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 substituting social enthusiasms for
individual passions as the motive-power of human conduct? We may admit
that the brain of man must first be developed up to a certain point
before divine suggestion could effectively work upon it. But we know
that men and races of magnificent 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! Hellas 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 bloody 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 godhead.
Of course Mr. Wells will remind me that he claims for him no material
potency; and I must own that no happier moment could have been chosen
for the annunciation of an impotent God. But the plea does not quite
tally with the facts. In the first place (as we have seen) the
Invisible King is _going_ to do things--he is going to do very
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 God can be exercised without producing
external reactions. Why, he is actually stated to be--like another
God, his near relative, whom he rather unkindly disowns--he is stated
to be "the light of the world" (p. 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 God powers which, even if he
had no greater knowledge than Mr. Wells himself possesses, could be
used to epoch-making advantage. Fancy an omnipresent 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 God's message to
the world; only he modestly attributed it to defects in his own
equipment rather than to powerlessness on the part of God. We read on
page 427:--"Never had it been so plain to Mr. Britling that he was a
weak, silly, ill-informed and hasty-minded writer, and never had he
felt so invincible a conviction that the Spirit of God was in him, and
that it fell to him to take some part in the establishment of a new
order of living upon the earth.... Always he seemed to be on the verge
of some illuminating and beautiful statement of his cause; always he
was finding his writing inadequate, a thin treachery to the impulse of
his heart." Have we not in such an experience an irrefutable proof of
the inefficacy of Mr. Britling's God? Always the world has been all
ears for a clear, convincing, compulsive message from God; always, or
at any rate for many thousands of years, there have been men who
seemed the predestined mouthpieces of such a message; always what
purported to be the word of God has proved to be either powerless to
make itself heard, or powerful only to the begetting of hideous moral
and social corruptions. God spoke (it 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. God spoke through Moses, and the result was--Judaism!
God spoke through Jesus, and the result was Arianism and
Athanasianism, the Papacy, the Holy Office, the Thirty Years' War,
massacres beyond computation, and the slowly calcined flesh of an
innumerable army of martyrs. All this, no doubt, was due to gross and
palpable misunderstanding of the message delivered through Jesus; but
since it was so fatally open to misunderstanding, would it not better
have remained undelivered? Could the world have been appreciably worse
off without it? The question is rather an idle one, since it turns on
"might have beens." That the element of good in the message of Jesus
has been to some extent efficient, no one would deny. But the alloy of
potential evil has made itself so overpoweringly actual that to strike
a balance between the two forces is impossible, and the question is
generally decided by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into one
scale or the other.
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 anticipated Mr. Wells's view of the matter when
he wrote ironically:--
It's a simple thing that I demand,
Though humble as can be--
A statement fair in my Maker's hand
To a gentleman like me--
A clean account, writ fair and broad,
And a plain apologee--
Or deevil a ceevil word to God
From a gentleman like me.
But why this irony? What an infinity of trouble and pain would have
been saved if such a "clean account, writ fair and broad," had been
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 God. I cannot
but think that the poet got nearer the heart of the matter who
wrote:--
Was Moses upon Sinai taught
How Sinai's mighty ribs were wrought?
Did Buddha, 'neath the bo-tree's shade,
Learn how the stars were poised and swayed?
Did Jesus still pain's raging storm,
And dower the world with chloroform?
Or Mahomet a jehad decree
'Gainst microbe-harboring gnat and flea?
Has revelation e'er revealed
Aught from its age and hour concealed?
Or miracle, since time began,
Conferred a single boon on Man?
Truly, we may agree with Mr. Wells that the Invisible King was
probably not in the secrets of the Veiled Being, else he could
scarcely have kept them so successfully. But have we any use for a God
who can teach us nothing? who has to be taught by us before he can do
anything worth mentioning? The old Gods who professed to teach were
much more rational in theory, if only their teaching had not been all
wrong. Man has built up his knowledge of the universe he lives in by
slow, laborious degrees, not helped, but constantly and cruelly
hindered, by his Gods. Yet Mr. Wells will surely not deny that an
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 associate his name
with the completed achievement. All this means that to-day, as from
the beginning, man has to wring her secrets from Nature in the sweat
of his brain, and without the smallest assistance from any Invisible
King or other potentate. To-day there are doubtless 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 God is Magic or that God is Providence" (p. 27)--as
though it were disgracefully pusillanimous to prefer a well-governed
to an ungoverned world. God, 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 godlike thing, and
greatly to the credit of any and every God, to give Nature its head,
and take no further trouble about the matter. I cannot share that
view. My only objection to Providence is that it manifestly does not
exist. If it did exist, and made the world an appreciably better place
to live in, why should we grudge it a few miracles? There is a touch
of the sour-grapes philosophy in the rationalist attitude on this
matter which Mr. Wells attributes to his Invisible King. Because we
can't have any miracles, we say we don't want them. Also, no doubt, we
see that the alleged miracles of the past were childish futilities,
doing at most a little temporary good to individuals, never rendering
any permanent service to a city or a nation, and much less to mankind
at large. They were a sort of niggardly alms from omnipotence, not a
generous endowment or a liberal compensation. But is that any reason
why an intelligent Power should be unable to devise a really helpful
miracle? Another plausible objection is that, even if we could admit
the justice of a system of rewards and punishments, good and evil are
so inextricably intermixed in this world that it is impossible to
distribute benefits on a satisfactory moral scheme. It is impossible
to manipulate the rainfall so that the righteous farmer shall have
just what he wants at the appropriate seasons, while his wicked
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 God 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 God is not a figure of
speech, but a person, an individual, as real and independent an entity
as the Kaiser or President Wilson. In the second place, I have
enquired whether anything he says enables us to conceive _a priori_
the possibility of such an entity disengaging itself from the mind of
the race, and have regretfully been led to the conclusion that the
genesis of this God remains at least as insoluble a mystery as that of
any other God ever placed before a confiding public. Thirdly, I have
approached the question _a posteriori_ and enquired whether history or
present experience offers any evidence from which we can reasonably
infer the existence and activity of such a God--arriving once more at
a negative conclusion. With the best will in the world, I can discover
nothing in this Invisible King but a sort of new liqueur--or old
liqueur with a new label--suited, no doubt, to the constitutions of
certain very exceptional people. Mr. Wells avers that he himself finds
it supremely grateful and comforting, and further appeals to the
testimony of a number of other (unnamed) believers--"English,
Americans, Bengalis, 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 God 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 God
in any useful or even comprehensible sense of the term, there remains
the question whether he is a useful figure of speech. Metaphors and
personifications are often things of great potency, whether for good
or evil. It might quite well happen that, if we wholly rejected Mr.
Wells's gospel, on account of a mere squabble as to the meaning of the
word "God," we should thereby lose something which might have been of
the utmost value to us. Let us not run the risk of throwing out the
baby with the bath-water.
Take the case of a very similar personification with which we are all
familiar--to wit, John Bull. Is he a helpful or a detrimental
"synthesis"? It is not quite easy to say. There is a certain
geniality, a bluff wholesomeness, a downright honesty about him, which
has doubtless its value; but on the other hand he is the incarnation
of Philistinism and Toryism, the perfect expression 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 illustration 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
anticipates 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 God, associations for building cathedrals
and such like great still places urgent with beauty, into which men
and women may go to rest from the clamor of the day's confusions" (p.
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 superstition 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 God then there is no
persuading you of him"; but if you do, "you will realize more and more
clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method and intention"
(p. 98). Now, assuming (no slight assumption) that the oracles of
God, the message of the still small voice, will be identically
interpreted by all believers, the unbelievers, those who "do not feel
God," have still to be dealt with; and, as they are not open to
persuasion, it would seem that the faithful must be prepared either to
shoot them down or to vote them down--whereof the latter seems the
humaner alternative. It is true that Mr. Wells's God is a man of war;
like that other whom he disowns but strangely 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 God
is real, his sword is metaphoric. Mr. Wells is not seriously proposing
to take his cue from his Mohammedan friends, raise the cry of "Allahu
Akbar!" and propagate his gospel scimitar in hand. It is hard to see,
then, what other method there can be of dealing with the heathen,
except the method of the ballot-box--of course with proportional
representation. When there are no more heathen--when the whole world
can read the will of God by direct intuition, as though it were
written in letters of fire across the firmament--then, indeed, the
ballot-box may join the throne, sceptre and crown in the historical
museum. But even the robust optimism of the _gottestrunken_ Mr. Wells
can scarcely conceive this millennium to be at hand. So that in the
meantime it seems unwise to speak slightingly of democracy, lest we
thereby help the Powers, both here and elsewhere, which are fighting
for something very much worse. For I take it that the worst enemy of
the Wellsian God is the Superman, who has quite a sporting chance of
coming out on top, if not actually in this War, at least in the welter
that will succeed it.