Or, to put the same question in more general terms, is it wise of Mr.
Wells to make such play with the word "God"? He himself admits that
"God trails with him a thousand misconceptions and bad associations:
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? God 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 substitute 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
associations. 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 cumbrous formulas. But politics
is not one of these regions of thought; and it is precisely in
politics that the intervention of God 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 God, it would be tactful to
pretend that he was not. As he is _not_ a God, 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 God 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 association 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 God, 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 God 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 attitude 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 God 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 participation 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 God 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 thorny 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 God-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 God
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 God" (p. 44), "God 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 God 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
classes, 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-accumulated 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 entity 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 assures 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.
Wells will scarcely tell me that these young men went through the
experiences he describes as "conversion," and escaped from the burden
of "over-individuation" by throwing themselves into the arms of a
synthetic God! Many of them, no doubt, would have expressed their
idealism, had they expressed it at all, in terms of Christianity; but
that, we are told, is a delusion, and the only true God is the
Invisible King. If that be so, the conclusion would seem to be that,
in the present stage of the evolution of human character, no God at
all is needed to enable millions of men, in whom the blood runs high
and the joy of life is at its keenest, to achieve the conquest of self
in one of its noblest forms. Or (what comes to the same thing) any
sort of God will serve the purpose. Your God (divested of metaphysical
attributes) is simply a name for your own better instincts and
impulses. Many people, perhaps most, share Mr. Wells's tendency to
externalize, objectivate, personify these impulses; and there may be
no harm in doing so. But when it comes to asserting that your own
personification is the only true one, then--I am not so sure.
Finally there arises the question whether the personification of the
Invisible King can really, in any comprehensible sense, and for any
considerable number of normal human beings, rob death of its sting,
the grave of its victory? On this point discussion cannot possibly be
conclusive, for the ultimate test is necessarily a personal one. If
any sane and sincere person tells me that a certain idea, or emotion,
or habit of mind, or even any rite or incantation, has deprived death
of its terrors for him, I can only congratulate him, even if I have to
confess that my own experience gives me no clue to his meaning. It is
not even very profitable to enquire whether a man can be confident of
his own attitude towards death unless he has either come very close to
its brink himself, or known what it means to witness the extinction of
a life on which his whole joy in the present and hope for the future
depended. All one can do is to try to ascertain as nearly as possible
what the contemner of death really means, and to consider whether his
individual experience or feeling is, or is likely to become, typical.
One thing we must plainly realize, and that is that, for the purposes
of his present argument, Mr. Wells conceives death to be a real
extinction of the individual consciousness. He does not formally
commit himself to a denial of personal immortality, but it is a
contingency which he declines to take into account. Oddly enough, in
trying to acclimatize our minds to the idea of such an absolutely
incorporeal and immaterial, yet really existent, being as his
Invisible King, he comes near to clearing away the one great obstacle
to belief in survival after death. "From the earliest ages," he says,
"man's mind has found little or no difficulty in the idea of something
essential to the personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing
apart from the body and continuing after the destruction of the body,
and being still a person and an individual" (p. 59). He does not
actually say that there _is_ no difficulty about this conception: he
only says that, as a matter of history, the great mass of men have
found it easy and natural to believe in ghosts. But it is hard to see
any force in his argument at this point unless he means to imply that
he himself finds "little or no difficulty" in conceiving the continued
existence of a spiritual consciousness and individuality after the
dissolution of the body to which it has been attached; and if he does
mean this, it is hard to see why he does not take his stand beside Sir
Oliver Lodge on the spiritist platform. To many of us, the extreme
difficulty of such a conception is the one great barrier to the
acceptance of the spiritist theory, for which remarkable evidence can
certainly be adduced. This, however, is a digression. So far as _God
the Invisible King_ is concerned, Mr. Wells must be taken as ignoring,
if not rejecting, the idea of personal immortality.
The victory over death, then, which the Invisible King is said to
achieve, does not consist in its abolition. It may probably be best
defined as the perfect reconcilement of the believer to the extinction
of his individual consciousness. And what are the grounds of that
reconcilement? Let us search the scriptures. Where the steps are
described by which the catechumen approaches the full realization of
God, it is said that at that stage he feels that "if there were such a
being he would supply the needed consolation and direction, his
continuing purpose would knit together the scattered effort of life,
_his immortality would take the sting from death_" (p. 21-22). A
little further on, the idea is elaborated in a high strain of
mysticism. God, who "captains us but does not coddle us" (p. 42), will
by no means undertake to hold the believer scatheless among the
pitfalls and perils that beset our earthly pilgrimage. "But God will
be with you nevertheless. In the reeling aeroplane, or the dark
ice-cave, God will be your courage. Though you suffer or are killed,
it is not an end. He will be with you as you face death; he will die
with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave deaths. He
will come so close to you that at the last you will not know whether
it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be swallowed up
in his victory" (p. 39). The passage has already been quoted in which
it is written that, at the end of the fight for God's Kingdom, "we are
altogether taken up into his being" (p. 68). In a discussion of "the
religion of atheists" we are told that unregenerate man is "acutely
aware of himself as an individual and unawakened to himself as a
species," wherefore he "finds death frustration." His mistake is in
not seeing that his own frustration "may be the success and triumph of
his kind" (p. 72). At the point where we are told that "the first
purpose of God is the attainment of clear knowledge," we are further
informed that "he will apprehend more fully as time goes on" the
purpose to which this knowledge is to be applied. But already it is
possible to define "the broad outlines" of his purpose. "It 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_"
(p. 99), and then, as we saw before, the defeat of the threatened
extinction of life through the cooling of the planet. These, I think,
are the chief texts bearing directly on this particular matter; but
there is one other remark which must not be overlooked. "A convicted
criminal, frankly penitent," we are told, "... may still die well and
bravely on the gallows, to the glory of God. He may step straight from
that death into the immortal being of God."
To what, now, does all this amount? Is there any more substantial
solace in it than in the "Oh, may I join the Choir Invisible"
aspiration of mid-nineteenth-century positivism? Far be it from me to
speak contemptuously of that aspiration. It gives a new orientation
and consistency to thought and effort during life; and to the man who
feels that his little note will melt into the world-harmony that is to
be, that thought may impart a certain serenity under the shadow of the
end. It is certainly better to feel at night, "I have done a fair
day's work," than to lie down with the confession, "My day has been
wasted, and worse." No one wants, I suppose, to say with Peer Gynt:--
Thou beautiful earth, be not angry with me,
That I trampled thy grasses to no avail;
Thou beautiful sun, thou hast squandered away
Thy glory of light in an empty hut.
Beautiful sun and beautiful earth,
You were foolish to bear and give light to my mother.
But there is also another side to the question. The more surely you
believe that "through the ages one increasing purpose runs"--the more
intimately you have merged your individual will in what Mr. Wells
would call the will of the Invisible King--the less do you relish the
thought that you can never see that will worked out. The intenser your
interest in the play, the greater your disinclination to leave the
theatre just as the plot is thickening. Nor does it afford much
consolation to know that the Producer is just (as it were) getting
into his stride, and that, if the house should become too cold for
comfort, arrangements will be made for the transference of the
production to another theatre, with a better heating-apparatus.
Is there any real escape from the fact that for each of us the one
thing that actually exists is our individual consciousness? It is our
universe; and if its trembling flame is blown out, that particular
universe is no more. If its limits of "individuation" are
irrecoverably lost, what avails it to tell us that the flame is
absorbed into the light of the world or the dayspring on high? Is it
possible to imagine that the rain-drop which falls in the Atlantic
thrills with a great rapture as its molecules disperse in the moment
of coalescence, because it is now part of an infinite and immortal
entity? Yes, it is possible to imagine it rejoicing that its "chagrins
of egotism," as an individual drop, are now over; in fact, this is
precisely the sort of thing that some poets love to imagine; but has
it any real relevance to our sublunary lot? Can it minister any
substantial comfort or fortification to the normal man in the moment
of peril or agony? I ask; I do not answer. Can Mr. Wells put in the
witness-box any flight-lieutenant who will swear that in his reeling
aeroplane, as death seemed on the point of engulfing him, he felt
uncertain whether it was God or he that was about to die, and
gloriously certain that in any case he was about to "step straight
into the immortal being of God"? And even if, in the excitement of
violent action, such hallucinations do mean something to a peculiar
type of mind, has any one dying of pneumonia or Bright's disease been
known to declare that, though his mortal spark was on the point of
extinction, he felt that "by the incorporation of the motives of his
life into an undying purpose" he had triumphed over death and the
grave? The simple soul who says "We shall meet in Heaven" no doubt
enjoys such a triumph--and even if he fails to keep the appointment,
no one is any the worse. But where are the men and women who feel the
immortality of God, however we define or construct him, a rich
compensation for their own mortality?
It may be said that I am applying shockingly terrestrial tests to Mr.
Wells's soaring transcendentalisms. I am simply asking: "Will they
work?" A world-religion cannot be what I have called a luxury for the
intellectually wealthy. It must be within the reach of plain men and
women; and plain men and women cannot, as the French say, "pay
themselves with words." Take them all round, they do not make too much
of death. With or without the aid of religion, they generally meet it
with tolerable fortitude. But it will be hard to persuade them that
annihilation is a thing to be faced with rapture, because a synthetic
God is indestructible; or that death is not death because other people
will be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence. Even if you cannot
offer them another life, you may tell them of the grave as a place
where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, and
they will understand. But will they understand if you tell them that
we triumph over the grave because God dies with us and yet never dies?
I fear it will need something clearer and more credible than this to
make the undertaker a popular functionary.