III
NEW MYTHS FOR OLD
Before examining the particular attributes and activities of the Invisible King, let us look a little more closely into the question whether a God detached alike from man below and (so to speak) from heaven above, is a thinkable God in whom any satisfaction can be found. Mr. Wells must not reply (he probably would not think of doing so) that "satisfaction" is no test: that he asserts an objective truth which exists, like the Nelson Column or the Atlantic Ocean, whether we find satisfaction in it or not. Though he does not mention the word "pragmatism," his standards are purely pragmatist. He offers no jot or tittle of evidence for the existence of the Invisible King, except that it is a hypothesis which he finds to work extremely well. Satisfaction and nothing else is the test he applies. So we have every right to ask whether the renunciation of all concern about the Veiled Being, and concentration upon the thought of a finite God, practically unrelated to the infinite, can bring us any reasonable sense of reconciliation to the nature of things. For that, I take it, is the essence of religion.
It was in no spirit of irony that I began this essay by expressing the lively interest with which I learned that Mr. Wells was setting out on the quest for God. The dogmatic agnosticism which declares it impossible ever to know anything about the whence, how and why of the universe does not seem to me more rational than any other dogma which jumps from "not yet" to "never." Mr. Wells himself disclaims that dogma. He says: "It may be that minds will presently appear among us of such a quality that the face of that Unknown will not be altogether hidden" (p. 108). And in another place (p. 15) he suggests that "our God, the Captain of Mankind," may one day enable us to "pierce the black wrappings," or, in other words, to get behind the veil. There is nothing, then, unreasonable or absurd in man's incurable inquisitiveness as to God, in the non-Wellsian sense of the term. God simply means the key to the mystery of existence; and though the keys hitherto offered have all either jammed or turned round and round without unlocking anything, it does not follow that no real key exists within the reach of human investigation or speculation. Therefore one naturally feels a little stirring of hope at the news that a fresh and keen intellect, untrammelled by the folk-lore theologies of the past, is applying itself to the problem. It is always possible, however improbable, that we may be helped a little forwarder on the path towards realization. One comes back to the before-mentioned analogy of flying. We had been assured over and over again, on the highest authority, that it was an idle dream. When we wanted to express the superlative degree of the impossible, we said "I can no more do it than I can fly." But the irrepressible spirit of man was not to be daunted by à priori demonstrations of impossibility. One day there came the rumour that the thing had been achieved, followed soon by ocular demonstration; and now we rub shoulders every day with men who have outsoared the eagle, and—alas!—carried death and destruction into the hitherto stainless empyrean.
It would seem, then, that there is no reason absolutely to despair of some advance towards a conception of the nature and reason of the universe. And it is certain that Mr. Wells's God would stand a better chance of satisfying the innate needs of the human intelligence if he had not (apparently) given up as a bad job the attempt to relate himself to the causal plexus of the All. Is he outside that causal plexus, self-begotten, self-existent? Then he is the miracle of miracles, a second mystery superimposed on the first. If, on the other hand, he falls within the system, he might surely manage to convey to his disciples some glimmering notion of his place in it. The birth-stories of Gods are always grotesque and unedifying, but that is because they belong to folk-lore. If this God does not belong to folk-lore, surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be indicated without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we have seen, hints that his reticence may be due to the fact that he does not know. In that case this "modern" God is suspiciously like all the ancient Gods, whose most unfortunate characteristic was that they never knew anything more than their worshippers. The reason was not far to seek—namely, that they were mere projections of the minds of these worshippers, fashioned in their own image. But Mr. Wells assures us that this is not the case of the Invisible King.
Mr. Wells will scarcely deny that if it were possible to compress his mythology and merge his Invisible King in his Veiled Being, the result would be a great simplification of the problem. But this is not, in fact, possible; for it would mean the positing of an all-good and all-powerful Creator, which is precisely the idea which Mr. Wells rebels against,[1] in common with every one who realizes the facts of life and the meaning of words. Short of this, however, is no other simplification possible? Would it not greatly clarify our thought if we could bring the Invisible King into action, not, indeed, as the creator of all things, but as the organizer and director of the surprising and almost incredible epiphenomenon which we call life? Our scheme would then take this shape: an inconceivable unity behind the veil, somehow manifesting itself, where it comes within our ken, in the dual form of a great Artificer and a mass of terribly recalcitrant matter—the only medium in which he can work. In other words, the Veiled Being would be as inscrutable as ever, but the Invisible King, instead of dropping in with a certain air of futility, like a doctor arriving too late at the scene of a railway accident, would be placed at the beginning, not of the universe at large, but of the atomic re-arrangements from which consciousness has sprung. Can we, on this hypothesis (which is practically that of Manichæanism) hazard any guess at the motives or forces actuating the Invisible King,—or, to avoid confusion, let us say the Artificer—which should acquit him of the charge of being a callous and mischievous demon rather than a well-willing God? Can we not only place pain and evil (a tautology) to the account of sluggish, refractory matter, but also conjecture a sufficient reason why the Artificer should have started the painful evolution of consciousness, instead of leaving the atoms to whirl insentiently in the figures imposed on them by the stupendous mathematician behind the veil?
[1] In Mr. Britling Sees It Through, which is in some sense a prologue to God the Invisible King, we find an emphatic renunciation of the all-good and all-powerful God. "The theologians," says Mr. Britling, "have been extravagant about God. They have had silly, absolute ideas—that he is all powerful. That he's omni-everything.... Why! if I thought there was an omnipotent God who looked down on battles and deaths and all the waste and horror of this war—able to prevent these things—doing them to amuse himself—I would spit in his empty face" (p. 406).
A complete answer to this question would be a complete solution of the riddle of existence. That, if it be ever attainable, is certainly far enough off. But there are some considerations, not always sufficiently present to our minds, which may perhaps help us, not to a solution, but to a rational restatement, of the riddle.