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 mythopœic 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 communiqué. 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?