Chapter 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.

Observe that in exercising this power of psychical influence there would be no sort of miracle-working, no interference with the order of nature. The influence of mind upon mind, even without the intervention of words or other symbols, is a part of the order of nature which no one to-day dreams of questioning. Hypnotic suggestion is a department of orthodox medical practice, and telepathy is more and more widely admitted, if only as a refuge from the hypothesis of survival after death. If, then, we have a divine mind applying itself to the problems of humanity, and capable of suggesting ideas to the mind of man--appealing, as a "still small voice" (p. 18), to his intelligence, his emotions and his will--one cannot but figure its power for good as almost illimitable. What is to prevent it from achieving a very rapid elimination of the ape and the tiger, the Junker and the Tory, and 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.