Those who are of Mr. Wells’s generation, the men who date their birth from the sixties and seventies of the last century, will remember the many efforts then made to get rid of God.
What efforts were made to get rid of Him as Creator I have described in my examination of the birth and death of that crude error known in its time as “Natural Selection.” There was a moment when those who were attacking the idea of creation tried to turn this error from a mere fashion into a dogma. Created beings had no End for which they were designed. This grossly mechanical system, Natural Selection, thus invented, has failed. They must seek for another.
But meanwhile they went to the heart of the matter—or at least the bolder of them did—and proposed to show not only that Creation and Design were illusions of the human spirit, but that the idea of God Himself was such an illusion. They made many efforts; they started a dozen major theories, and scores of minor ones, to account for that illusion. Mr. Wells in this book characteristically follows one of the crudest—Grant Allen’s. But while all of them, old or new, differ, they differ most amicably as fellow-opponents of true religion; for men do not mind how much their theories disagree so long as they all have for their root-motive a common antagonism to the Faith and right living.
Note that these people were not out to observe historical record or to ascertain prehistoric fact upon the actions and the thought of man. That would have been true science; and true science was not in their line. They were out to bolster up a theory. Facts must be twisted to meet theory, or, even more often, invented to support theory. A disciplined subjection to ascertained truth was abhorrent to them.
Since all can see that God—and God Creative—explains the Universe, some odd system must be constructed to get rid of that simplest and most obvious explanation. Since man in his most primitive condition apparently takes God for granted, and only in later perversions distorts his vision of that primordial truth, some brief must be got together to argue an exactly contrary process.
We have had the suggestion that man first thought of spirits because in his dreams he saw dead friends again; then came to imagine a universal governing spirit. We have had the suggestion that early man’s vivid imagination, comparable to that of a child, saw personality in every natural object that moved and apparently acted with intention—wind, trees, clouds, rivers—put gods into these, and so, very late, came to unite them in one Universal God. We have had a totally different suggestion that man, perceiving the action of the sun upon the earth, both beneficent and maleficent, got his illusion of God from that. This piece of foolery ran riot in my youth, and was made to explain not only the idea of God, but even great poems, until the very heroes of Homer and Patriarchs of the Bible became “Sun-myths”—as the silly jargon went.
How it all dates, to be sure! As I read Mr. Wells on the Evolution of the idea of God, I recall those successive cataracts of nonsense in this country alone: Grant Allen’s, Max Müller’s, and the rest of them. I am back in my youth. I am back in the days of the Bustle and the Bang, of Knowles’s old Nineteenth Century, of Sweetness and Light, and many another faded picture and phrase that turn me cold with the mere memory of them, and yet give me a sort of homely feeling. I smell the gas of the old gas-burners, and I hear the wheels of the hansom cab along the London streets, and the clatter of horse hoofs in Pall Mall.
Mr. Wells brings out one only of these venerable contraptions. He goes in for “The Old Man Theory.” It dates from about forty years ago. Here—as in the case of “Natural Selection,” or of the Croll theory of glaciation—he reposes upon his early manhood; he is not even immediately pre-war, as he was in the case of Eoanthropos. He is as modern as the days before the Daily Mail. How it dates! How it dates!
But, like Cyrano, we elder men must be just as we approach the tomb, and I must do Mr. Wells the justice to admit that the “Old Man” theory is something a good number of his contemporaries still swear by. He is not so high and dry here as he is in the more antiquated passages of the book.
The “Old Man” theory is, briefly, this: