One is conscious of a sort of churlishness in thus rejecting the advances of so amiable a character as the Invisible King. But is Mr. Wells, on his side, quite courteous, or even quite fair, to the Veiled Being? "Riddle me no riddles!" he seems to say; "I am tired of your guessing games. Let us have done with 'distressful enquiry into ultimate origins,' and 'bring our minds to the conception of a spontaneous and developing God'—one of whose existence and benevolence we are sure, since we made him ourselves. I want something to worship, to take me out of myself, to inspire me with brave phrases about death. How can one worship an insoluble problem? Will an enigma die with me in a reeling aeroplane? While you lurk obstinately behind that veil, how can I even know that your political views are sound? Whereas the Invisible King gives forth oracles of the highest political wisdom, in a voice which I can scarcely distinguish from my own. You are a remote, tantalizing entity with nothing comforting or stimulating about you. But as for my Invisible King, 'Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.'"
A little way back, I compared Mr. Wells to Moses; but, looked at from another point of view, he and his co-religionists may rather be likened to the Children of Israel. Tired of waiting for news from the God on the cloudy mountain-top, did they not make themselves a synthetic deity, finite, friendly, and very like the Invisible King, inasmuch as he seems to have worked no miracles, and done, in fact, nothing whatever? But the God on the mountain-top was wroth, and accused them of idolatry, surely not without reason. For what is idolatry if it be not manufacturing a God, whether out of golden earrings or out of humanitarian sentiments, and then bowing down and worshipping it?
The wrath of the tribal God against his bovine rival was certainly excessive—yet we cannot regard idolatry as one of the loftier manifestations of the religious spirit. The man who can bow down and worship the work of his hands shows a morbid craving for self-abasement. It is possible, no doubt, to plead that the graven image is a mere symbol of incorporeal, supersensible deity; and the plea is a good one, if, and in so far as, we can believe that the distinction between the sign and the thing signified is clear to the mind of the devotee. The difficulty lies in believing that the type of mind which is capable of focussing its devotion upon a statuette is also capable of distinguishing between the idea of a symbol and the idea of a portrait. But when we pass from the work of a man's hands to the work of his brain—from an actual piece of sculpture to a mental construction—the plea of symbolism can no longer be advanced. This graven image of the mind, so to speak, is the veritable God, or it is nothing; and Mr. Wells, as we have seen, is profuse in his assurances that it is the veritable God. That is what makes his whole attitude and argument so baffling. One can understand an idolater who says "I believe that my God inhabits yonder image," or "Yonder image is only a convenient point of concentration for the reverence, gratitude, and love which pass through it to the august and transcendent Spirit whom it symbolizes." But how are we to understand the idolater who adores, and claims actual divinity for, an emanation from his own brain and the brains of a certain number of like-minded persons? Is it not as though a ventriloquist were to prostrate himself before his own puppet?
This craving for something to worship points to an almost uncanny recrudescence of the spirit of Asia in a fine European intelligence. For my own part, as above stated, I cannot believe Mr. Wells's case to be typical; but in that I may be mistaken. It is possible that an epidemic of Asiatic religiosity may be one of the sequels of the War. If that be so—if there are many people who shrink from the condition of the spiritual "ronin," and are in search of a respectable "daimio" to whom to pay their devotion—I beg leave strongly to urge the claims of the Veiled Being as against the Invisible King.
He has at the outset the not inconsiderable advantage of being an entity instead of a non-entity. Whoever or whatever he may be, we are compelled by the very constitution of our minds to assume his (or its) existence; whereas there is manifestly no compulsion to assume the existence of the Invisible King.
Then, again, the Veiled Being is entirely unpretentious. There is no bluster and no cant about him. He does not claim our gratitude for the doubtful boon of life. He does not pretend to be just, while he is committing, or winking at, the most intolerable injustices. He does not set up to be long-suffering, while in fact he is childishly touchy. He does not profess to be merciful, while the incurable ward, the battlefield—nay, even the maternity home and the dentist's parlor—are there to give him the lie. (Here, of course, I am not contrasting him with the Invisible King, but with more ancient and still more Asian divinities.) It is the moral pretensions tagged on by the theologians to metaphysical Godhead that revolt and estrange reasonable men—Mr. Wells among the rest. If you tell us that behind the Veil we shall find a good-natured, indulgent old man, who chastens us only for our good, is pleased by our flatteries (with or without music), and is not more than suitably vexed at our naughtinesses in the Garden of Eden and elsewhere—we reply that this is a nursery tale which has been riddled, time out of mind, not by wicked sceptics, but by the spontaneous, irrepressible criticism of babes and sucklings. But if you divest the Veiled Being of all ethical—or in other words of all human—attributes, then there is no difficulty whatever in admiring, and even adoring, the marvels he has wrought. Tennyson went deeper than he realized into the nature of things when he wrote—
"For merit lives from man to man,
But not from man, O Lord, to thee."
Once put aside all question of merit and demerit, of praise and blame, and more especially (but this will shock Mr. Wells) of salvation and damnation—and nothing can be easier than to pay to the works of the Veiled Being the meed of an illimitable wonder. When we think of the roaring vortices of flame that spangle the heavens night by night, at distances that beggar conception: when we think of our tiny earth, wrapped in its little film of atmosphere, spinning safely for ages untold amid all these appalling immensities: and when we think, on the other hand, of the battles of claw and maw going on, beneath the starry vault, in that most miraculous of jewels, a drop of water: we cannot but own that the Power which set all this whirl of atoms agoing is worthy of all admiration. And approbation? Ah, that is another matter; for there the moral element comes in. It is possible (and here lies the interest of the enigma) that the Veiled Being may one day justify himself even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing so behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely useless to speculate. Light may one day come to us, but it will come through patient investigation, not through idle pondering and guessing. In the meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the microcosm, ourselves including both extremes, and being, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle of all, we cannot deny to this amazing frame of things the tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be religion, I profess myself as religious as Mr. Wells. I am even willing to join him in some outward, ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if he can suggest one that shall not be ridiculously inadequate. What about kneeling through the C Minor Symphony? That seems to me about as near as we can get. Or I will go with him to Primrose Hill some fine morning (like the Persian Ambassador fabled by Charles Lamb) and worship the Sun, chanting to him William Watson's magnificent hymn:—