faineant_. 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 encyclopaedia, 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?
The assumption would be, as I understand it, that of a finite God,
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 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, automatically 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 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 substitute ordered co-operation for the
sanguinary competition above which merely instinctive organism are
incapable of rising.