VI
FOR AND AGAINST PERSONIFICATION
For those of us who cannot accept Mr. Wells's Invisible King as a God in any useful or even comprehensible sense of the term, there remains the question whether he is a useful figure of speech. Metaphors and personifications are often things of great potency, whether for good or evil. It might quite well happen that, if we wholly rejected Mr. Wells's gospel, on account of a mere squabble as to the meaning of the word "God," we should thereby lose something which might have been of the utmost value to us. Let us not run the risk of throwing out the baby with the bath-water.
Take the case of a very similar personification with which we are all familiar—to wit, John Bull. Is he a helpful or a detrimental "synthesis"? It is not quite easy to say. There is a certain geniality, a bluff wholesomeness, a downright honesty about him, which has doubtless its value; but on the other hand he is the incarnation of Philistinism and Toryism, the perfect expression of the average sensual man. I am told that in one of his avatars he has something like two million worshippers, on whom his influence is of the most questionable, precisely because they have implicit "faith" in him, and regard him as a "Friend behind phenomena," a "great brother," a "strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and lovable." That is an illustration of the dangers which may lurk in prosopopœia. But in the main we can regard John Bull without too much misgiving, because we cannot regard him seriously. His worship will always be seasoned with the saving grace of humor. He can do service in two capacities—sometimes as an ideal, often as a deterrent. Whatever religious revolutions may await us, we are not likely to see St. Paul's Cathedral solemnly re-dedicated to the worship of John Bull. He and his sister divinity, Mrs. Grundy, have never lacked adorers in that basilica; but their cult is probably not on the increase.
The Invisible King, on the other hand, is a personage to be taken with the utmost seriousness. If he has anything like the success Mr. Wells anticipates for him, it is quite on the cards that he might oust the present Reigning Family from one or all of the cathedrals. It is true that Mr. Wells deprecates any ritual worship; but "religious thought finely expressed" would always be in order; and he "does not see why there should not be, under God, associations for building cathedrals and such like great still places urgent with beauty, into which men and women may go to rest from the clamor of the day's confusions" (p. 168). If cathedrals may be built, all the more clearly may they be appropriated—if you can convert or evict the dean and chapter. If the Invisible King should take the fancy of the nation and the world, as Mr. Wells would have us think that he is already doing, he is bound to become the object of a formal cult. We shall very soon see a prayer-book of the "modern religion" with marriage, funeral and perhaps baptismal services, with daily lessons, and with suitable forms of prayer for persons who cannot trust themselves to extempore communings even with a "great brother."
Well, there might be no great harm in this. Some solemn form for the expression of cosmic, and even of mundane or political, emotion would doubtless be useful; and if the "modern religion" could be saved from degenerating into a hysterical superstition on the one hand, or a petrified, persecuting orthodoxy on the other, it would certainly be a vast improvement on many of the religions of to-day.
But the ambitions of the Invisible King go far beyond the mere presidency of an Ethical Church on an extended scale. He is to be a King and no mistake; not even a King of Kings, but "sole Monarch of the universal earth." Autocracies, oligarchies, and democracies are alike to be swept out of his path. The "implicit command" of the modern religion "to all its adherents is to make plain the way to the world theocracy" (p. 97). How the fiats of the Invisible King are to be issued, we are not informed. If through the ballot-box—"vox populi, vox dei"—then the distinction between theocracy and democracy will scarcely be apparent to the naked eye. And one does not see how, in the transition stage at any rate, recourse to the ballot-box is to be avoided, if only as a lesser evil than recourse to howitzers, tanks and submarines. We read that "if you do not feel God then there is no persuading you of him"; but if you do, "you will realize more and more clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method and intention" (p. 98). Now, assuming (no slight assumption) that the oracles of God, the message of the still small voice, will be identically interpreted by all believers, the unbelievers, those who "do not feel God," have still to be dealt with; and, as they are not open to persuasion, it would seem that the faithful must be prepared either to shoot them down or to vote them down—whereof the latter seems the humaner alternative. It is true that Mr. Wells's God is a man of war; like that other whom he disowns but strangely resembles, "he brings mankind not rest but a sword" (p. 96). But we may confidently hold that this, at any rate, is but a manner of speaking. Even if the God is real, his sword is metaphoric. Mr. Wells is not seriously proposing to take his cue from his Mohammedan friends, raise the cry of "Allahu Akbar!" and propagate his gospel scimitar in hand. It is hard to see, then, what other method there can be of dealing with the heathen, except the method of the ballot-box—of course with proportional representation. When there are no more heathen—when the whole world can read the will of God by direct intuition, as though it were written in letters of fire across the firmament—then, indeed, the ballot-box may join the throne, sceptre and crown in the historical museum. But even the robust optimism of the gottestrunken Mr. Wells can scarcely conceive this millennium to be at hand. So that in the meantime it seems unwise to speak slightingly of democracy, lest we thereby help the Powers, both here and elsewhere, which are fighting for something very much worse. For I take it that the worst enemy of the Wellsian God is the Superman, who has quite a sporting chance of coming out on top, if not actually in this War, at least in the welter that will succeed it.
But seriously, is any conceivable sort of theocracy a desirable ideal? 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-fé? 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.