[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 mythopœic 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 encyclopædia, 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?