PC World Plus! (NZ) 2000 December & 2001 January/PC World Plus! D.bin/ebooks/godik10.txt

Text File | 2000-08-22 | 244KB | 4,467 lines

Project Gutenberg Etext of God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells
#10 in our series by H. G. Wells


Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!

Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below.  We need your donations.


God The Invisible King

by H. G. Wells  [Herbert George Wells]

September, 1997  [Etext #1046]


Project Gutenberg Etext of God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells
******This file should be named godik10.txt or godik10.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, godik11.txt.
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, godik10a.txt.


Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.


We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
of the official release dates, for time for better editing.

Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
new copy has at least one byte more or less.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1997 for a total of 1000+
If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
total should reach over 100 billion Etexts given away.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.


We need your donations more than ever!


All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
Mellon University).

For these and other matters, please mail to:

Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box  2782
Champaign, IL 61825

When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
Michael S. Hart <[e-mail]>

We would prefer to send you this information by email
(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).

******
If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]

ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
login:  anonymous
password:  your@login
cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET INDEX?00.GUT
for a list of books
and
GET NEW GUT for general information
and
MGET GUT* for newsletters.

**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
(Three Pages)


***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
     University" within the 60 days following each
     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".

*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*





GOD THE INVISIBLE KING

by H. G. Wells



CONTENTS


PREFACE

1.  THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION

2.  HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT

3.  THE LIKENESS OF GOD

4.  THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS

5.  THE INVISIBLE KING

6.  MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION

7.  THE IDEA OF A CHURCH

THE ENVOY




PREFACE


This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious
belief of the writer.  That belief is not orthodox Christianity; it
is not, indeed, Christianity at all; its core nevertheless is a
profound belief in a personal and intimate God.  There is nothing in
its statements that need shock or offend anyone who is prepared for
the expression of a faith different from and perhaps in several
particulars opposed to his own.  The writer will be found to be
sympathetic with all sincere religious feeling.  Nevertheless it is
well to prepare the prospective reader for statements that may jar
harshly against deeply rooted mental habits.  It is well to warn him
at the outset that the departure from accepted beliefs is here no
vague scepticism, but a quite sharply defined objection to dogmas
very widely revered.  Let the writer state the most probable
occasion of trouble forthwith.  An issue upon which this book will
be found particularly uncompromising is the dogma of the Trinity.
The writer is of opinion that the Council of Nicaea, which forcibly
crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the
creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was
one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all
religious gatherings, and he holds that the Alexandrine speculations
which were then conclusively imposed upon Christianity merit only
disrespectful attention at the present time.  There you have a chief
possibility of offence.  He is quite unable to pretend any awe for
what he considers the spiritual monstrosities established by that
undignified gathering.  He makes no attempt to be obscure or
propitiatory in this connection.  He criticises the creeds
explicitly and frankly, because he believes it is particularly
necessary to clear them out of the way of those who are seeking
religious consolation at this present time of exceptional religious
need.  He does little to conceal his indignation at the role played
by these dogmas in obscuring, perverting, and preventing the
religious life of mankind.  After this warning such readers from
among the various Christian churches and sects as are accessible to
storms of theological fear or passion to whom the Trinity is an
ineffable mystery and the name of God almost unspeakably awful, read
on at their own risk.  This is a religious book written by a
believer, but so far as their beliefs and religion go it may seem to
them more sceptical and more antagonistic than blank atheism.  That
the writer cannot tell.  He is not simply denying their God.  He is
declaring that there is a living God, different altogether from that
Triune God and nearer to the heart of man.  The spirit of this book
is like that of a missionary who would only too gladly overthrow and
smash some Polynesian divinity of shark's teeth and painted wood and
mother-of-pearl.  To the writer such elaborations as "begotten of
the Father before all worlds" are no better than intellectual
shark's teeth and oyster shells.  His purpose, like the purpose of
that missionary, is not primarily to shock and insult; but he is
zealous to liberate, and he is impatient with a reverence that
stands between man and God.  He gives this fair warning and proceeds
with his matter.

His matter is modern religion as he sees it.  It is only
incidentally and because it is unavoidable that he attacks doctrinal
Christianity.

In a previous book, "First and Last Things" (Constable and Co.), he
has stated his convictions upon certain general ideas of life and
thought as clearly as he could.  All of philosophy, all of
metaphysics that is, seems to him to be a discussion of the
relations of class and individual.  The antagonism of the Nominalist
and the Realist, the opposition of the One and the Many, the
contrast of the Ideal and the Actual, all these oppositions express
a certain structural and essential duality in the activity of the
human mind.  From an imperfect recognition of that duality ensue
great masses of misconception.  That was the substance of "First and
Last Things."  In this present book there is no further attack on
philosophical or metaphysical questions.  Here we work at a less
fundamental level and deal with religious feeling and religious
ideas.  But just as the writer was inclined to attribute a whole
world of disputation and inexactitudes to confused thinking about
the exact value of classes and terms, so here he is disposed to
think that interminable controversies and conflicts arise out of a
confusion of intention due to a double meaning of the word "God";
that the word "God" conveys not one idea or set of ideas, but
several essentially different ideas, incompatible one with another,
and falling mainly into one or other of two divergent groups; and
that people slip carelessly from one to the other of these groups of
ideas and so get into ultimately inextricable confusions.

The writer believes that the centuries of fluid religious thought
that preceded the violent ultimate crystallisation of Nicaea, was
essentially a struggle--obscured, of course, by many complexities--
to reconcile and get into a relationship these two separate main
series of God-ideas.

Putting the leading id a part against evil.

The writer believes that these dogmas of relationship are not merely
extraneous to religion, but an impediment to religion.  His aim in
this book is to give a statement of religion which is no longer
entangled in such speculations and disputes.


Let him add only one other note of explanation in this preface, and
that is to remark that except for one incidental passage (in Chapter
IV., 1), nowhere does he discuss the question of personal
immortality.  [It is discussed in "First and Last Things," Book IV,
4.]  He omits this question because he does not consider that it has
any more bearing upon the essentials of religion, than have the
theories we may hold about the relation of God and the moral law to
the starry universe.  The latter is a question for the theologian,
the former for the psychologist.  Whether we are mortal or immortaea of this book very roughly, these two
antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by
speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the
other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer.  One is the great Outward
God; the other is the Inmost God.  The first idea was perhaps
developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza.  It is a
conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a
comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a
conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness.  The second
idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God
of the human heart.  The writer would suggest that the great outline
of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world
unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful
attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus.  It
was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of
the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love
and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers and the
dignity of inexorable justice.  There could be no finer metaphor for
such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship.  But the trouble is
that it seems impossible to most people to continue to regard the
relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical
metaphor.  Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment
of intellectual carelessness back to the idea of sexual filiation.

And it may further be suggested that the extreme aloofness and
inhumanity, which is logically necessary in the idea of a Creator
God, of an Infinite God, was the reason, so to speak, for the
invention of a Holy Spirit, as something proceeding from him, as
something bridging the great gulf, a Comforter, a mediator
descending into the sphere of the human understanding.  That, and
the suggestive influence of the Egyptian Trinity that was then being
worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had saturated the thought of
Alexandria with the conception of a trinity in unity, are probably
the realities that account for the Third Person of the Christian
Trinity.  At any rate the present writer believes that the
discussions that shaped the Christian theology we know were
dominated by such natural and fundamental thoughts.  These
discussions were, of course, complicated from the outset; and
particularly were they complicated by the identification of the man
Jesus with the theological Christ, by materialistic expectations of
his second coming, by materialistic inventions about his
"miraculous" begetting, and by the morbid speculations about
virginity and the like that arose out of such grossness.  They were
still further complicated by the idea of the textual inspiration of
the scriptures, which presently swamped thought in textual
interpretation.  That swamping came very early in the development of
Christianity.  The writer of St. John's gospel appears still to be
thinking with a considerable freedom, but Origen is already
hopelessly in the net of the texts.  The writer of St. John's gospel
was a free man, but Origen was a superstitious man.  He was
emasculated mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry.  He
quotes; his predecessor thinks.

But the writer throws out these guesses at the probable intentions
of early Christian thought in passing.  His business here is the
definition of a position.  The writer's position here in this book
is, firstly, complete Agnosticism in the matter of God the Creator,
and secondly, entire faith in the matter of God the Redeemer.  That,
so to speak, is the key of his book.  He cannot bring the two ideas
under the same term God.  He uses the word God therefore for the God
in our hearts only, and he uses the term the Veiled Being for the
ultimate mysteries of the universe, and he declares that we do not
know and perhaps cannot know in any comprehensible terms the
relation of the Veiled Being to that living reality in our lives who
is, in his terminology, the true God.  Speaking from the point of
view of practical religion, he is restricting and defining the word
God, as meaning only the personal God of mankind, he is restricting
it so as to exclude all cosmogony and ideas of providence from our
religious thought and leave nothing but the essentials of the
religious life.

Many people, whom one would class as rather liberal Christians of an
Arian or Arminian complexion, may find the larger part of this book
acceptable to them if they will read "the Christ God" where the
writer has written "God."  They will then differ from him upon
little more than the question whether there is an essential identity
in aim and quality between the Christ God and the Veiled Being, who
answer to their Creator God.  This the orthodox post Nicaean
Christians assert, and many pre-Nicaeans and many heretics (as the
Cathars) contradicted with its exact contrary.  The Cathars,
Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held, with the Manichaeans, that
the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil.  The Christ God was his
antagonist.  This was the idea of the poet Shelley.  And passing
beyond Christian theology altogether a clue can still be found to
many problems in comparative theology in this distinction between
the Being of Nature (cf.  Kant's "starry vault above") and the God
of the heart (Kant's "moral law within").  The idea of an antagonism
seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the
Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism.  So, too, Buddhism seems to
be "antagonistic."  On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and
modern Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God
the creator is altogether and without distinction also God the King
of Mankind.  Christianity stands somewhere between such complete
identification and complete antagonism.  It admits a difference in
attitude between Father and Son in its distinction between the Old
Dispensation (of the Old Testament) and the New.  Every possible
change is rung in the great religions of the world between
identification, complete separation, equality, and disproportion of
these Beings; but it will be found that these two ideas are, so to
speak, the basal elements of all theology in the world.  The writer
is chary of assertion or denial in these matters.  He believes that
they are speculations not at all necessary to salvation.  He
believes that men may differ profoundly in their opinions upon these
points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials of
religion.  The reality of religion he believes deals wholly and
exclusively with the God of the Heart.  He declares as his own
opinion, and as the opinion which seems most expressive of modern
thought, that there is no reason to suppose the Veiled Being either
benevolent or malignant towards men.  But if the reader believes
that God is Almighty and in every way Infinite the practical outcome
is not very different.  For the purposes of human relationship it is
impossible to deny that God PRESENTS HIMSELF AS FINITE, as
struggling and takingl,
whether the God in our hearts is the Son of or a rebel against the
Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of salvation, is still
our self-identification with God, irrespective of consequences, and
the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and in the world.
Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect
righteousness.  Many people seem to find the prospect of a final
personal death unendurable.  This impresses me as egotism.  I have
no such appetite for a separate immortality.  God is my immortality;
what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not is of no
more permanent value than the snows of yester-year.

H. G. W.

Dunmow,
May, 1917.




GOD THE INVISIBLE KING


CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION


1. MODERN RELIGION HAS NO FOUNDER


Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be
an exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world.  A little
while ago and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found
in existence, and already in a state of diffusion.  People have
begun to hear of the new belief first here and then there.  It is
interesting, for example, to trace how Christianity drifted into the
consciousness of the Roman world.  But when a religion has been
interrogated it has always had hitherto a tale of beginnings, the
name and story of a founder.  The renascent religion that is now
taking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points to no origins.  It
is the Truth, its believers declare; it has always been here; it has
always been visible to those who had eyes to see.  It is perhaps
plainer than it was and to more people--that is all.

It is as if it still did not realise its own difference.  Many of
those who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of
Christianity.  Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley's, speak of it
as Christianity without Theology.  They do not know the creed they
are carrying.  It has, as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle
theology, flatly opposed to any belief that could, except by great
stretching of charity and the imagination, be called Christianity.
One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the system ascribed to
some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather
than a sympathetic coincidence.  Of that the reader shall presently
have an opportunity of judging.

This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only
the opening phase of the new faith.  Christianity also began with an
extreme neglect of definition.  It was not at first anything more
than a sect of Judaism.  It was only after three centuries, amidst
the uproar and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more
enthusiastic Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in
affected horror at the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal
mystery of the Trinity was established as the essential fact of
Christianity.  Throughout those three centuries, the centuries of
its greatest achievements and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had
not defined its God.  And even to-day it has to be noted that a
large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds
have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood,
that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the
statements to which they subscribe.  They will speak and think of
both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of
the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all
the churches rests.  They will show themselves as frankly Arians as
though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the world
forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood.  But
whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be,
there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to
give Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement
possible.  Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its
maturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the
confusions of its decay.  The renascent religion that one finds now,
a thing active and sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come
to self-consciousness.  But it is so coming, and this present book
is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to
compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the
various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic
cults amidst which it has appeared.

The writer's sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that
he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist
nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian.  He will make no
pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment.  He will do his
best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the
reader must reckon with this bias.  He has found this faith growing
up in himself; he has found it, or something very difficult to
distinguish from it, growing independently in the minds of men and
women he has met.  They have been people of very various origins;
English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French, people brought up in
a "Catholic atmosphere," Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans.
Their diversity of source is as remarkable as their convergence of
tendency.  A miscellany of minds thinking upon parallel lines has
come out to the same light.  The new teaching is also traceable in
many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be heard
from Christian pulpits.  The phase of definition is manifestly at
hand.



2. MODERN RELIGION HAS A FINITE GOD


Perhaps the most fundamental difference between this new faith and
any recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or
unknowingly, it worships A FINITE GOD.  Directly the believer is
fairly confronted with the plain questions of the case, the vague
identifications that are still carelessly made with one or all of
the persons of the Trinity dissolve away.  He will admit that his
God is neither all-wise, nor all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he
is neither the maker of heaven nor earth, and that he has little to
identify him with that hereditary God of the Jews who became the
"Father" in the Christian system.  On the other hand he will assert
that his God is a god of salvation, that he is a spirit, a person, a
strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and
lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human soul.  He
will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a close
resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
"Christ." . . .

The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of
universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon
any God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that
sense of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence
of the religious experience, it was the True God that answered them.
For the True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very
antithesis of that bickering monopolist who "will have none other
gods but Me"; and when a human heart cries out--to what name it
matters not--for a larger spirit and a stronger help than the
visible things of life can give, straightway the nameless Helper is
with it and the God of Man answers to the call.  The True God has no
scorn nor hate for those who have accepted the many-handed symbols
of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China.  Where there is faith,
where there is need, there is the True God ready to clasp the hands
that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness behind the ivory
and gold.

The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think
clearly among the new believers are very insistent.  He is, above
everything else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have
characteristics, to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being,
not us but dealing with us and through us, he has an aim and that
means he has a past and future; he is within time and not outside
it.  And they point out that this is really what everyone who prays
sincerely to God or gets help from God, feels and believes.  Our
practice with God is better than our theory.  None of us really pray
to that fantastic, unqualified danse a trois, the Trinity, which the
wranglings and disputes of the worthies of Alexandria and Syria
declared to be God.  We pray to one single understanding person.
But so far the tactics of those Trinitarians at Nicaea, who stuck
their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in this world; this was
no matter for discussion, they declared, it was a Holy Mystery full
of magical terror, and few religious people have thought it worth
while to revive these terrors by a definite contradiction.  The
truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the
comparative sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to
the scoffing Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the
official creed.  But one magnificent protest against this
theological fantasy must have been the work of a sincerely religious
man, the cold superb humour of that burlesque creed, ascribed, at
first no doubt facetiously and then quite seriously, to Saint
Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond its original
intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the church.

The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing
to its end.  It is when men most urgently need God that they become
least patient with foolish presentations and dogmas.  The new
believers are very definitely set upon a thorough analysis of the
nature and growth of the Christian creeds and ideas.  There has
grown up a practice of assuming that, when God is spoken of, the
Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea is meant.  But 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.  These things do not even make a
caricature of the True God; they compose an altogether different and
antagonistic figure.

It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has
led the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite
qualities for their deity.  One has to remember the poorness of the
mental and moral quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and
fifth centuries who saddled Christendom with its characteristic
dogmas, and the extreme poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas
within which they thought.  Many of these makers of Christianity,
like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who had even to be baptised after his
election to his bishopric), had been pitchforked into the church
from civil life; they lived in a time of pitiless factions and
personal feuds; they had to conduct their disputations amidst the
struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs and favourites swayed
their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their decisions.  There
was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian world than
there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience of
educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal,
either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population
of Constantinople.  To these conditions we owe the claim that the
Christian God is a magic god, very great medicine in battle, "in hoc
signo vinces," and the argument so natural to the minds of those
days and so absurd to ours, that since he had ALL power, all
knowledge, and existed for ever and ever, it was no use whatever to
set up any other god against him. . . .

By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as its fundamental
belief, without which everyone was to be "damned everlastingly," a
conception of God and of Christ's relation to God, of which even by
the Christian account of his teaching, Jesus was either totally
unaware or so negligent and careless of the future comfort of his
disciples as scarcely to make mention.  The doctrine of the Trinity,
so far as the relationship of the Third Person goes, hangs almost
entirely upon one ambiguous and disputed utterance in St. John's
gospel (XV. 26).  Most of the teachings of Christian orthodoxy
resolve themselves to the attentive student into assertions of the
nature of contradiction and repartee.  Someone floats an opinion in
some matter that has been hitherto vague, in regard, for example, to
the sonship of Christ or to the method of his birth.  The new
opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds unaccustomed to so
definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil they fly to a
contrary proposition.  The Christians would neither admit that they
worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the
divinity of Christ because of the Jews.  They dreaded to be
polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction
from the power and importance of their Saviour.  They were forced
into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary
assertions, and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to
save it from a reductio ad absurdam.  The entire history of the
growth of the Christian doctrine in those disordered early centuries
is a history of theology by committee; a history of furious
wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still more hasty attempts to
clinch matters by anathema.  When the muddle was at its very worst,
the church was confronted by enormous political opportunities.  In
order that it should seize these one chief thing appeared
imperative: doctrinal uniformity.  The emperor himself, albeit
unbaptised and very ignorant of Greek, came and seated himself in
the midst of Christian thought upon a golden throne.  At the end of
it all Eusebius, that supreme Trimmer, was prepared to damn
everlastingly all those who doubted that consubstantiality he
himself had doubted at the beginning of the conference.  It is quite
clear that Constantine did not care who was damned or for what
period, so long as the Christians ceased to wrangle among
themselves.  The practical unanimity of Nicaea was secured by
threats, and then, turning upon the victors, he sought by threats to
restore Arius to communion.  The imperial aim was a common faith to
unite the empire.  The crushing out of the Arians and of the
Paulicians and suchlike heretics, and more particularly the
systematic destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings,
had about it none of that quality of honest conviction which comes
to those who have a real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of
dissensions that, left to work themselves out, would have spoilt
good business; it was the fist of Nicolas of Myra over again, except
that after the days of Ambrose the sword of the executioner and the
fires of the book-burner were added to the weapon of the human
voice.  Priscillian was the first human sacrifice formally offered
up under these improved conditions to the greater glory of the
reinforced Trinity.  Thereafter the blood of the heretics was the
cement of Christian unity.

It is with these things in mind that those who profess the new faith
are becoming so markedly anxious to distinguish God from the
Trinitarian's deity.  At present if anyone who has left the
Christian communion declares himself a believer in God, priest and
parson swell with self-complacency.  There is no reason why they
should do so.  That many of us have gone from them and found God is
no concern of theirs.  It is not that we who went out into the
wilderness which we thought to be a desert, away from their creeds
and dogmas, have turned back and are returning.  It is that we have
gone on still further, and are beyond that desolation.  Never more
shall we return to those who gather under the cross.  By faith we
disbelieved and denied.  By faith we said of that stuffed scarecrow
of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antique theological
notions, the Nicene deity, "This is certainly no God."  And by faith
we have found God. . . .



3. THE INFINITE BEING IS NOT GOD


There has always been a demand upon the theological teacher that he
should supply a cosmogony.  It has always been an effective
propagandist thing to say: "OUR God made the whole universe.  Don't
you think that it would be wise to abandon YOUR deity, who did not,
as you admit, do anything of the sort?"

The attentive reader of the lives of the Saints will find that this
style of argument did in the past bring many tribes and nations into
the Christian fold.  It was second only to the claim of magic
advantages, demonstrated by a free use of miracles.  Only one great
religious system, the Buddhist, seems to have resisted the
temptation to secure for its divinity the honour and title of
Creator.  Modern religion is like Buddhism in that respect.  It
offers no theory whatever about the origin of the universe.  It does
not reach behind the appearances of space and time.  It sees only a
featureless presumption in that playing with superlatives which has
entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the
delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or the
Unconditioned, can assert anything at all.  At the back of all known
things there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence
is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or
good or ill.  Of that Being, whether it is simple or complex or
divine, we know nothing; to us it is no more than the limit of
understanding, the unknown beyond.  It may be of practically
limitless intricacy and possibility.  The new religion does not
pretend that the God of its life is that Being, or that he has any
relation of control or association with that Being.  It does not
even assert that God knows all or much more than we do about that
ultimate Being.

For us life is a matter of our personalities in space and time.
Human analysis probing with philosophy and science towards the
Veiled Being reveals nothing of God, reveals space and time only as
necessary forms of consciousness, glimpses a dance of atoms, of
whirls in the ether.  Some day in the endless future there may be a
knowledge, an understanding of relationship, a power and courage
that will pierce into those black wrappings.  To that it may be our
God, the Captain of Mankind will take us.

That now is a mere speculation.  The veil of the unknown is set with
the stars; its outer texture is ether and atom and crystal.  The
Veiled Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods over the
mirror upon which the busy shapes of life are moving.  It is as if
it waited in a great stillness.  Our lives do not deal with it, and
cannot deal with it.  It may be that they may never be able to deal
with it.



4. THE LIFE FORCE IS NOT GOD


So it is that comprehensive setting of the universe presents itself
to the modern mind.  It is altogether outside good and evil and love
and hate.  It is outside God, who is love and goodness.  And coming
out of this veiled being, proceeding out of it in a manner
altogether inconceivable, is another lesser being, an impulse
thrusting through matter and clothing itself in continually changing
material forms, the maker of our world, Life, the Will to Be.  It
comes out of that inscrutable being as a wave comes rolling to us
from beyond the horizon.  It is as it were a great wave rushing
through matter and possessed by a spirit.  It is a breeding,
fighting thing; it pants through the jungle track as the tiger and
lifts itself towards heaven as the tree; it is the rabbit bolting
for its life and the dove calling to her mate; it crawls, it flies,
it dives, it lusts and devours, it pursues and eats itself in order
to live still more eagerly and hastily; it is every living thing, of
it are our passions and desires and fears.  And it is aware of
itself not as a whole, but dispersedly as individual self-
consciousness, starting out dispersedly from every one of the
sentient creatures it has called into being.  They look out for
their little moments, red-eyed and fierce, full of greed, full of
the passions of acquisition and assimilation and reproduction,
submitting only to brief fellowships of defence or aggression.  They
are beings of strain and conflict and competition.  They are living
substance still mingled painfully with the dust.  The forms in which
this being clothes itself bear thorns and fangs and claws, are
soaked with poison and bright with threats or allurements, prey
slyly or openly on one another, hold their own for a little while,
breed savagely and resentfully, and pass. . . .

This second Being men have called the Life Force, the Will to Live,
the Struggle for Existence.  They have figured it too as Mother
Nature.  We may speculate whether it is not what the wiser among the
Gnostics meant by the Demiurge, but since the Christians destroyed
all the Gnostic books that must remain a mere curious guess.  We may
speculate whether this heat and haste and wrath of life about us is
the Dark God of the Manichees, the evil spirit of the sun
worshippers.  But in contemporary thought there is no conviction
apparent that this Demiurge is either good or evil; it is conceived
of as both good and evil.  If it gives all the pain and conflict of
life, it gives also the joy of the sunshine, the delight and hope of
youth, the pleasures.  If it has elaborated a hundred thousand sorts
of parasite, it has also moulded the beautiful limbs of man and
woman; it has shaped the slug and the flower.  And in it, as part of
it, taking its rewards, responding to its goads, struggling against
the final abandonment to death, do we all live, as the beasts live,
glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted,
forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood after mood
but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence within
us, until we find God.  And God comes to us neither out of the stars
nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice within.



5. GOD IS WITHIN


God comes we know not whence, into the conflict of life.  He works
in men and through men.  He is a spirit, a single spirit and a
single person; he has begun and he will never end.  He is the
immortal part and leader of mankind.  He has motives, he has
characteristics, he has an aim.  He is by our poor scales of
measurement boundless love, boundless courage, boundless generosity.
He is thought and a steadfast will.  He is our friend and brother
and the light of the world.  That briefly is the belief of the
modern mind with regard to God.  There is no very novel idea about
this God, unless it be the idea that he had a beginning.  This is
the God that men have sought and found in all ages, as God or as the
Messiah or the Saviour.  The finding of him is salvation from the
purposelessness of life.  The new religion has but disentangled the
idea of him from the absolutes and infinities and mysteries of the
Christian theologians; from mythological virgin births and the
cosmogonies and intellectual pretentiousness of a vanished age.

Modern religion appeals to no revelation, no authoritative teaching,
no mystery.  The statement it makes is, it declares, a mere
statement of what we may all perceive and experience.  We all live
in the storm of life, we all find our understandings limited by the
Veiled Being; if we seek salvation and search within for God,
presently we find him.  All this is in the nature of things.  If
every one who perceives and states it were to be instantly killed
and blotted out, presently other people would find their way to the
same conclusions; and so on again and again.  To this all true
religion, casting aside its hulls of misconception, must ultimately
come.  To it indeed much religion is already coming.  Christian
thought struggles towards it, with the millstones of Syrian theology
and an outrageous mythology of incarnation and resurrection about
its neck.  When at last our present bench of bishops join the early
fathers of the church in heaven there will be, I fear, a note of
reproach in their greeting of the ingenious person who saddled them
with OMNIPOTENS.  Still more disastrous for them has been the virgin
birth, with the terrible fascination of its detail for unpoetic
minds.  How rich is the literature of authoritative Christianity
with decisions upon the continuing virginity of Mary and the
virginity of Joseph--ideas that first arose in Arabia as a Moslem
gloss upon Christianity--and how little have these peepings and
pryings to do with the needs of the heart and the finding of God!

Within the last few years there have been a score or so of such
volumes as that recently compiled by Dr. Foakes Jackson, entitled
"The Faith and the War," a volume in which the curious reader may
contemplate deans and canons, divines and church dignitaries, men
intelligent and enquiring and religiously disposed, all lying like
overladen camels, panting under this load of obsolete theological
responsibility, groaning great articles, outside the needle's eye
that leads to God.



6. THE COMING OF GOD


Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God
entirely upon experience.  It has encountered God.  It does not
argue about God; it relates.  It relates without any of those
wrappings of awe and reverence that fold so necessarily about
imposture, it relates as one tells of a friend and his assistance,
of a happy adventure, of a beautiful thing found and picked up by
the wayside.

So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal
salvation tallies very closely with the account of "conversion" as
it is given by other religions.  It has little to tell that is not
already familiar to the reader of William James's "Varieties of
Religious Experience."  It describes an initial state of distress
with the aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with
the futility of the individual life, a state of helpless self-
disgust, of inability to form any satisfactory plan of living.  This
is the common prelude known to many sorts of Christian as
"conviction of sin"; it is, at any rate, a conviction of hopeless
confusion. . . .  Then in some way the idea of God comes into the
distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without substance or
belief.  It is read about or it is remembered; it is expounded by
some teacher or some happy convert.  In the case of all those of the
new faith with whose personal experience I have any intimacy, the
idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea floating
about in a mind still dissatisfied.  God is not believed in, but it
is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the
needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit
together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take
the sting from death.  Under this realisation the idea is pursued
and elaborated.  For a time there is a curious resistance to the
suggestion that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by
such phrases as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness,
as the Collective Mind.

I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the
idea of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous
prejudice against divine personality created by the absurdities of
the Christian teaching and the habitual monopoly of the Christian
idea.  The picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself
before minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are lambs.  The
cross in the twilight bars the way.  It is a novelty and an enormous
relief to such people to realise that one may think of God without
being committed to think of either the Father, the Son, or the Holy
Ghost, or of all of them at once.  That freedom had not seemed
possible to them.  They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea
that the Christian God is the only thinkable God.  They had heard so
much about that God and so little of any other.  With that release
their minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of
God.

Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes.  This
cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God.  It is
the attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in
oneself.  It is as if one was touched at every point by a being akin
to oneself, sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in
aim.  It is completer and more intimate, but it is like standing
side by side with and touching someone that we love very dearly and
trust completely.  It is as if this being bridged a thousand
misunderstandings and brought us into fellowship with a great
multitude of other people. . . .

"Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the
stars, or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit
and muse.  It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the
battle.  There is no saying when it may not come to us. . . .  But
after it has come our lives are changed, God is with us and there is
no more doubt of God.  Thereafter one goes about the world like one
who was lonely and has found a lover, like one who was perplexed and
has found a solution.  One is assured that there is a Power that
fights with us against the confusion and evil within us and without.
There comes into the heart an essential and enduring happiness and
courage.

There is but one God, there is but one true religious experience,
but under a multitude of names, under veils and darknesses, God has
in this manner come into countless lives.  There is scarcely a
faith, however mean and preposterous, that has not been a way to
holiness.  God who is himself finite, who himself struggles in his
great effort from strength to strength, has no spite against error.
Far beyond halfway he hastens to meet the purblind.  But God is
against the darkness in their eyes.  The faith which is returning to
men girds at veils and shadows, and would see God plainly.  It has
little respect for mysteries.  It rends the veil of the temple in
rags and tatters.  It has no superstitious fear of this huge
friendliness, of this great brother and leader of our little beings.
To find God is but the beginning of wisdom, because then for all our
days we have to learn his purpose with us and to live our lives with
him.



CHAPTER THE SECOND

HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT


1. HERESIES ARE MISCONCEPTIONS OF GOD


Religion is not a plant that has grown from one seed; it is like a
lake that has been fed by countless springs.  It is a great pool of
living water, mingled from many sources and tainted with much
impurity.  It is synthetic in its nature; it becomes simpler from
original complexities; the sediment subsides.

A life perfectly adjusted to its surroundings is a life without
mentality; no judgment is called for, no inhibition, no disturbance
of the instinctive flow of perfect reactions.  Such a life is bliss,
or nirvana.  It is unconsciousness below dreaming.  Consciousness is
discord evoking the will to adjust; it is inseparable from need.  At
every need consciousness breaks into being.  Imperfect adjustments,
needs, are the rents and tatters in the smooth dark veil of being
through which the light of consciousness shines--the light of
consciousness and will of which God is the sun.

So that every need of human life, every disappointment and
dissatisfaction and call for help and effort, is a means whereby men
may and do come to the realisation of God.

There is no cardinal need, there is no sort of experience in human
life from which there does not come or has not come a contribution
to men's religious ideas.  At every challenge men have to put forth
effort, feel doubt of adequacy, be thwarted, perceive the chill
shadow of their mortality.  At every challenge comes the possibility
of help from without, the idea of eluding frustration, the
aspiration towards immortality.  It is possible to classify the
appeals men make for God under the headings of their chief system of
effort, their efforts to understand, their fear and their struggles
for safety and happiness, the craving of their restlessness for
peace, their angers against disorder and their desire for the
avenger; their sexual passions and perplexities. . . .

Each of these great systems of needs and efforts brings its own sort
of sediment into religion.  Each, that is to say, has its own kind
of heresy, its distinctive misapprehension of God.  It is only in
the synthesis and mutual correction of many divergent ideas that the
idea of God grows clear.  The effort to understand completely, for
example, leads to the endless Heresies of Theory.  Men trip over the
inherent infirmities of the human mind.  But in these days one does
not argue greatly about dogma.  Almost every conceivable error about
unity, about personality, about time and quantity and genus and
species, about begetting and beginning and limitation and similarity
and every kink in the difficult mind of man, has been thrust forward
in some form of dogma.  Beside the errors of thought are the errors
of emotion.  Fear and feebleness go straight to the Heresies that
God is Magic or that God is Providence; restless egotism at leisure
and unchallenged by urgent elementary realities breeds the Heresies
of Mysticism, anger and hate call for God's Judgments, and the
stormy emotions of sex gave mankind the Phallic God.  Those who find
themselves possessed by the new spirit in religion, realise very
speedily the necessity of clearing the mind of all these
exaggerations, transferences, and overflows of feeling.  The search
for divine truth is like gold washing; nothing is of any value until
most has been swept away.



2. HERESIES OF SPECULATION


One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest.  It is infinitely
the most various sort.  It includes all those heresies which result
from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those
which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the
heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse.  The
former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in
comparison natural, simple confusions.  The former are the errors of
the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside,
or are brought down to us in our social structure out of a barbaric
past.

To the heresies of thought and speculation belong the elaborate
doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about God's absolute qualities, such
odd deductions as the accepted Christian teachings about the
virginity of Mary and Joseph, and the like.  All these things are
parts of orthodox Christianity.  Yet none of them did Christ, even
by the Christian account, expound or recommend.  He treated them as
negligible.  It was left for the Alexandrians, for Alexander, for
little, red-haired, busy, wire-pulling Athanasius to find out
exactly what their Master was driving at, three centuries after
their Master was dead. . . .

Men still sit at little desks remote from God or life, and rack
their inadequate brains to meet fancied difficulties and state
unnecessary perfections.  They seek God by logic, ignoring the
marginal error that creeps into every syllogism.  Their conceit
blinds them to the limitations upon their thinking.  They weave
spider-like webs of muddle and disputation across the path by which
men come to God.  It would not matter very much if it were not that
simpler souls are caught in these webs.  Every great religious
system in the world is choked by such webs; each system has its own.
Of all the blood-stained tangled heresies which make up doctrinal
Christianity and imprison the mind of the western world to-day, not
one seems to have been known to the nominal founder of Christianity.
Jesus Christ never certainly claimed to be the Messiah; never spoke
clearly of the Trinity; was vague upon the scheme of salvation and
the significance of his martyrdom.  We are asked to suppose that he
left his apostles without instructions, that were necessary to their
eternal happiness, that he could give them the Lord's Prayer but
leave them to guess at the all-important Creed,* and that the Church
staggered along blindly, putting its foot in and out of damnation,
until the "experts" of Nicaea, that "garland of priests," marshalled
by Constantine's officials, came to its rescue. . . .  From the
conversion of Paul onward, the heresies of the intellect multiplied
about Christ's memory and hid him from the sight of men.  We are no
longer clear about the doctrine he taught nor about the things he
said and did. . . .

* Even the "Apostles' Creed" is not traceable earlier than the
fourth century.  It is manifestly an old, patched formulary.
Rutinius explains that it was not written down for a long time, but
transmitted orally, kept secret, and used as a sort of password
among the elect.

We are all so weary of this theology of the Christians, we are all
at heart so sceptical about their Triune God, that it is needless
here to spend any time or space upon the twenty thousand different
formulae in which the orthodox have attempted to believe in
something of the sort.  There are several useful encyclopaedias of
sects and heresies, compact, but still bulky, to which the curious
may go.  There are ten thousand different expositions of orthodoxy.
No one who really seeks God thinks of the Trinity, either the
Trinity of the Trinitarian or the Trinity of the Sabellian or the
Trinity of the Arian, any more than one thinks of those theories
made stone, those gods with three heads and seven hands, who sit on
lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what not, in the temples of
India.  Let us leave, therefore, these morbid elaborations of the
human intelligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the natural
heresies that spring from fundamental weaknesses of the human
character, and which are common to all religions.  Against these it
is necessary to keep constant watch.  They return very insidiously.



3. GOD IS NOT MAGIC


One of the most universal of these natural misconceptions of God is
to consider him as something magic serving the ends of men.

It is not easy for us to grasp at first the full meaning of giving
our souls to God.  The missionary and teacher of any creed is all
too apt to hawk God for what he will fetch; he is greedy for the
poor triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about that many people
who have been led to believe themselves religious, are in reality
still keeping back their own souls and trying to use God for their
own purposes.  God is nothing more for them as yet than a
magnificent Fetish.  They did not really want him, but they have
heard that he is potent stuff; their unripe souls think to make use
of him.  They call upon his name, they do certain things that are
supposed to be peculiarly influential with him, such as saying
prayers and repeating gross praises of him, or reading in a blind,
industrious way that strange miscellany of Jewish and early
Christian literature, the Bible, and suchlike mental mortification,
or making the Sabbath dull and uncomfortable.  In return for these
fetishistic propitiations God is supposed to interfere with the
normal course of causation in their favour.  He becomes a celestial
log-roller.  He remedies unfavourable accidents, cures petty
ailments, contrives unexpected gifts of medicine, money, or the
like, he averts bankruptcies, arranges profitable transactions, and
does a thousand such services for his little clique of faithful
people.  The pious are represented as being constantly delighted by
these little surprises, these bouquets and chocolate boxes from the
divinity.  Or contrawise he contrives spiteful turns for those who
fail in their religious attentions.  He murders Sabbath-breaking
children, or disorganises the careful business schemes of the
ungodly.  He is represented as going Sabbath-breakering on Sunday
morning as a Staffordshire worker goes ratting.  Ordinary everyday
Christianity is saturated with this fetishistic conception of God.
It may be disowned in THE HIBBERT JOURNAL, but it is unblushingly
advocated in the parish magazine.  It is an idea taken over by
Christianity with the rest of the qualities of the Hebrew God.  It
is natural enough in minds so self-centred that their recognition of
weakness and need brings with it no real self-surrender, but it is
entirely inconsistent with the modern conception of the true God.

There has dropped upon the table as I write a modest periodical
called THE NORTHERN BRITISH ISRAEL REVIEW, illustrated with
portraits of various clergymen of the Church of England, and of
ladies and gentlemen who belong to the little school of thought
which this magazine represents; it is, I should judge, a sub-sect
entirely within the Established Church of England, that is to say
within the Anglican communion of the Trinitarian Christians.  It
contains among other papers a very entertaining summary by a
gentleman entitled--I cite the unusual title-page of the periodical--
"Landseer Mackenzie, Esq.," of the views of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and
Obadiah upon the Kaiser William.  They are distinctly hostile views.
Mr. Landseer Mackenzie discourses not only upon these anticipatory
condemnations but also upon the relations of the weather to this
war.  He is convinced quite simply and honestly that God has been
persistently rigging the weather against the Germans.  He points out
that the absence of mist on the North Sea was of great help to the
British in the autumn of 1914, and declares that it was the wet
state of the country that really held up the Germans in Flanders in
the winter of 1914-15.  He ignores the part played by the weather in
delaying the relief of Kut-el-Amara, and he has not thought of the
difficult question why the Deity, having once decided upon
intervention, did not, instead of this comparatively trivial
meteorological assistance, adopt the more effective course of, for
example, exploding or spoiling the German stores of ammunition by
some simple atomic miracle, or misdirecting their gunfire by a
sudden local modification of the laws of refraction or gravitation.

Since these views of God come from Anglican vicarages I can only
conclude that this kind of belief is quite orthodox and permissible
in the established church, and that I am charging orthodox
Christianity here with nothing that has ever been officially
repudiated.  I find indeed the essential assumptions of Mr. Landseer
Mackenzie repeated in endless official Christian utterances on the
part of German and British and Russian divines.  The Bishop of
Chelmsford, for example, has recently ascribed our difficulties in
the war to our impatience with long sermons--among other similar
causes.  Such Christians are manifestly convinced that God can be
invoked by ritual--for example by special days of national prayer or
an increased observance of Sunday--or made malignant by neglect or
levity.  It is almost fundamental in their idea of him.  The
ordinary Mohammedan seems as confident of this magic pettiness of
God, and the belief of China in the magic propitiations and
resentments of "Heaven" is at least equally strong.

But the true God as those of the new religion know him is no such
God of luck and intervention.  He is not to serve men's ends or the
ends of nations or associations of men; he is careless of our
ceremonies and invocations.  He does not lose his temper with our
follies and weaknesses.  It is for us to serve Him.  He captains us,
he does not coddle us.  He has his own ends for which he needs
us. . . .



4. GOD IS NOT PROVIDENCE


Closely related to this heresy that God is magic, is the heresy that
calls him Providence, that declares the apparent adequacy of cause
and effect to be a sham, and that all the time, incalculably, he is
pulling about the order of events for our personal advantages.

The idea of Providence was very gaily travested by Daudet in
"Tartarin in the Alps."  You will remember how Tartarin's friend
assured him that all Switzerland was one great Trust, intent upon
attracting tourists and far too wise and kind to permit them to
venture into real danger, that all the precipices were netted
invisibly, and all the loose rocks guarded against falling, that
avalanches were prearranged spectacles and the crevasses at their
worst slippery ways down into kindly catchment bags.  If the
mountaineer tried to get into real danger he was turned back by
specious excuses.  Inspired by this persuasion Tartarin behaved with
incredible daring. . . .  That is exactly the Providence theory of
the whole world.  There can be no doubt that it does enable many a
timid soul to get through life with a certain recklessness.  And
provided there is no slip into a crevasse, the Providence theory
works well.  It would work altogether well if there were no
crevasses.

Tartarin was reckless because of his faith in Providence, and
escaped.  But what would have happened to him if he had fallen into
a crevasse?

There exists a very touching and remarkable book by Sir Francis
Younghusband called "Within." [Williams and Norgate, 1912.]  It is
the confession of a man who lived with a complete confidence in
Providence until he was already well advanced in years.  He went
through battles and campaigns, he filled positions of great honour
and responsibility, he saw much of the life of men, without
altogether losing his faith.  The loss of a child, an Indian famine,
could shake it but not overthrow it.  Then coming back one day from
some races in France, he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt
very cruelly.  He suffered terribly in body and mind.  His
sufferings caused much suffering to others.  He did his utmost to
see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and
the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a
fine essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he
could not do so.  His confidence in the benevolent intervention of
God was altogether destroyed.  His book tells of this shattering,
and how labouriously he reconstructed his religion upon less
confident lines.  It is a book typical of an age and of a very
English sort of mind, a book well worth reading.

That he came to a full sense of the true God cannot be asserted, but
how near he came to God, let one quotation witness.


"The existence of an outside Providence," he writes, "who created
us, who watches over us, and who guides our lives like a Merciful
Father, we have found impossible longer to believe in.  But of the
existence of a Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate
beings, and finding its fullest expression, in man in love, and in
the flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of anything in the
world.  This fiery spiritual impulsion at the centre and the source
of things, ever burning in us, is the supremely important factor in
our existence.  It does not always attain to light.  In many
directions it fails; the conditions are too hard and it is utterly
blocked.  In others it only partially succeeds.  But in a few it
bursts forth into radiant light.  There are few who in some heavenly
moment of their lives have not been conscious of its presence.  We
may not be able to give it outward expression, but we know that it
is there." . . .


God does not guide our feet.  He is no sedulous governess
restraining and correcting the wayward steps of men.  If you would
fly into the air, there is no God to bank your aeroplane correctly
for you or keep an ill-tended engine going; if you would cross a
glacier, no God nor angel guides your steps amidst the slippery
places.  He will not even mind your innocent children for you if you
leave them before an unguarded fire.  Cherish no delusions; for
yourself and others you challenge danger and chance on your own
strength; no talisman, no God, can help you or those you care for.
Nothing of such things will God do; it is an idle dream.  But God
will be with you nevertheless.  In the reeling aeroplane or the dark
ice-cave God will be your courage.  Though you suffer or are killed,
it is not an end.  He will be with you as you face death; he will
die with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave
deaths.  He will come so close to you that at the last you will not
know whether it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be
swallowed up in his victory.


5. THE HERESY OF QUIETISM


God comes to us within and takes us for his own.  He releases us
from ourselves; he incorporates us with his own undying experience
and adventure; he receives us and gives himself.  He is a stimulant;
he makes us live immortally and more abundantly.  I have compared
him to the sensation of a dear, strong friend who comes and stands
quietly beside one, shoulder to shoulder.

The finding of God is the beginning of service.  It is not an escape
from life and action; it is the release of life and action from the
prison of the mortal self.  Not to realise that, is the heresy of
Quietism, of many mystics.  Commonly such people are people of some
wealth, able to command services for all their everyday needs.  They
make religion a method of indolence.  They turn their backs on the
toil and stresses of existence and give themselves up to a delicious
reverie in which they flirt with the divinity.  They will recount
their privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and wonderfully
God has tried and proved them.  But indeed the true God was not the
lover of Madame Guyon.  The true God is not a spiritual troubadour
wooing the hearts of men and women to no purpose.  The true God goes
through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for
recruits along the street.  We must go out to him.  We must accept
his discipline and fight his battle.  The peace of God comes not by
thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him.



6. GOD DOES NOT PUNISH


Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for
moral indignation.  Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear.
They were more often "wrath" than not.  Such was the temperament of
the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps
under the influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian
Trinity and who became also the Moslem God.*  The natural hatred of
unregenerate men against everything that is unlike themselves,
against strange people and cheerful people, against unfamiliar
usages and things they do not understand, embodied itself in this
conception of a malignant and partisan Deity, perpetually "upset" by
the little things people did, and contriving murder and vengeance.
Now this God would be drowning everybody in the world, now he would
be burning Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting his
congenial Israelites to the most terrific pogroms.  This divine
"frightfulness" is of course the natural human dislike and distrust
for queer practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike
reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape in us, liberating the
latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it an excuse and pressing
permission upon it, handing the thing hated and feared over to its
secular arm. . . .

* It is not so generally understood as it should be among English
and American readers that a very large proportion of early
Christians before the creeds established and regularised the
doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely that Jehovah was God;
they regarded Christ as a rebel against Jehovah and a rescuer of
humanity from him, just as Prometheus was a rebel against Jove.
These beliefs survived for a thousand years tbroughout Christendom:
they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the
Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians.  The catholic
church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old
Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of
the Cathars against the Hebrew God.  But in this book, be it noted,
the word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to
indicate only the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.

It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct
for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish
sweet familiar things, that these things of the True God should so
readily liberate cruelty and tyranny.  It is like a woman going with
a light to tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the
house on fire.  None the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of
God the Revengeful, God the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion.
It is only in quite recent years that the growing gentleness of
everyday life has begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less
tolerant and gentle than themselves.  The recent literature of the
Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this trouble.

Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for
denying the irascibility of his God and teaching "the Kaffirs of
Natal" the dangerous heresy that God is all mercy.  "We cannot allow
it to be said," the Dean of Cape Town insisted, "that God was not
angry and was not appeased by punishment." He was angry "on account
of Sin, which is a great evil and a great insult to His Majesty."
The case of the Rev. Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a
second assertion of the Church's insistence upon the fierceness of
her God.  This case is not to be found in the ordinary church
histories nor is it even mentioned in the latest edition of the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it appears to have been a
very illuminating case.  It is doubtful if the church would
prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey to-day.



7. GOD AND THE NURSERY-MAID


Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger, is that kind of
miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the
overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal.  You stab your children with
such a God and he poisons all their lives.  For many of us the word
"God" first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational
restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye.
God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to
leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while
she goes off upon her own aims.  But indeed, the teaching of God
Bogey is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less dreadful
than an indecent assault.  The reason rebels and is crushed under
this horrible and pursuing suggestion.  Many minds never rise again
from their injury.  They remain for the rest of life spiritually
crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion
of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.

I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered.  He and his
Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still
believed in him, and who could help but hate?  I thought of him as a
fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening,
perpetually waiting to condemn and to "strike me dead"; his flames
as ready as a grill-room fire.  He was over me and about my
feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would
be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic.  When I was still only a
child of thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this
Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that God
himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to
me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.

I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mental cripples with
this bogey God of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges,
still living like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place
where God should be.  They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not
be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish
observances; they dare not look at the causes of things.  They are
afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of
science, lest that old watching spider take offence.  The voice of
the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing,
but they avert themselves, fear-driven.  For the true God has no
lash of fear.  And how the foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven
face, his greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his
bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest of fear the
ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown for him!  How he loves
the importance of denunciation, and, himself a malignant cripple, to
rally the company of these crippled souls to persecute and destroy
the happy children of God! . . .

Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children.  There is a
real wickedness of the priest that is different from other
wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and
strange perversions of instinct affect it.  Let a former Archbishop
of Canterbury speak for me.  This that follows is the account given
by Archbishop Tait in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation
(July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a certain SOCIETY OF
THE HOLY CROSS:


"I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the
instruction of very young children.  I find, in one of the pages of
it, the statement that between the ages of six and six and a half
years would be the proper time for the inculcation of the teaching
which is to be found in the book.  Now, six to six and a half is
certainly a very tender age, and to these children I find these
statements addressed in the book:


"'It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must
acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him.'


"I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many
there were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that
they did not mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to
God direct; that it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six,
to its mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse to
the priest.  But the words, to say the least of them, are rash.
Then comes the very obvious question:


"'Do you know why?  It is because God, when he was on earth, gave to
his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men
their sins.  It was to priests alone that Jesus said: "Receive ye
the Holy Ghost." . . .  Those who will not confess will not be
cured.  Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.'


"That is addressed to a child six years of age.


"'I have known,' the book continues, 'poor children who concealed
their sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were
tormented with remorse, and if they had died in that state they
would certainly have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.'" . . .


Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen
time after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in
their preaching.  It is a distinct lust.  Much nobility and devotion
there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of
real worship, lives no man may better; this that I write is not of
all, perhaps not of many priests.  But there has been in all ages
that have known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest;
priestcraft and priestly power release an aggressive and narrow
disposition to a recklessness of suffering and a hatred of liberty
that surely exceeds the badness of any other sort of men.



8. THE CHILDREN'S GOD


Children do not naturally love God.  They have no great capacity for
an idea so subtle and mature as the idea of God.  While they are
still children in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy
for them to feel any great need of God.  All things are still
something God-like. . . .

The true God, our modern minds insist upon believing, can have no
appetite for unnatural praise and adoration.  He does not clamour
for the attention of children.  He is not like one of those senile
uncles who dream of glory in the nursery, who love to hear it said,
"The children adore him."  If children are loved and trained to
truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the
true God as their needs bring them within his scope.  They should be
left to their innocence, and to their trust in the innocence of the
world, as long as they can be.  They should be told only of God as a
Great Friend whom some day they will need more and understand and
know better.  That is as much as most children need.  The phrases of
religion put too early into their mouths may become a cant,
something worse than blasphemy.

Yet children are sometimes very near to God.  Creative passion stirs
in their play.  At times they display a divine simplicity.  But it
does not follow that therefore they should be afflicted with
theological formulae or inducted into ceremonies and rites that they
may dislike or misinterpret.  If by any accident, by the death of a
friend or a distressing story, the thought of death afflicts a
child, then he may begin to hear of God, who takes those that serve
him out of their slain bodies into his shining immortality.  Or if
by some menial treachery, through some prowling priest, the whisper
of Old Bogey reaches our children, then we may set their minds at
ease by the assurance of his limitless charity. . . .

With adolescence comes the desire for God and to know more of God,
and that is the most suitable time for religious talk and teaching.



9. GOD IS NOT SEXUAL


In the last two or three hundred years there has been a very
considerable disentanglement of the idea of God from the complex of
sexual thought and feeling.  But in the early days of religion the
two things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew
prophets, for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary
"wrath" of their God at this or that little dirtiness or
irregularity or breach of the sexual tabus.  The ceremony of
circumcision is clearly indicative of the original nature of the
Semitic deity who developed into the Trinitarian God.  So far as
Christianity dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed the
old associations.  But to this day the representative Christian
churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with
some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of
celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the mischievousness and
maliciousness that so often ensue.  Nearly every Christian church
inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can contrive upon the
illegitimate child.  They do not treat illegitimate children as
unfortunate children, but as children with a mystical and an
incurable taint of SIN.  Kindly easy-going Christians may resent
this statement because it does not tally with their own attitudes,
but let them consult their orthodox authorities.

One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred
or sinful in itself and what is held to be one's duty or a nation's
duty because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best
thing to do.  By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or
all of our institutions regulating the relations of the sexes may be
justifiable.  But my case is not whether they can be justified by
these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged
even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world.
It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies
that I would criticise.  These sexual questions are guarded by a
holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made--with a
sense of complete righteousness--to prohibit their discussion.  That
fury about sexual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis
that the Christian God remains a sex God in the minds of great
numbers of his exponents.  His disentanglement from that plexus is
incomplete.  Sexual things are still to the orthodox Christian,
sacred things.

Now the God whom those of the new faith are finding is only
mediately concerned with the relations of men and women.  He is no
more sexual essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hygienic.
The God of Leviticus was all these things.  He is represented as
prescribing the most petty and intimate of observances--many of
which are now habitually disregarded by the Christians who profess
him. . . .  It is part of the evolution of the idea of God that we
have now so largely disentangled our conception of him from the
dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual rules that were once
inseparably bound up with his majesty.  Christ himself was one of
the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is the clearest
evidence in several instances of his disregard of the rule and his
insistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit underlying
and often masked by the rule.  His Church, being made of baser
matter, has followed him as reluctantly as possible and no further
than it was obliged.  But it has followed him far enough to admit
his principle that in all these matters there is no need for
superstitious fear, that the interpretation of the divine purpose is
left to the unembarrassed intelligence of men.  The church has
followed him far enough to make the harsh threatenings of priests
and ecclesiastics against what they are pleased to consider impurity
or sexual impiety, a profound inconsistency.  One seems to hear
their distant protests when one reads of Christ and the Magdalen, or
of Christ eating with publicans and sinners.  The clergy of our own
days play the part of the New Testament Pharisees with the utmost
exactness and complete unconsciousness.  One cannot imagine a modern
ecclesiastic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary
civility, unless she was in a very high social position indeed, or
blending with disreputable characters without a dramatic sense of
condescension and much explanatory by-play.  Those who profess
modern religion do but follow in these matters a course entirely
compatible with what has survived of the authentic teachings of
Christ, when they declare that God is not sexual, and that religious
passion and insult and persecution upon the score of sexual things
are a barbaric inheritance.

But lest anyone should fling off here with some hasty assumption
that those who profess the religion of the true God are sexually
anarchistic, let stress be laid at once upon the opening sentence of
the preceding paragraph, and let me a little anticipate a section
which follows.  We would free men and women from exact and
superstitious rules and observances, not to make them less the
instruments of God but more wholly his.  The claim of modern
religion is that one should give oneself unreservedly to God, that
there is no other salvation.  The believer owes all his being and
every moment of his life to God, to keep mind and body as clean,
fine, wholesome, active and completely at God's service as he can.
There is no scope for indulgence or dissipation in such a
consecrated life.  It is a matter between the individual and his
conscience or his doctor or his social understanding what exactly he
may do or not do, what he may eat or drink or so forth, upon any
occasion.  Nothing can exonerate him from doing his utmost to
determine and perform the right act.  Nothing can excuse his failure
to do so.  But what is here being insisted upon is that none of
these things has immediately to do with God or religious emotion,
except only the general will to do right in God's service.  The
detailed interpretation of that "right" is for the dispassionate
consideration of the human intelligence.

All this is set down here as distinctly as possible.  Because of the
emotional reservoirs of sex, sexual dogmas are among the most
obstinately recurrent of all heresies, and sexual excitement is
always tending to leak back into religious feeling.  Amongst the
sex-tormented priesthood of the Roman communion in particular,
ignorant of the extreme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic
cult and suchlike predecessors of Christianity, there seems to be an
extraordinary belief that chastity was not invented until
Christianity came, and that the religious life is largely the
propitiation of God by feats of sexual abstinence.  But a
superstitious abstinence that scars and embitters the mind, distorts
the imagination, makes the body gross and keeps it unclean, is just
as offensive to God as any positive depravity.



CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE LIKENESS OF GOD


1. GOD IS COURAGE

Now having set down what those who profess the new religion regard
as the chief misconceptions of God, having put these systems of
ideas aside from our explanations, the path is cleared for the
statement of what God is.  Since language springs entirely from
material, spatial things, there is always an element of metaphor in
theological statement.  So that I have not called this chapter the
Nature of God, but the Likeness of God.

And firstly, GOD IS COURAGE.



2. GOD IS A PERSON


And next GOD IS A PERSON.

Upon this point those who are beginning to profess modern religion
are very insistent.  It is, they declare, the central article, the
axis, of their religion.  God is a person who can be known as one
knows a friend, who can be served and who receives service, who
partakes of our nature; who is, like us, a being in conflict with
the unknown and the limitless and the forces of death; who values
much that we value and is against much that we are pitted against.
He is our king to whom we must be loyal; he is our captain, and to
know him is to have a direction in our lives.  He feels us and knows
us; he is helped and gladdened by us.  He hopes and attempts. . . .
God is no abstraction nor trick of words, no Infinite.  He is as
real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace.

Now this is where those who have left the old creeds and come asking
about the new realisations find their chief difficulty.  They say,
Show us this person; let us hear him.  (If they listen to the
silences within, presently they will hear him.)  But when one
argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient
controversies between species and individual, between the one and
the many, which arise out of the necessarily imperfect methods of
the human mind.  Upon these matters there has been much pregnant
writing during the last half century.  Such ideas as this writer has
to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, "First
and Last Things," in which, writing as one without authority or
specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly
interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to
elucidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours, this mind,
by which we must seek and explain and reach up to God.  Suffice it
here to say that theological discussion may very easily become like
the vision of a man with cataract, a mere projection of inherent
imperfections.  If we do not use our phraseology with a certain
courage, and take that of those who are trying to convey their ideas
to us with a certain politeness and charity, there is no end
possible to any discussion in so subtle and intimate a matter as
theology but assertions, denials, and wranglings.  And about this
word "person" it is necessary to be as clear and explicit as
possible, though perfect clearness, a definition of mathematical
sharpness, is by the very nature of the case impossible.

Now when we speak of a person or an individual we think typically of
a man, and we forget that he was once an embryo and will presently
decay; we forget that he came of two people and may beget many, that
he has forgotten much and will forget more, that he can be confused,
divided against himself, delirious, drunken, drugged, or asleep.  On
the contrary we are, in our hasty way of thinking of him, apt to
suppose him continuous, definite, acting consistently and never
forgetting.  But only abstract and theoretical persons are like
that.  We couple with him the idea of a body.  Indeed, in the common
use of the word "person" there is more thought of body than of mind.
We speak of a lover possessing the person of his mistress.  We speak
of offences against the person as opposed to insults, libels, or
offences against property.  And the gods of primitive men and the
earlier civilisations were quite of that quality of person.  They
were thought of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting
consistently.  If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was
because they were aloof or because their "persons" were too splendid
for weak human eyes.  Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the
person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted
upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was
utterly consumed.  The early Islamic conception of God, like the
conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in
spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic
personality away somewhere in Heaven.  The personal appearance of
the Christian God is described in The Revelation, and however much
that description may be explained away by commentators as
symbolical, it is certainly taken by most straightforward believers
as a statement of concrete reality.  Now if we are going to insist
upon this primary meaning of person and individual, then certainly
God as he is now conceived is not a person and not an individual.
The true God will never promenade an Eden or a Heaven, nor sit upon
a throne.

But current Christianity, modern developments of Islam, much Indian
theological thought--that, for instance, which has found such
delicate and attractive expression in the devotional poetry of
Rabindranath Tagore--has long since abandoned this anthropomorphic
insistence upon a body.  From the earliest ages man's mind has found
little or no difficulty in the idea of something essential to the
personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing apart from the
body and continuing after the destruction of the body, and being
still a person and an individual.  From this it is a small step to
the thought of a person existing independently of any existing or
pre-existing body.  That is the idea of theological Christianity, as
distinguished from the Christianity of simple faith.  The Triune
Persons--omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent--exist for all
time, superior to and independent of matter.  They are supremely
disembodied.  One became incarnate--as a wind eddy might take up a
whirl of dust. . . .  Those who profess modern religion conceive
that this is an excessive abstraction of the idea of spirituality, a
disembodiment of the idea of personality beyond the limits of the
conceivable; nevertheless they accept the conception that a person,
a spiritual individual, may be without an ordinary mortal body. . . .
They declare that God is without any specific body, that he is
immaterial, that he can affect the material universe--and that means
that he can only reach our sight, our hearing, our touch--through
the bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.

His nature is of the nature of thought and will.  Not only has he,
in his essence, nothing to do with matter, but nothing to do with
space.  He is not of matter nor of space.  He comes into them.
Since the period when all the great theologies that prevail to-day
were developed, there have been great changes in the ideas of men
towards the dimensions of time and space.  We owe to Kant the
release from the rule of these ideas as essential ideas.  Our modern
psychology is alive to the possibility of Being that has no
extension in space at all, even as our speculative geometry can
entertain the possibility of dimensions--fourth, fifth, Nth
dimensions--outside the three-dimensional universe of our
experience.  And God being non-spatial is not thereby banished to an
infinite remoteness, but brought nearer to us; he is everywhere
immediately at hand, even as a fourth dimension would be everywhere
immediately at hand.  He is a Being of the minds and in the minds of
men.  He is in immediate contact with all who apprehend him. . . .

But modern religion declares that though he does not exist in matter
or space, he exists in time just as a current of thought may do;
that he changes and becomes more even as a man's purpose gathers
itself together; that somewhere in the dawning of mankind he had a
beginning, an awakening, and that as mankind grows he grows.  With
our eyes he looks out upon the universe he invades; with our hands,
he lays hands upon it.  All our truth, all our intentions and
achievements, he gathers to himself.  He is the undying human
memory, the increasing human will.

But this, you may object, is no more than saying that God is the
collective mind and purpose of the human race.  You may declare 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.  He is not merely the best of
all of us, but a Being in himself, composed of that but more than
that, as a temple is more than a gathering of stones, or a regiment
is more than an accumulation of men.  They point out that a man is
made up of a great multitude of cells, each equivalent to a
unicellular organism.  Not one of those cells is he, nor is he
simply just the addition of all of them.  He is more than all of
them.  You can take away these and these and these, and he still
remains.  And he can detach part of himself and treat it as if it
were not himself, just as a man may beat his breast or, as Cranmer
the martyr did, thrust his hand into the flames.  A man is none the
less himself because his hair is cut or his appendix removed or his
leg amputated.

And take another image. . . .  Who bears affection for this or that
spadeful of mud in my garden?  Who cares a throb of the heart for
all the tons of chalk in Kent or all the lumps of limestone in
Yorkshire?  But men love England, which is made up of such things.

And so we think of God as a synthetic reality, though he has neither
body nor material parts.  And so too we may obey him and listen to
him, though we think but lightly of the men whose hands or voices he
sometimes uses.  And we may think of him as having moods and
aspects--as a man has--and a consistency we call his character.

These are theorisings about God.  These are statements to convey
this modern idea of God.  This, we say, is the nature of the person
whose will and thoughts we serve.  No one, however, who understands
the religious life seeks conversion by argument.  First one must
feel the need of God, then one must form or receive an acceptable
idea of God.  That much is no more than turning one's face to the
east to see the coming of the sun.  One may still doubt if that
direction is the east or whether the sun will rise.  The real coming
of God is not that.  It is a change, an irradiation of the mind.
Everything is there as it was before, only now it is aflame.
Suddenly the light fills one's eyes, and one knows that God has
risen and that doubt has fled for ever.


3. GOD IS YOUTH


The third thing to be told of the true God is that GOD IS YOUTH.

God, we hold, began and is always beginning.  He looks forever into
the future.

Most of the old religions derive from a patriarchal phase.  God is
in those systems the Ancient of Days.  I know of no Christian
attempt to represent or symbolise God the Father which is not a
bearded, aged man.  White hair, beard, bearing, wrinkles, a hundred
such symptoms of senile decay are there.  These marks of senility do
not astonish our modern minds in the picture of God, only because
tradition and usage have blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a
time-worn immortal.  Jove too and Wotan are figures far past the
prime of their vigour.  These are gods after the ancient habit of
the human mind, that turned perpetually backward for causes and
reasons and saw all things to come as no more than the working out
of Fate,--

     "Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
      Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
      Brought death into the world and all our woe."

But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks not to our past but
our future, and if a figure may represent him it must be the figure
of a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his
strength.  He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time,
eager to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that
was still but a promise; he should bear a sword, that clean,
discriminating weapon, his eyes should be as bright as swords; his
lips should fall apart with eagerness for the great adventure before
him, and he should be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting
the rising sun.  Death should still hang like mists and cloud banks
and shadows in the valleys of the wide landscape about him.  There
should be dew upon the threads of gossamer and little leaves and
blades of the turf at his feet. . . .



4. WHEN WE SAY GOD IS LOVE


One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most
trite and most sacred, is that God is Love.  This is a saying that
deserves careful examination.  Love is a word very loosely used;
there are people who will say they love new potatoes; there are a
multitude of loves of different colours and values.  There is the
love of a mother for her child, there is the love of brothers, there
is the love of youth and maiden, and the love of husband and wife,
there is illicit love and the love one bears one's home or one's
country, there are dog-lovers and the loves of the Olympians, and
love which is a passion of jealousy.  Love is frequently a mere
blend of appetite and preference; it may be almost pure greed; it
may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit self-forgetful nor
generous.  It is possible so to phrase things that the furtive
craving of a man for another man's wife may be made out to be a
light from God.  Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts
of love that people will call "true love," there is something of
that same exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential
quality of the knowledge of God.

Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the
exaltation of religious passion comes to remain.  Lovers are the
windows by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is
the open door by which we freely go.  And God never dies, nor
disappoints, nor betrays.

The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its
earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much
possessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced
trust, and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love
of God.  The former is a dramatic relationship that drifts to a
climax, and then again seeks presently a climax, and that may be
satiated or fatigued.  But the latter is far more like the love of
comrades, or like the love of a man and a woman who have loved and
been through much trouble together, who have hurt one another and
forgiven, and come to a complete and generous fellowship.  There is
a strange and beautiful love that men tell of that will spring up on
battlefields between sorely wounded men, and often they are men who
have fought together, so that they will do almost incredibly brave
and tender things for one another, though but recently they have
been trying to kill each other.  There is often a pure exaltation of
feeling between those who stand side by side manfully in any great
stress.  These are the forms of love that perhaps come nearest to
what we mean when we speak of the love of God.

That is man's love of God, but there is also something else; there
is the love God bears for man in the individual believer.  Now this
is not an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love
of a woman for her baby.  It is the love of the captain for his men;
God must love his followers as a great captain loves his men, who
are so foolish, so helpless in themselves, so confiding, and yet
whose faith alone makes him possible.  It is an austere love.  The
spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and bodily
death. . . .

And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach
him.  He has need of us as we of him.  He desires us and desires to
make himself known to us.  When at last the individual breaks
through the limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that
moment, the smile and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man.  He
has won us from his enemy.  We come staggering through into the
golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth,
until at last we are altogether taken up into his being.



CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS



1. THE SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST


It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to
drape about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God,
the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth
bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness.
It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme
instability of absolute negation.

Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who
was a very typical antagonist of all religion.  He died only the
other day.  He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man
almost of the rank and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin.  A
decade or more ago he wrote a book called "The Nature of Man," in
which he set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts about
life.  They are facts so illuminating that presently, in our
discussion of sin, they will be referred to again.  But it is not
Professor Metchnikoff's intention to provide material for a
religious discussion.  He sets out his facts in order to overthrow
theology as he conceives it.  The remarkable thing about his book,
the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no
inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive
theology as he conceives it.  The development of his science has
destroyed that right.

He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our
ideas of individuality and species, and how the import of theology
is modified through these changes.  When he comes from his own world
of modern biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time.
He attacks religion as he understood it when first he fell out with
it fifty years or more ago.

Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes
that biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the
general scheme and method of our thinking.

The influence of biology upon thought in general consists
essentially in diminishing the importance of the individual and
developing the realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of
super-individual, a modifying and immortal super-individual,
maintaining itself against the outer universe by the birth and death
of its constituent individuals.  Natural History, which began by
putting individuals into species as if the latter were mere
classificatory divisions, has come to see that the species has its
adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding in interest and
importance the individual adventure.  "The Origin of Species" was
for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.

The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be
stated plainly and compactly as follows.  A little while ago we
current individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us
distributed between two parents, then between four grandparents, and
so on backward, we are temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an
ancestral diffusion; we stand our trial, and presently our
individuality is dispersed and mixed again with other
individualities in an uncertain multitude of descendants.  But the
species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to
newness, remaining still a unity.  The drama of the individual life
is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing
adventure of the species.  And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble
of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is
still very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions
under which it lives.  The conflict of life is a continual pursuit
of adjustment, and the "ills of life," of the individual life that
is, are due to its "disharmonies."  Man, acutely aware of himself as
an individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species,
finds life jangling and distressful, finds death frustration.  He
fails and falls as a person in what may be the success and triumph
of his kind.  He does not apprehend the struggle or the nature of
victory, but only his own gravitation to death and personal
extinction.

Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-
religious because to him as to so many Europeans religion is
confused with priest-craft and dogmas, is associated with
disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and
misguidance.  How completely he misconceives the quality of
religion, how completely he sees it as an individual's affair, his
own words may witness:


"Religion is still occupied with the problem of death.  The
solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as
satisfactory.  A future life has no single argument to support it,
and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the
whole range of human knowledge.  On the other hand, resignation as
preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a
longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the
inevitability of death."


Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death,
and by a future life the prolongation of individuality.  But
Buddhism does not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with
that, and modern religious developments are certainly not under that
preoccupation with the narrower self.  Buddhism indeed so far from
"preaching resignation" to death, seeks as its greater good a death
so complete as to be absolute release from the individual's burthen
of KARMA.  Buddhism seeks an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY.
The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it
approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and
over-individuation, and the more it diverges from Professor
Metchnikoff's assertion of its aims.  Salvation is indeed to lose
one's self.  But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied that
this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the
religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if
they were the antithesis of the religious life.  His book, when it
is analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape
from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is
the ultimate of religion.

At times, indeed, he seems almost wilfully blind to the true
solution round and about which his writing goes.  He suggests as his
most hopeful satisfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such
a scientific prolongation of life that the instinct for self-
preservation will be at last extinct.  If that is not the very
"resignation" he imputes to the Buddhist I do not know what it is.
He believes that an individual which has lived fully and completely
may at last welcome death with the same instinctive readiness as, in
the days of its strength, it shows for the embraces of its mate.  We
are to be glutted by living to six score and ten.  We are to rise
from the table at last as gladly as we sat down.  We shall go to
death as unresistingly as tired children go to bed.  Men are to have
a life far beyond the range of what is now considered their prime,
and their last period (won by scientific self-control) will be a
period of ripe wisdom (from seventy to eighty to a hundred and
twenty or thereabouts) and public service!

(But why, one asks, public service?  Why not book-collecting or the
simple pleasure of reminiscence so dear to aged egotists?
Metchnikoff never faces that question.  And again, what of the man
who is challenged to die for right at the age of thirty?  What does
the prolongation of life do for him?  And where are the consolations
for accidental misfortune, for the tormenting disease or the lost
limb?)

But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff lapses into pure
religiosity.  The prolongation of life gives place to sheer self-
sacrifice as the fundamental "remedy."  And indeed what other remedy
has ever been conceived for the general evil of life?


"On the other hand," he writes, "the knowledge that the goal of
human life can be attained only by the development of a high degree
of solidarity amongst men will restrain actual egotism.  The mere
fact that the enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon
(Ecelesiastes ix. 7-10)* is opposed to the goal of human life, will
lessen luxury and the evil that comes from luxury.  Conviction that
science alone is able to redress the disharmonies of the human
constitution will lead directly to the improvement of education and
to the solidarity of mankind.

* Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a
merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.  Let thy garments be
always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.  Live joyfully with
the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity,
which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity
for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou
takest under the sun.  whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor
wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

"In progress towards the goal, nature will have to be consulted
continuously.  Already, in the case of the ephemerids, nature has
produced a complete cycle of normal life ending in natural death.
In the problem of his own fate, man must not be content with the
gifts of nature; he must direct them by his own efforts.  Just as he
has been able to modify the nature of animals and plants, man must
attempt to modify his own constitution, so as to readjust its
disharmonies. . . .

"To modify the human constitution, it will be necessary first, to
frame the ideal, and thereafter to set to work with all the
resources of science.

"If there can be formed an ideal able to unite men in a kind of
religion of the future, this ideal must be founded on scientific
principles.  And if it be true, as has been asserted so often, that
man can live by faith alone, the faith must be in the power of
science."


Now this, after all the flat repudiations that have preceded it of
"religion" and "philosophy" as remedies for human ills, is nothing
less than the fundamental proposition of the religious life
translated into terms of materialistic science, the proposition that
damnation is really over-individuation and that salvahon is escape
from self into the larger being of life. . . .

What can this "religion of the future" be but that devotion to the
racial adventure under the captaincy of God which we have already
found, like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed
away the confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion?  By an
inquiry setting out from a purely religious starting-point we have
already reached conclusions identical with this ultimate refuge of
an extreme materialist.

This altar to the Future of his, we can claim as an altar to our
God--an altar rather indistinctly inscribed.



2. SACRIFICE IMPLIES GOD


Almost all Agnostic and Atheistical writings that show any fineness
and generosity of spirit, have this tendency to become as it were
the statement of an anonymous God.  Everything is said that a
religious writer would say--except that God is not named.  Religious
metaphors abound.  It is as if they accepted the living body of
religion but denied the bones that held it together--as they might
deny the bones of a friend.  It is true, they would admit, the body
moves in a way that implies bones in its every movement, but --WE
HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE BONES.

The disputes in theory--I do not say the difference in reality--
between the modern believer and the atheist or agnostic--becomes at
times almost as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear to
students of physics, whether the scientific "ether" is real or a
formula.  Every material phenomenon is consonant with and helps to
define this ether, which permeates and sustains and is all things,
which nevertheless is perceptible to no sense, which is reached only
by an intellectual process.  Most minds are disposed to treat this
ether as a reality.  But the acutely critical mind insists that what
is only so attainable by inference is not real; it is no more than
"a formula that satisfies all phenomena."

But if it comes to that, am I anything more than the formula that
satisfies all my forms of consciousness?

Intellectually there is hardly anything more than a certain will to
believe, to divide the religious man who knows God to be utterly
real, from the man who says that God is merely a formula to satisfy
moral and spiritual phenomena.  The former has encountered him, the
other has as yet felt only unassigned impulses.  One says God's will
is so; the other that Right is so.  One says God moves me to do this
or that; the other the Good Will in me which I share with you and
all well-disposed men, moves me to do this or that.  But the former
makes an exterior reference and escapes a risk of self-
righteousness.

I have recently been reading a book by Mr. Joseph McCabe called "The
Tyranny of Shams," in which he displays very typically this curious
tendency to a sort of religion with God "blacked out."  His is an
extremely interesting case.  He is a writer who was formerly a Roman
Catholic priest, and in his reaction from Catholicism he displays a
resolution even sterner than Professor Metchnikoff's, to deny that
anything religious or divine can exist, that there can be any aim in
life except happiness, or any guide but "science."  But--and here
immediately he turns east again--he is careful not to say
"individual happiness."  And he says "Pleasure is, as Epicureans
insisted, only a part of a large ideal of happiness."  So he lets
the happiness of devotion and sacrifice creep in.  So he opens
indefinite possibilities of getting away from any merely
materialistic rule of life.  And he writes:


"In every civilised nation the mass of the people are inert and
indifferent.  Some even make a pretence of justifying their
inertness.  Why, they ask, should we stir at all?  Is there such a
thing as a duty to improve the earth?  What is the meaning or
purpose of life?  Or has it a purpose?

"One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece
of controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness.  People
tell you that the conflict of science and religion--it would be
better to say, the conflict of modern culture and ancient
traditions--has robbed life of its plain significance.  The men who,
like Tolstoi, seriously urge this point fail to appreciate the
modern outlook on life.  Certainly modern culture--science, history,
philosophy, and art--finds no purpose in life: that is to say, no
purpose eternally fixed and to be discovered by man.  A great
chemist said a few years ago that he could imagine 'a series of
lucky accidents'--the chance blowing by the wind of certain
chemicals into pools on the primitive earth--accounting for the
first appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the
influences which have lifted those early germs to the level of
conscious beings as a similar series of lucky accidents.

"But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us.  If
there is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the
development of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose
its own purpose and set up its own goal; and the most elementary
sense of order will teach us that this choice must be social, not
merely individual.  In whatever measure ill-controlled individuals
may yield to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race
must be a collective aim.  I do not mean an austere demand of self-
sacrifice from the individual, but an adjustment--as genial and
generous as possible--of individual variations for common good.
Otherwise life becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste
react on each individual.  So we raise again, in the twentieth
century, the old question of 'the greatest good,' which men
discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the suburban groves of Athens, in
the cool atria of patrician mansions on the Palatine and the
Pincian, in the Museum at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar
Khayyam frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages
and the opulent chambers of Cosimo dei Medici."


And again:


"The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve life, to bring
happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach, shines above
all the mists of the day.  Through the ruins of creeds and
philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our
steps toward that height--just as the Athenians did two thousand
years ago.  It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no
disputable tradition--nothing that scepticism can corrode or
advancing knowledge undermine.  Its foundations are the fundamental
and unchanging impulses of our nature."


And again:


"The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our
time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome
of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the
general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor
altruistic.  It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an
inspiration in the finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow
which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a
happier earth.  It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and
assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of
social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy
which is linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges
all to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation
of happiness.  The advance guard of the race, the men and women in
whom mental alertness is associated with fine feeling, cry that they
have reached Pisgah's slope and in increasing numbers men and women
are pressing on to see if it be really the Promised Land."


"Pisgah--the Promised Land!"  Mr.  McCabe in that passage sounds as
if he were half-way to "Oh! Beulah Land!" and the tambourine.

That "larger spirit," we maintain, is God; those "impulses" are the
power of God, and Mr. McCabe serves a Master he denies.  He has but
to realise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the
Catholic Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be
lured back to that altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from
that preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to realise the
presence of Divinity.



3. GOD IS AN EXTERNAL REALITY


It may be argued that if atheists and agnostics when they set
themselves to express the good will that is in them, do shape out
God, that if their conception of right living falls in so completely
with the conception of God's service as to be broadly identical,
then indeed God, like the ether of scientific speculation, is no
more than a theory, no more than an imaginative externalisation of
man's inherent good will.  Why trouble about God then?  Is not the
declaration of a good disposition a sufficient evidence of
salvation?  What is the difference between such benevolent
unbelievers as Professor Metchnikoff or Mr. McCabe and those who
have found God?

The difference is this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone
upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard,
trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral
strength.  A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs
like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs
beneath his feet.  He has not really given himself or got away from
himself.  He has no one to whom he can give himself.  He is still a
masterless man.  His exaltation is self-centred, is priggishness,
his fall is unrestrained by any exterior obligation.  His devotion
is only the good will in himself, a disposition; it is a mood that
may change.  At any moment it may change.  He may have pledged
himself to his own pride and honour, but who will hold him to his
bargain?  He has no source of strength beyond his own amiable
sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported voice, and no
one watches while he sleeps.  He cannot pray; he can but ejaculate.
He has no real and living link with other men of good will.

And those whose acquiescence in the idea of God is merely
intellectual are in no better case than those who deny God
altogether.  They may have all the forms of truth and not divinity.
The religion of the atheist with a God-shaped blank at its heart and
the persuasion of the unconverted theologian, are both like lamps
unlit.  The lit lamp has no difference in form from the lamp unlit.
But the lit lamp is alive and the lamp unlit is asleep or dead.

The difference between the unconverted and the unbeliever and the
servant of the true God is this; it is that the latter has
experienced a complete turning away from self.  This only difference
is all the difference in the world.  It is the realisation that this
goodness that I thought was within me and of myself and upon which I
rather prided myself, is without me and above myself, and infinitely
greater and stronger than I.  It is the immortal and I am mortal.
It is invincible and steadfast in its purpose, and I am weak and
insecure.  It is no longer that I, out of my inherent and remarkable
goodness, out of the excellence of my quality and the benevolence of
my heart, give a considerable amount of time and attention to the
happiness and welfare of others--because I choose to do so.  On the
contrary I have come under a divine imperative, I am obeying an
irresistible call, I am a humble and willing servant of the
righteousness of God.  That altruism which Professor Metchnikoff and
Mr. McCabe would have us regard as the goal and refuge of a broad
and free intelligence, is really the first simple commandment in the
religious life.



4. ANOTHER RELIGIOUS MATERIALIST


Now here is a passage from a book, "Evolution and the War," by
Professor Metchnikoff's translator, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, which
comes even closer to our conception of God as an immortal being
arising out of man, and external to the individual man.  He has been
discussing that well-known passage of Kant's: "Two things fill my
mind with ever-renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I
dwell on them--the starry vault above me, and the moral law within
me."

From that discussion, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell presently comes to this
most definite and interesting statement:


"Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the
scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as
one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not
shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a
secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert
as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external
to man as the starry vault.  It has no secure seat in any single man
or in any single nation.  It is the work of the blood and tears of
long generations of men.  It is not in man, inborn or innate, but is
enshrined in his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and
his religion.  Its creation and sustenance are the crowning glory of
man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a high place above the
animal world.  Men live and die; nations rise and fall, but the
struggle of individual lives and of individual nations must be
measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the
debasement or perfection of man's great achievement."


This is the same reality.  This is the same Link and Captain that
this book asserts.  It seems to me a secondary matter whether we
call Him "Man's Great Achievement" or "The Son of Man" or the "God
of Mankind" or "God."  So far as the practical and moral ends of
life are concerned, it does not matter how we explain or refuse to
explain His presence in our lives.

There is but one possible gap left between the position of Dr.
Chalmers Mitchell and the position of this book.  In this book it is
asserted that GOD RESPONDS, that he GIVES courage and the power of
self-suppression to our weakness.



5. A NOTE ON A LECTURE BY PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY


Let me now quote and discuss a very beautiful passage from a lecture
upon Stoicism by Professor Gilbert Murray, which also displays the
same characteristic of an involuntary shaping out of God in the
forms of denial.  It is a passage remarkable for its conscientious
and resolute Agnosticism.  And it is remarkable too for its
blindness to the possibility of separating quite completely the idea
of the Infinite Being from the idea of God.  It is another striking
instance of that obsession of modern minds by merely Christian
theology of which I have already complained.  Professor Murray has
quoted Mr. Bevan's phrase for God, "the Friend behind phenomena,"
and he does not seem to realise that that phrase carries with it no
obligation whatever to believe that this Friend is in control of the
phenomena.  He assumes that he is supposed to be in control as if it
were a matter of course:


"We do seem to find," Professor Murray writes, "not only in all
religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man
is not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours
towards the good by some external help or sympathy.  We find it
everywhere in the unsophisticated man.  We find it in the unguarded
self-revelations of the most severe and conscientious Atheists.
Now, the Stoics, like many other schools of thought, drew an
argument from this consensus of all mankind.  It was not an absolute
proof of the existence of the Gods or Providence, but it was a
strong indication.  The existence of a common instinctive belief in
the mind of man gives at least a presumption that there must be a
good cause for that belief.

"This is a reasonable position.  There must be some such cause.  But
it does not follow that the only valid cause is the truth of the
content of the belief.  I cannot help suspecting that this is
precisely one of those points on which Stoicism, in company with
almost all philosophy up to the present time, has gone astray
through not sufficiently realising its dependence on the human mind
as a natural biological product.  For it is very important in this
matter to realise that the so-called belief is not really an
intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature.

"It is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to
realise the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is
normally unconscious.  We cannot escape as easily as these brave men
dreamed from the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold.
Indeed, as I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this
unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I
myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from
making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we
are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct.  We are
gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages.
We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we
see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship.  Students of animals
under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious
creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details
by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there--the pack
which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out
walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens.  It is
a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious
animal for the herd of friends who are not there.  And it may be, it
may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind
phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable
instinctive conviction, since they are certainly not founded on
either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-
souled gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the
great spaces between the stars.

"At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of."


There the passage and the lecture end.

I would urge that here again is an inadvertent witness to the
reality of God.

Professor Murray writes of gregarious animals as though there
existed solitary animals that are not gregarious, pure
individualists, "atheists" so to speak, and as though this appeal to
a life beyond one's own was not the universal disposition of living
things.  His classical training disposes him to a realistic
exaggeration of individual difference.  But nearly every animal, and
certainly every mentally considerable animal, begins under parental
care, in a nest or a litter, mates to breed, and is associated for
much of its life.  Even the great carnivores do not go alone except
when they are old and have done with the most of life.  Every pack,
every herd, begins at some point in a couple, it is the equivalent
of the tiger's litter if that were to remain undispersed.  And it is
within the memory of men still living that in many districts the
African lion has with a change of game and conditions lapsed from a
"solitary" to a gregarious, that is to say a prolonged family habit
of life.

Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher
apes, is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less.  He has
passed within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to
a nearly cosmopolitan tolerance.  And he has his tribe about him.
He is not, as Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST
gregarious beast.  Why should his desire for God be regarded as the
overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when he has home,
town, society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at
hand to glut it?  Why should gregariousness drive a man to God
rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house?  Why
should gregariousness drive men out of crowded Egyptian cities into
the cells of the Thebaid?  Schopenhauer in a memorable passage
(about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is flatly opposed to
Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when he declares that
the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious.  The parallel with
the dog is not a valid one.

Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the
Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation?  Is not
the real deception, our belief that we are completely
individualised, and is it not possible that this that Professor
Murray calls "instinct" is really not a vestige but a new thing
arising out of our increasing understanding, an intellectual
penetration to that greater being of the species, that vine, of
which we are the branches?  Why should not the soul of the species,
many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul like our own?

Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff, and in many other
cases of atheism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate
understanding of individuation bars the way to at least the
intellectual recognition of the true God.



6. RELIGION AS ETHICS


And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent
interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston's.  You will note that
while in this book we use the word "God" to indicate the God of the
Heart, Sir Harry uses "God" for that idea of God-of-the-Universe,
which we have spoken of as the Infinite Being.  This use of the word
"God" is of late theological origin; the original identity of the
words "good" and "god" and all the stories of the gods are against
him.  But Sir Harry takes up God only to define him away into
incomprehensible necessity.  Thus:


"We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force we call God; and,
assuming such an intelligent ruling force to be in existence,
permeating this universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of
millions of planets, we do not know under what conditions and
limitations It works.  We are quite entitled to assume that the end
of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness
and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled
to identify the reactionary forces of brute Nature with the
anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of darkness
resisting the power of light.  But in these conjectures we must
surely come to the conclusion that the theoretical potency we call
'God' makes endless experiments, and scrap-heaps the failures.
Think of the Dinosaurs and the expenditure of creative energy that
went to their differentiation and their wellnigh incredible physical
development. . . .

"To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and
perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may
seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out,
the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should
feel as little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and fragments
as must the Creative Force of the immeasurably vast universe feel
for the DISJECTA MEMBRA of perfected life on this planet. . . ."


But thence he goes on to a curiously imperfect treatment of the God
of man as if he consisted in nothing more than some vague sort of
humanitarianism.  Sir Harry's ideas are much less thoroughly thought
out than those of any other of these sceptical writers I have
quoted.  On that account they are perhaps more typical.  He speaks
as though Christ were simply an eminent but illreported and
abominably served teacher of ethics--and yet of the only right ideal
and ethics.  He speaks as though religions were nothing more than
ethical movements, and as though Christianity were merely someone
remarking with a bright impulsiveness that everything was simply
horrid, and so, "Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal axiom.
He ignores altogether the fundamental essential of religion, which
is THE DEVELOPMENT AND SYNTHESIS OF THE DIVERGENT AND CONFLICTING
MOTIVES OF THE UNCONVERTED LIFE, AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE
INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITH THE IMMORTAL PURPOSE OF GOD.  He presents a
conception of religion relieved of its "nonsense" as the cheerful
self-determination of a number of bright little individuals (much
stirred but by no means overcome by Cosmic Pity) to the Service of
Man.  As he seems to present it, it is as outward a thing, it goes
as little into the intimacy of their lives, as though they had after
proper consideration agreed to send a subscription to a Red Cross
Ambulance or take part in a public demonstration against the
Armenian Massacres, or do any other rather nice-spirited exterior
thing.  This is what he says:


"I hope that the religion of the future will devote itself wholly to
the Service of Man.  It can do so without departing from the
Christian ideal and Christian ethics.  It need only drop all that is
silly and disputable, and 'mattering not neither here nor there,' of
Christian theology--a theology virtually absent from the direct
teaching of Christ--and all of Judaistic literature or prescriptions
not made immortal in their application by unassailable truth and by
the confirmation of science.  An excellent remedy for the nonsense
which still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter
Monson's 'Service of Man,' which was published as long ago as 1887,
and has since been re-issued by the Rationalist Press Association in
its well-known sixpenny series, and J. Allanson Picton's 'Man and
the Bible.'  Similarly, those who wish to acquire a sane view of the
relations between man and God would do well to read Winwood Reade's
'Martyrdom of Man.'"


Sir Harry in fact clears the ground for God very ably, and then
makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space.  There is no help
nor strength in his gesture unless God is there.  Without God, the
"Service of Man" is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an
hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison of the mortal life.



CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE INVISIBLE KING


1. MODERN RELIGION A POLITICAL RELIGION


The conception of a young and energetic God, an Invisible Prince
growing in strength and wisdom, who calls men and women to his
service and who gives salvation from self and mortality only through
self-abandonment to his service, necessarily involves a demand for a
complete revision and fresh orientation of the life of the convert.

God faces the blackness of the Unknown and the blind joys and
confusions and cruelties of Life, as one who leads mankind through a
dark jungle to a great conquest.  He brings mankind not rest but a
sword.  It is plain that he can admit no divided control of the
world he claims.  He concedes nothing to Caesar.  In our philosophy
there are no human things that are God's and others that are
Caesar's.  Those of the new thought cannot render unto God the
things that are God's, and to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.
Whatever claim Caesar may make to rule men's lives and direct their
destinies outside the will of God, is a usurpation.  No king nor
Caesar has any right to tax or to service or to tolerance, except he
claim as one who holds for and under God.  And he must make good his
claim.  The steps of the altar of the God of Youth are no safe place
for the sacrilegious figure of a king.  Who claims "divine right"
plays with the lightning.

The new conceptions do not tolerate either kings or aristocracies or
democracies.  Its implicit command to all its adherents is to make
plain the way to the world theocracy.  Its rule of life is the
discovery and service of the will of God, which dwells in the hearts
of men, and the performance of that will, not only in the private
life of the believer but in the acts and order of the state and
nation of which he is a part.  I give myself to God not only because
I am so and so but because I am mankind.  I become in a measure
responsible for every evil in the world of men.  I become a knight
in God's service.  I become my brother's keeper.  I become a
responsible minister of my King.  I take sides against injustice,
disorder, and against all those temporal kings, emperors, princes,
landlords, and owners, who set themselves up against God's rule and
worship.  Kings, owners, and all who claim rule and decisions in the
world's affairs, must either show themselves clearly the fellow-
servants of the believer or become the objects of his steadfast
antagonism.



2. THE WILL OF GOD


It is here that those who explain this modern religiosity will seem
most arbitrary to the inquirer.  For they relate of God, as men will
relate of a close friend, his dispositions, his apparent intentions,
the aims of his kingship.  And just as they advance no proof
whatever of the existence of God but their realisation of him, so
with regard to these qualities and dispositions they have little
argument but profound conviction.  What they say is this; that if
you do not feel God then there is no persuading you of him; we
cannot win over the incredulous.  And what they say of his qualities
is this; that if you feel God then you will know, you will realise
more and more clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method
and intention.

It comes as no great shock to those who have grasped the full
implications of the statement that God is Finite, to hear it
asserted that the first purpose of God is the attainment of clear
knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of
knowledge as a means to power.  For that he must use human eyes and
hands and brains.

And as God gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only
beginning to apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as
time goes on.  But it is possible to define the broad outlines of
the attainment he seeks.  It is the conquest of death.

It is the conquest of death; first the overcoming of death in the
individual by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an
undying purpose, and then the defeat of that death that seems to
threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun.
God fights against death in every form, against the great death of
the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency,
baseness, misconception, and perversion.  He it is and no other who
can deliver us "from the body of this death."  This is the battle
that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of
the animal's round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and
laughing and weeping, fearing and failing, and presently of wearying
and dying, which is the whole life that living without God can give
us.  And from these great propositions there follow many very
definite maxims and rules of life for those who serve God.  These we
will immediately consider.



3. THE CRUCIFIX


But first let me write a few words here about those who hold a kind
of intermediate faith between the worship of the God of Youth and
the vaguer sort of Christianity.  There are a number of people
closely in touch with those who have found the new religion who,
biased probably by a dread of too complete a break with
Christianity, have adopted a theogony which is very reminiscent of
Gnosticism and of the Paulician, Catharist, and kindred sects to
which allusion has already been made.  He, who is called in this
book God, they would call God-the-Son or Christ, or the Logos; and
what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled Being, they would
call God-the-Father.  And what we speak of here as Life, they would
call, with a certain disregard of the poor brutes that perish, Man.
And they would assert, what we of the new belief, pleading our
profound ignorance, would neither assert nor deny, that that
Darkness, out of which came Life and God, since it produced them
must be ultimately sympathetic and of like nature with them.  And
that ultimately Man, being redeemed and led by Christ and saved from
death by him, would be reconciled with God the Father.*  And this
great adventurer out of the hearts of man that we here call God,
they would present as the same with that teacher from Galilee who
was crucified at Jerusalem.

* This probably was the conception of Spinoza.  Christ for him is
the wisdom of God manifested in all things, and chiefly in the mind
of man.  Through him we reach the blessedness of an intuitive
knowledge of God.  Salvation is an escape from the "inadequate"
ideas of the mortal human personality to the "adequate" and timeless
ideas of God.

Now we of the modern way would offer the following criticisms upon
this apparent compromise between our faith and the current religion.
Firstly, we do not presume to theorise about the nature of the
veiled being nor about that being's relations to God and to Life.
We do not recognise any consistent sympathetic possibilities between
these outer beings and our God.  Our God is, we feel, like
Prometheus, a rebel.  He is unfilial.  And the accepted figure of
Jesus, instinct with meek submission, is not in the tone of our
worship.  It is not by suffering that God conquers death, but by
fighting.  Incidentally our God dies a million deaths, but the thing
that matters is not the deaths but the immortality.  It may be he
cannot escape in this person or that person being nailed to a cross
or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock.  These may be necessary
sufferings, like hunger and thirst in a campaign; they do not in
themselves bring victory.  They may be necessary, but they are not
glorious.  The symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-
drenched figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father, "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" these things jar with our
spirit.  We little men may well fail and repent, but it is our faith
that our God does not fail us nor himself.  We cannot accept the
Christian's crucifix, or pray to a pitiful God.  We cannot accept
the Resurrection as though it were an after-thought to a bitterly
felt death.  Our crucifix, if you must have a crucifix, would show
God with a hand or a foot already torn away from its nail, and with
eyes not downcast but resolute against the sky; a face without pain,
pain lost and forgotten in the surpassing glory of the struggle and
the inflexible will to live and prevail. . . .

But we do not care how long the thorns are drawn, nor how terrible
the wounds, so long as he does not droop.  God is courage.  God is
courage beyond any conceivable suffering.

But when all this has been said, it is well to add that it concerns
the figure of Christ only in so far as that professes to be the
figure of God, and the crucifix only so far as that stands for
divine action.  The figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think
of it as being no more than the tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man
who proclaimed the loving-kindness of God and the supremacy of God's
kingdom over the individual life, and who, in the extreme agony of
his pain and exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, becomes
something altogether distinct from a theological symbol.
Immediately that we cease to worship, we can begin to love and pity.
Here was a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and of great
courage, of the utmost tolerance and the subtlest sympathy, a saint
of non-resistance. . . .

We of the new faith repudiate the teaching of non-resistance.  We
are the militant followers of and participators in a militant God.
We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle
being upon whose nobility the theologians trade.  But submission is
the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is
the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him.  A
Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and
trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the
spirit of our worship.*

* It is curious, after writing the above, to find in a letter
written by Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to that pertinacious
correspondent, the late Lady Victoria Welby, almost exactly the same
sentiments I have here expressed.  "If I could fill the Crucifix
with life as you do," he says, "I would gladly look on it, but the
fallen Head and the closed Eye exclude from my thought the idea of
glorified humanity.  The Christ to whom we are led is One who 'hath
been crucified,' who hath passed the trial victoriously and borne
the fruits to heaven.  I dare not then rest on this side of the
glory."

I find, too, a still more remarkable expression of the modern spirit
in a tract, "The Call of the Kingdom," by that very able and subtle,
Anglican theologian, the Rev. W. Temple, who declares that under the
vitalising stresses of the war we are winning "faith in Christ as an
heroic leader.  We have thought of Him so much as meek and gentle
that there is no ground in our picture of Him, for the vision which
His disciple had of Him: 'His head and His hair were white, as white
wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire: and His
feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a
furnace; and His voice was as the voice of many waters.  And He had
in His right hand seven stars; and out of His mouth proceeded a
sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in
its strength.'"

These are both exceptional utterances, interesting as showing how
clearly parallel are the tendencies within and without Christianity.



4. THE PRIMARY DUTIES


Now it follows very directly from the conception of God as a finite
intelligence of boundless courage and limitless possibilities of
growth and victory, who has pitted himself against death, who stands
close to our inmost beings ready to receive us and use us, to rescue
us from the chagrins of egotism and take us into his immortal
adventure, that we who have realised him and given ourselves
joyfully to him, must needs be equally ready and willing to give our
energies to the task we share with him, to do our utmost to increase
knowledge, to increase order and clearness, to fight against
indolence, waste, disorder, cruelty, vice, and every form of his and
our enemy, death, first and chiefest in ourselves but also in all
mankind, and to bring about the establishment of his real and
visible kingdom throughout the world.

And that idea of God as the Invisible King of the whole world means
not merely that God is to be made and declared the head of the
world, but that the kingdom of God is to be present throughout the
whole fabric of the world, that the Kingdom of God is to be in the
teaching at the village school, in the planning of the railway
siding of the market town, in the mixing of the mortar at the
building of the workman's house.  It means that ultimately no effigy
of intrusive king or emperor is to disfigure our coins and stamps
any more; God himself and no delegate is to be represented wherever
men buy or sell, on our letters and our receipts, a perpetual
witness, a perpetual reminder.  There is no act altogether without
significance, no power so humble that it may not be used for or
against God, no life but can orient itself to him.  To realise God
in one's heart is to be filled with the desire to serve him, and the
way of his service is neither to pull up one's life by the roots nor
to continue it in all its essentials unchanged, but to turn it
about, to turn everything that there is in it round into his way.

The outward duty of those who serve God must vary greatly with the
abilities they possess and the positions in which they find
themselves, but for all there are certain fundamental duties; a
constant attempt to be utterly truthful with oneself, a constant
sedulousness to keep oneself fit and bright for God's service, and
to increase one's knowledge and powers, and a hidden persistent
watchfulness of one's baser motives, a watch against fear and
indolence, against vanity, against greed and lust, against envy,
malice, and uncharitableness.  To have found God truly does in
itself make God's service one's essential motive, but these evils
lurk in the shadows, in the lassitudes and unwary moments.  No one
escapes them altogether, there is no need for tragic moods on
account of imperfections.  We can no more serve God without blunders
and set-backs than we can win battles without losing men.  But the
less of such loss the better.  The servant of God must keep his mind
as wide and sound and his motives as clean as he can, just as an
operating surgeon must keep his nerves and muscles as fit and his
hands as clean as he can.  Neither may righteously evade exercise
and regular washing--of mind as of hands.  An incessant watchfulness
of one's self and one's thoughts and the soundness of one's
thoughts; cleanliness, clearness, a wariness against indolence and
prejudice, careful truth, habitual frankness, fitness and steadfast
work; these are the daily fundamental duties that every one who
truly comes to God will, as a matter of course, set before himself.



5. THE INCREASING KINGDOM


Now of the more intimate and personal life of the believer it will
be more convenient to write a little later.  Let us for the present
pursue the idea of this world-kingdom of God, to whose establishment
he calls us.  This kingdom is to be a peaceful and co-ordinated
activity of all mankind upon certain divine ends.  These, we
conceive, are first, the maintenance of the racial life; secondly,
the exploration of the external being of nature as it is and as it
has been, that is to say history and science; thirdly, that
exploration of inherent human possibility which is art; fourthly,
that clarification of thought and knowledge which is philosophy; and
finally, the progressive enlargement and development of the racial
life under these lights, so that God may work through a continually
better body of humanity and through better and better equipped
minds, that he and our race may increase for ever, working
unendingly upon the development of the powers of life and the
mastery of the blind forces of matter throughout the deeps of space.
He sets out with us, we are persuaded, to conquer ourselves and our
world and the stars.  And beyond the stars our eyes can as yet see
nothing, our imaginations reach and fail.  Beyond the limits of our
understanding is the veiled Being of Fate, whose face is hidden from
us. . . .

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. . . .

But the business of such ordinary lives as ours is the setting up of
this earthly kingdom of God.  That is the form into which our lives
must fall and our consciences adapt themselves.

Belief in God as the Invisible King brings with it almost
necessarily a conception of this coming kingdom of God on earth.
Each believer as he grasps this natural and immediate consequence of
the faith that has come into his life will form at the same time a
Utopian conception of this world changed in the direction of God's
purpose.  The vision will follow the realisation of God's true
nature and purpose as a necessary second step.  And he will begin to
develop the latent citizen of this world-state in himself.  He will
fall in with the idea of the world-wide sanities of this new order
being drawn over the warring outlines of the present, and of men
falling out of relationship with the old order and into relationship
with the new.  Many men and women are already working to-day at
tasks that belong essentially to God's kingdom, tasks that would be
of the same essential nature if the world were now a theocracy; for
example, they are doing or sustaining scientific research or
education or creative art; they are making roads to bring men
together, they are doctors working for the world's health, they are
building homes, they are constructing machinery to save and increase
the powers of men. . . .

Such men and women need only to change their orientation as men will
change about at a work-table when the light that was coming in a
little while ago from the southern windows, begins presently to come
in chiefly from the west, to become open and confessed servants of
God.  This work that they were doing for ambition, or the love of
men or the love of knowledge or what seemed the inherent impulse to
the work itself, or for money or honour or country or king, they
will realise they are doing for God and by the power of God.  Self-
transformation into a citizen of God's kingdom and a new realisation
of all earthly politics as no more than the struggle to define and
achieve the kingdom of God in the earth, follow on, without any need
for a fresh spiritual impulse, from the moment when God and the
believer meet and clasp one another.

This transfiguration of the world into a theocracy may seem a merely
fantastic idea to anyone who comes to it freshly without such
general theological preparation as the preceding pages have made.
But to anyone who has been at the pains to clear his mind even a
little from the obsession of existing but transitory things, it
ceases to be a mere suggestion and becomes more and more manifestly
the real future of mankind.  From the phase of "so things should
be," the mind will pass very rapidly to the realisation that "so
things will be."  Towards this the directive wills among men have
been drifting more and more steadily and perceptibly and with fewer
eddyings and retardations, for many centuries.  The purpose of
mankind will not be always thus confused and fragmentary.  This
dissemination of will-power is a phase.  The age of the warring
tribes and kingdoms and empires that began a hundred centuries or so
ago, draws to its close.  The kingdom of God on earth is not a
metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream, not an uncertain
project; it is the thing before us, it is the close and inevitable
destiny of mankind.

In a few score years the faith of the true God will be spreading
about the world.  The few halting confessions of God that one hears
here and there to-day, like that little twittering of birds which
comes before the dawn, will have swollen to a choral unanimity.  In
but a few centuries the whole world will be openly, confessedly,
preparing for the kingdom.  In but a few centuries God will have led
us out of the dark forest of these present wars and confusions into
the open brotherhood of his rule.



6. WHAT IS MY PLACE IN THE KINGDOM?


This conception of the general life of mankind as a transformation
at thousands of points of the confused, egotistical, proprietary,
partisan, nationalist, life-wasting chaos of human life to-day into
the coherent development of the world kingdom of God, provides the
form into which everyone who comes to the knowledge of God will
naturally seek to fit his every thought and activity.  The material
greeds, the avarice, fear, rivalries, and ignoble ambitions of a
disordered world will be challenged and examined under one general
question: "What am I in the kingdom of God?"

It has already been suggested that there is a great and growing
number of occupations that belong already to God's kingdom,
research, teaching, creative art, creative administration,
cultivation, construction, maintenance, and the honest satisfaction
of honest practical human needs.  For such people conversion to the
intimacy of God means at most a change in the spirit of their work,
a refreshed energy, a clearer understanding, a new zeal, a completer
disregard of gains and praises and promotion.  Pay, honours, and the
like cease to be the inducement of effort.  Service, and service
alone, is the criterion that the quickened conscience will
recognise.

Most of such people will find themselves in positions in which
service is mingled with activities of a baser sort, in which service
is a little warped and deflected by old traditions and usage, by
mercenary and commercial considerations, by some inherent or special
degradation of purpose.  The spirit of God will not let the believer
rest until his life is readjusted and as far as possible freed from
the waste of these base diversions.  For example a scientific
investigator, lit and inspired by great inquiries, may be hampered
by the conditions of his professorship or research fellowship, which
exact an appearance of "practical" results.  Or he may be obliged to
lecture or conduct classes.  He may be able to give but half his
possible gift to the work of his real aptitude, and that at a
sacrifice of money and reputation among short-sighted but
influential contemporaries.  Well, if he is by nature an
investigator he will know that the research is what God needs of
him.  He cannot continue it at all if he leaves his position, and so
he must needs waste something of his gift to save the rest.  But
should a poorer or a humbler post offer him better opportunity,
there lies his work for God.  There one has a very common and simple
type of the problems that will arise in the lives of men when they
are lit by sudden realisation of the immediacy of God.

Akin to that case is the perplexity of any successful physician
between the increase of knowledge and the public welfare on the one
hand, and the lucrative possibilities of his practice among wealthy
people on the other.  He belongs to a profession that is crippled by
a mediaeval code, a profession which was blind to the common
interest of the Public Health and regarded its members merely as
skilled practitioners employed to "cure" individual ailments.  Very
slowly and tortuously do the methods of the profession adapt
themselves to the modern conception of an army of devoted men
working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as a whole,
broadening out from the frowsy den of the "leech," with its
crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled
and illuminating co-operation with those who deal with the food and
housing and economic life of the community.

And again quite parallel with these personal problems is the trouble
of the artist between the market and vulgar fame on the one hand and
his divine impulse on the other.

The presence of God will be a continual light and help in every
decision that must be made by men and women in these more or less
vitiated, but still fundamentally useful and righteous, positions.

The trouble becomes more marked and more difficult in the case of a
man who is a manufacturer or a trader, the financier of business
enterprise or the proprietor of great estates.  The world is in need
of manufactures and that goods should be distributed; land must be
administered and new economic possibilities developed.  The drift of
things is in the direction of state ownership and control, but in a
great number of cases the state is not ripe for such undertakings,
it commands neither sufficient integrity nor sufficient ability, and
the proprietor of factory, store, credit or land, must continue in
possession, holding as a trustee for God and, so far as lies in his
power, preparing for his supersession by some more public
administration.  Modern religion admits of no facile flights from
responsibility.  It permits no headlong resort to the wilderness and
sterile virtue.  It counts the recluse who fasts among scorpions in
a cave as no better than a deserter in hiding.  It unhesitatingly
forbids any rich young man to sell all that he has and give to the
poor.  Himself and all that he has must be alike dedicated to God.

The plain duty that will be understood by the proprietor of land and
of every sort of general need and service, so soon as he becomes
aware of God, is so to administer his possessions as to achieve the
maximum of possible efficiency, the most generous output, and the
least private profit.  He may set aside a salary for his
maintenance; the rest he must deal with like a zealous public
official.  And if he perceives that the affair could be better
administered by other hands than his own, then it is his business to
get it into those hands with the smallest delay and the least profit
to himself. . . .

The rights and wrongs of human equity are very different from right
and wrong in the sight of God.  In the sight of God no landlord has
a RIGHT to his rent, no usurer has a RIGHT to his interest.  A man
is not justified in drawing the profits from an advantageous
agreement nor free to spend the profits of a speculation as he will.
God takes no heed of savings nor of abstinence.  He recognises no
right to the "rewards of abstinence," no right to any rewards.
Those profits and comforts and consolations are the inducements that
dangle before the eyes of the spiritually blind.  Wealth is an
embarrassment to the religious, for God calls them to account for
it.  The servant of God has no business with wealth or power except
to use them immediately in the service of God.  Finding these things
in his hands he is bound to administer them in the service of God.

The tendency of modern religion goes far beyond the alleged
communism of the early Christians, and far beyond the tithes of the
scribes and Pharisees.  God takes all.  He takes you, blood and
bones and house and acres, he takes skill and influence and
expectations.  For all the rest of your life you are nothing but
God's agent.  If you are not prepared for so complete a surrender,
then you are infinitely remote from God.  You must go your way.
Here you are merely a curious interloper.  Perhaps you have been
desiring God as an experience, or covetmg him as a possession.  You
have not begun to understand.  This that we are discussing in this
book is as yet nothing for you.



7. ADJUSTING LIFE


This picturing of a human world more to the mind of God than this
present world and the discovery and realisation of one's own place
and work in and for that kingdom of God, is the natural next phase
in the development of the believer.  He will set about revising and
adjusting his scheme of life, his ways of living, his habits and his
relationships in the light of his new convictions.

Most men and women who come to God will have already a certain
righteousness in their lives; these things happen like a thunderclap
only in strange exceptional cases, and the same movements of the
mind that have brought them to God will already have brought their
lives into a certain rightness of direction and conduct.  Yet
occasionally there will be someone to whom the self-examination that
follows conversion will reveal an entirely wrong and evil way of
living.  It may be that the light has come to some rich idler doing
nothing but follow a pleasurable routine.  Or to someone following
some highly profitable and amusing, but socially useless or socially
mischievous occupation.  One may be an advocate at the disposal of
any man's purpose, or an actor or actress ready to fall in with any
theatrical enterprise.  Or a woman may find herself a prostitute or
a pet wife, a mere kept instrument of indulgence.  These are lives
of prey, these are lives of futility; the light of God will not
tolerate such lives.  Here religion can bring nothing but a
severance from the old way of life altogether, a break and a
struggle towards use and service and dignity.

But even here it does not follow that because a life has been wrong
the new life that begins must be far as the poles asunder from the
old.  Every sort of experience that has ever come to a human being
is in the self that he brings to God, and there is no reason why a
knowledge of evil ways should not determine the path of duty.  No
one can better devise protections against vices than those who have
practised them; none know temptations better than those who have
fallen.  If a man has followed an evil trade, it becomes him to use
his knowledge of the tricks of that trade to help end it.  He knows
the charities it may claim and the remedies it needs. . . .

A very interesting case to discuss in relation to this question of
adjustment is that of the barrister.  A practising barrister under
contemporary conditions does indeed give most typically the
opportunity for examining the relation of an ordinary self-
respecting wordly life, to life under the dispensation of God
discovered.  A barrister is usually a man of some energy and
ambition, his honour is moulded by the traditions of an ancient and
antiquated profession, instinctively self-preserving and yet with a
real desire for consistency and respect.  As a profession it has
been greedy and defensively conservative, but it has never been
shameless nor has it ever broken faith with its own large and
selfish, but quite definite, propositions.  It has never for
instance had the shamelessness of such a traditionless and
undisciplined class as the early factory organisers.  It has never
had the dull incoherent wickedness of the sort of men who exploit
drunkenness and the turf.  It offends within limits.  Barristers can
be, and are, disbarred.  But it is now a profession extraordinarily
out of date; its code of honour derives from a time of cruder and
lower conceptions of human relationship.  It apprehends the State as
a mere "ring" kept about private disputations; it has not begun to
move towards the modern conception of the collective enterprise as
the determining criterion of human conduct.  It sees its business as
a mere play upon the rules of a game between man and man, or between
men and men.  They haggle, they dispute, they inflict and suffer
wrongs, they evade dues, and are liable or entitled to penalties and
compensations.  The primary business of the law is held to be
decision in these wrangles, and as wrangling is subject to artistic
elaboration, the business of the barrister is the business of a
professional wrangler; he is a bravo in wig and gown who fights the
duels of ordinary men because they are incapable, very largely on
account of the complexities of legal procedure, of fighting for
themselves.  His business is never to explore any fundamental right
in the matter.  His business is to say all that can be said for his
client, and to conceal or minimise whatever can be said against his
client.  The successful promoted advocate, who in Britain and the
United States of America is the judge, and whose habits and
interests all incline him to disregard the realities of the case in
favour of the points in the forensic game, then adjudicates upon the
contest. . . .

Now this condition of things is clearly incompatible with the modern
conception of the world as becoming a divine kingdom.  When the
world is openly and confessedly the kingdom of God, the law court
will exist only to adjust the differing views of men as to the
manner of their service to God; the only right of action one man
will have against another will be that he has been prevented or
hampered or distressed by the other in serving God.  The idea of the
law court will have changed entirely from a place of dispute,
exaction and vengeance, to a place of adjustment.  The individual or
some state organisation will plead ON BEHALF OF THE COMMON GOOD
either against some state official or state regulation, or against
the actions or inaction of another individual.  This is the only
sort of legal proceedings compatible with the broad beliefs of the
new faith. . . .  Every religion that becomes ascendant, in so far
as it is not otherworldly, must necessarily set its stamp upon the
methods and administration of the law.  That this was not the case
with Christianity is one of the many contributory aspects that lead
one to the conviction that it was not Christianity that took
possession of the Roman empire, but an imperial adventurer who took
possession of an all too complaisant Christianity.

Reverting now from these generalisations to the problem of the
religious from which they arose, it will have become evident that
the essential work of anyone who is conversant with the existing
practice and literature of the law and whose natural abilities are
forensic, will lie in the direction of reconstructing the theory and
practice of the law in harmony with modern conceptions, of making
that theory and practice clear and plain to ordinary men, of
reforming the abuses of the profession by working for the separation
of bar and judiciary, for the amalgamation of the solicitors and the
barristers, and the like needed reforms.  These are matters that
will probably only be properly set right by a quickening of
conscience among lawyers themselves.  Of no class of men is the help
and service so necessary to the practical establishment of God's
kingdom, as of men learned and experienced in the law.  And there is
no reason why for the present an advocate should not continue to
plead in the courts, provided he does his utmost only to handle
cases in which he believes he can serve the right.  Few righteous
cases are ill-served by a frank disposition on the part of lawyer
and client to put everything before the court.  Thereby of course
there arises a difficult case of conscience.  What if a lawyer,
believing his client to be in the right, discovers him to be in the
wrong?  He cannot throw up the case unless he has been scandalously
deceived, because so he would betray the confidence his client has
put in him to "see him through."  He has a right to "give himself
away," but not to "give away" his client in this fashion.  If he has
a chance of a private consultation I think he ought to do his best
to make his client admit the truth of the case and give in, but
failing this he has no right to be virtuous on behalf of another.
No man may play God to another; he may remonstrate, but that is the
limit of his right.  He must respect a confidence, even if it is
purely implicit and involuntary.  I admit that here the barrister is
in a cleft stick, and that he must see the business through
according to the confidence his client has put in him--and
afterwards be as sorry as he may be if an injustice ensues.  And
also I would suggest a lawyer may with a fairly good conscience
defend a guilty man as if he were innocent, to save him from
unjustly heavy penalties. . . .

This comparatively full discussion of the barrister's problem has
been embarked upon because it does bring in, in a very typical
fashion, just those uncertainties and imperfections that abound in
real life.  Religious conviction gives us a general direction, but
it stands aside from many of these entangled struggles in the jungle
of conscience.  Practice is often easier than a rule.  In practice a
lawyer will know far more accurately than a hypothetical case can
indicate, how far he is bound to see his client through, and how far
he may play the keeper of his client's conscience.  And nearly every
day there happens instances where the most subtle casuistry will
fail and the finger of conscience point unhesitatingly.  One may
have worried long in the preparation and preliminaries of the issue,
one may bring the case at last into the final court of conscience in
an apparently hopeless tangle.  Then suddenly comes decision.

The procedure of that silent, lit, and empty court in which a man
states his case to God, is very simple and perfect.  The excuses and
the special pleading shrivel and vanish.  In a little while the case
lies bare and plain.



8. THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE


The question of oaths of allegiance, acts of acquiescence in
existing governments, and the like, is one that arises at once with
the acceptance of God as the supreme and real King of the Earth.  At
the worst Caesar is a usurper, a satrap claiming to be sovereign; at
the best he is provisional.  Modern casuistry makes no great trouble
for the believing public official.  The chief business of any
believer is to do the work for which he is best fitted, and since
all state affairs are to become the affairs of God's kingdom it is
of primary importance that they should come into the hands of God's
servants.  It is scarcely less necessary to a believing man with
administrative gifts that he should be in the public administration,
than that he should breathe and eat.  And whatever oath or the like
to usurper church or usurper king has been set up to bar access to
service, is an oath imposed under duress.  If it cannot be avoided
it must be taken rather than that a man should become unserviceable.
All such oaths are unfair and foolish things.  They exclude no
scoundrels; they are appeals to superstition.  Whenever an
opportunity occurs for the abolition of an oath, the servant of God
will seize it, but where the oath is unavoidable he will take it.

The service of God is not to achieve a delicate consistency of
statement; it is to do as much as one can of God's work.



9. THE PRIEST AND THE CREED


It may be doubted if this line of reasoning regarding the official
and his oath can be extended to excuse the priest or pledged
minister of religion who finds that faith in the true God has ousted
his formal beliefs.

This has been a frequent and subtle moral problem in the
intellectual life of the last hundred years.  It has been
increasingly difficult for any class of reading, talking, and
discussing people such as are the bulk of the priesthoods of the
Christian churches to escape hearing and reading the accumulated
criticism of the Trinitarian theology and of the popularly accepted
story of man's fall and salvation.  Some have no doubt defeated this
universal and insidious critical attack entirely, and honestly
established themselves in a right-down acceptance of the articles
and disciplines to which they have subscribed and of the creeds they
profess and repeat.  Some have recanted and abandoned their
positions in the priesthood.  But a great number have neither
resisted the bacillus of criticism nor left the churches to which
they are attached.  They have adopted compromises, they have
qualified their creeds with modifying footnotes of essential
repudiation; they have decided that plain statements are metaphors
and have undercut, transposed, and inverted the most vital points of
the vulgarly accepted beliefs.  One may find within the Anglican
communion, Arians, Unitarians, Atheists, disbelievers in
immortality, attenuators of miracles; there is scarcely a doubt or a
cavil that has not found a lodgment within the ample charity of the
English Establishment.  I have been interested to hear one
distinguished Canon deplore that "they" did not identify the Logos
with the third instead of the second Person of the Trinity, and
another distinguished Catholic apologist declare his indifference to
the "historical Jesus."  Within most of the Christian communions one
may believe anything or nothing, provided only that one does not
call too public an attention to one's eccentricity.  The late Rev.
Charles Voysey, for example, preached plainly in his church at
Healaugh against the divinity of Christ, unhindered.  It was only
when he published his sermons under the provocative title of "The
Sling and the Stone," and caused an outcry beyond the limits of his
congregation, that he was indicted and deprived.

Now the reasons why these men do not leave the ministry or
priesthood in which they find themselves are often very plausible.
It is probable that in very few cases is the retention of stipend or
incumbency a conscious dishonesty.  At the worst it is mitigated by
thought for wife or child.  It has only been during very exceptional
phases of religious development and controversy that beliefs have
been really sharp.  A creed, like a coin, it may be argued, loses
little in practical value because it is worn, or bears the image of
a vanished king.  The religious life is a reality that has clothed
itself in many garments, and the concern of the priest or minister
is with the religious life and not with the poor symbols that may
indeed pretend to express, but do as a matter of fact no more than
indicate, its direction.  It is quite possible to maintain that the
church and not the creed is the real and valuable instrument of
religion, that the religious life is sustained not by its
propositions but by its routines.  Anyone who seeks the intimate
discussion of spiritual things with professional divines, will find
this is the substance of the case for the ecclesiastical sceptic.
His church, he will admit, mumbles its statement of truth, but where
else is truth?  What better formulae are to be found for ineffable
things?  And meanwhile--he does good.

That may be a valid defence before a man finds God.  But we who
profess the worship and fellowship of the living God deny that
religion is a matter of ineffable things.  The way of God is plain
and simple and easy to understand.

Therewith the whole position of the conforming sceptic is changed.
If a professional religious has any justification at all for his
professionalism it is surely that he proclaims the nearness and
greatness of God.  And these creeds and articles and orthodoxies are
not proclamations but curtains, they are a darkening and confusion
of what should be crystal clear.  What compensatory good can a
priest pretend to do when his primary business is the truth and his
method a lie?  The oaths and incidental conformities of men who wish
to serve God in the state are on a different footing altogether from
the falsehood and mischief of one who knows the true God and yet
recites to a trustful congregation, foists upon a trustful
congregation, a misleading and ill-phrased Levantine creed.

Such is the line of thought which will impose the renunciation of
his temporalities and a complete cessation of services upon every
ordained priest and minister as his first act of faith.  Once that
he has truly realised God, it becomes impossible for him ever to
repeat his creed again.  His course seems plain and clear.  It
becomes him to stand up before the flock he has led in error, and to
proclaim the being and nature of the one true God.  He must be
explicit to the utmost of his powers.  Then he may await his
expulsion.  It may be doubted whether it is sufficient for him to go
away silently, making false excuses or none at all for his retreat.
He has to atone for the implicit acquiescences of his conforming
years.



10. THE UNIVERSALISM OF GOD


Are any sorts of people shut off as if by inherent necessity from
God?

This is, so to speak, one of the standing questions of theology; it
reappears with slight changes of form at every period of religious
interest, it is for example the chief issue between the Arminian and
the Calvinist.  From its very opening proposition modern religion
sweeps past and far ahead of the old Arminian teachings of Wesleyans
and Methodists, in its insistence upon the entirely finite nature of
God.  Arminians seem merely to have insisted that God has
conditioned himself, and by his own free act left men free to accept
or reject salvation.  To the realist type of mind--here as always I
use "realist" in its proper sense as the opposite of nominalist--to
the old-fashioned, over-exact and over-accentuating type of mind,
such ways of thinking seem vague and unsatisfying.  Just as it
distresses the more downright kind of intelligence with a feeling of
disloyalty to admit that God is not Almighty, so it troubles the
same sort of intelligence to hear that there is no clear line to be
drawn between the saved and the lost.  Realists like an exclusive
flavour in their faith.  Moreover, it is a natural weakness of
humanity to be forced into extreme positions by argument.  It is
probable, as I have already suggested, that the absolute attributes
of God were forced upon Christianity under the stresses of
propaganda, and it is probable that the theory of a super-human
obstinancy beyond salvation arose out of the irritations natural to
theological debate.  It is but a step from the realisation that
there are people absolutely unable or absolutely unwilling to see
God as we see him, to the conviction that they are therefore shut
off from God by an invincible soul blindness.

It is very easy to believe that other people are essentially damned.

Beyond the little world of our sympathies and comprehension there
are those who seem inaccessible to God by any means within our
experience.  They are people answering to the "hard-hearted," to the
"stiff-necked generation" of the Hebrew prophets.  They betray and
even confess to standards that seem hopelessly base to us.  They
show themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty
or truth or goodness.  They are altogether remote from intelligent
sacrifice.  To every test they betray vileness of texture; they are
mean, cold, wicked.  There are people who seem to cheat with a
private self-approval, who are ever ready to do harsh and cruel
things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and
for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize
upon religion and turn it into persecution, and upon beauty to
torment it on the altars of some joyless vice.  We cannot do with
such souls; we have no use for them, and it is very easy indeed to
step from that persuasion to the belief that God has no use for
them.

And besides these base people there are the stupid people and the
people with minds so poor in texture that they cannot even grasp the
few broad and simple ideas that seem necessary to the salvation we
experience, who lapse helplessly into fetishistic and fearful
conceptions of God, and are apparently quite incapable of
distinguishing between what is practically and what is spiritually
good.

It is an easy thing to conclude that the only way to God is our way
to God, that he is the privilege of a finer and better sort to which
we of course belong; that he is no more the God of the card-sharper
or the pickpocket or the "smart" woman or the loan-monger or the
village oaf than he is of the swine in the sty.  But are we
justified in thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and
intellectual understandings?  Because some people seem to me
steadfastly and consistently base or hopelessly and incurably dull
and confused, does it follow that there are not phases, albeit I
have never chanced to see them, of exaltation in the one case and
illumination in the other?  And may I not be a little restricting my
perception of Good?  While I have been ready enough to pronounce
this or that person as being, so far as I was concerned, thoroughly
damnable or utterly dull, I find a curious reluctance to admit the
general proposition which is necessary for these instances.  It is
possible that the difference between Arminian and Calvinist is a
difference of essential intellectual temperament rather than of
theoretical conviction.  I am temperamentally Arminian as I am
temperamentally Nominalist.  I feel that it must be in the nature of
God to attempt all souls.  There must be accessibilities I can only
suspect, and accessibilities of which I know nothing.

Yet here is a consideration pointing rather the other way.  If you
think, as you must think, that you yourself can be lost to God and
damned, then I cannot see how you can avoid thinking that other
people can be damned.  But that is not to believe that there are
people damned at the outset by their moral and intellectual
insufficiency; that is not to make out that there is a class of
essential and incurable spiritual defectives.  The religious life
preceded clear religious understanding and extends far beyond its
range.

In my own case I perceive that in spite of the value I attach to
true belief, the reality of religion is not an intellectual thing.
The essential religious fact is in another than the mental sphere.
I am passionately anxious to have the idea of God clear in my own
mind, and to make my beliefs plain and clear to other people, and
particularly to other people who may seem to be feeling with me; I
do perceive that error is evil if only because a faith based on
confused conceptions and partial understandings may suffer
irreparable injury through the collapse of its substratum of ideas.
I doubt if faith can be complete and enduring if it is not secured
by the definite knowledge of the true God.  Yet I have also to admit
that I find the form of my own religious emotion paralleled by
people with whom I have no intellectual sympathy and no agreement in
phrase or formula at all.

There is for example this practical identity of religious feeling
and this discrepancy of interpretation between such an inquirer as
myself and a convert of the Salvation Army.  Here, clothing itself
in phrases and images of barbaric sacrifice, of slaughtered lambs
and fountains of precious blood, a most repulsive and
incomprehensible idiom to me, and expressing itself by shouts,
clangour, trumpeting, gesticulations, and rhythmic pacings that stun
and dismay my nerves, I find, the same object sought, release from
self, and the same end, the end of identification with the immortal,
successfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved.  I see God
indubitably present in these excitements, and I see personalities I
could easily have misjudged as too base or too dense for spiritual
understandings, lit by the manifest reflection of divinity.  One may
be led into the absurdest underestimates of religious possibilities
if one estimates people only coldly and in the light of everyday
life.  There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very
conceivably, when its utmost range can be examined, excludes nothing
human from religious cooperation, which will use any words to its
tune, which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world about it,
as it takes the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its
inner point in the directest contact with God.  Religion may suffer
from aphasia and still be religion; it may utter misleading or
nonsensical words and yet intend and convey the truth.  The methods
of the Salvation Army are older than doctrinal Christianity, and may
long survive it.  Men and women may still chant of Beulah Land and
cry out in the ecstasy of salvation; the tambourine, that modern
revival of the thrilling Alexandrine sistrum, may still stir dull
nerves to a first apprehension of powers and a call beyond the
immediate material compulsion of life, when the creeds of
Christianity are as dead as the lore of the Druids.

The emancipation of mankind from obsolete theories and formularies
may be accompanied by great tides of moral and emotional release
among types and strata that by the standards of a trained and
explicit intellectual, may seem spiritually hopeless.  It is not
necessary to imagine the whole world critical and lucid in order to
imagine the whole world unified in religious sentiment,
comprehending the same phrases and coming together regardless of
class and race and quality, in the worship and service of the true
God.  The coming kingship of God if it is to be more than hieratic
tyranny must have this universality of appeal.  As the head grows
clear the body will turn in the right direction.  To the mass of men
modern religion says, "This is the God it has always been in your
nature to apprehend."



11. GOD AND THE LOVE AND STATUS OF WOMEN


Now that we are discussing the general question of individual
conduct, it will be convenient to take up again and restate in that
relationship, propositions already made very plainly in the second
and third chapters.  Here there are several excellent reasons for a
certain amount of deliberate repetition. . . .

All the mystical relations of chastity, virginity, and the like with
religion, those questions of physical status that play so large a
part in most contemporary religions, have disappeared from modern
faith.  Let us be as clear as possible upon this.  God is concerned
by the health and fitness and vigour of his servants; we owe him our
best and utmost; but he has no special concern and no special
preferences or commandments regarding sexual things.

Christ, it is manifest, was of the modern faith in these matters, he
welcomed the Magdalen, neither would he condemn the woman taken in
adultery.  Manifestly corruption and disease were not to stand
between him and those who sought God in him.  But the Christianity
of the creeds, in this as in so many respects, does not rise to the
level of its founder, and it is as necessary to repeat to-day as
though the name of Christ had not been ascendant for nineteen
centuries, that sex is a secondary thing to religion, and sexual
status of no account in the presence of God.  It follows quite
logically that God does not discriminate between man and woman in
any essential things.  We leave our individuality behind us when we
come into the presence of God.  Sex is not disavowed but forgotten.
Just as one's last meal is forgotten--which also is a difference
between the religious moment of modern faith and certain Christian
sacraments.  You are a believer and God is at hand to you; heed not
your state; reach out to him and he is there.  In the moment of
religion you are human; it matters not what else you are, male or
female, clean or unclean, Hebrew or Gentile, bond or free.  It is
AFTER the moment of religion that we become concerned about our
state and the manner in which we use ourselves.

We have to follow our reason as our sole guide in our individual
treatment of all such things as food and health and sex.  God is the
king of the whole world, he is the owner of our souls and bodies and
all things.  He is not particularly concerned about any aspect,
because he is concerned about every aspect.  We have to make the
best use of ourselves for his kingdom; that is our rule of life.
That rule means neither painful nor frantic abstinences nor any
forced way of living.  Purity, cleanliness, health, none of these
things are for themselves, they are for use; none are magic, all are
means.  The sword must be sharp and clean.  That does not mean that
we are perpetually to sharpen and clean it--which would weaken and
waste the blade.  The sword must neither be drawn constantly nor
always rusting in its sheath.  Those who have had the wits and soul
to come to God, will have the wits and soul to find out and know
what is waste, what is vanity, what is the happiness that begets
strength of body and spirit, what is error, where vice begins, and
to avoid and repent and recoil from all those things that degrade.
These are matters not of the rule of life but of the application of
life.  They must neither be neglected nor made disproportionally
important.

To the believer, relationship with God is the supreme relationship.
It is difficult to imagine how the association of lovers and friends
can be very fine and close and good unless the two who love are each
also linked to God, so that through their moods and fluctuations and
the changes of years they can be held steadfast by his undying
steadfastness.  But it has been felt by many deep-feeling people
that there is so much kindred between the love and trust of husband
and wife and the feeling we have for God, that it is reasonable to
consider the former also as a sacred thing.  They do so value that
close love of mated man and woman, they are so intent upon its
permanence and completeness and to lift the dear relationship out of
the ruck of casual and transitory things, that they want to bring
it, as it were, into the very presence and assent of God.  There are
many who dream and desire that they are as deeply and completely
mated as this, many more who would fain be so, and some who are.
And from this comes the earnest desire to make marriage sacramental
and the attempt to impose upon all the world the outward appearance,
the restrictions, the pretence at least of such a sacramental union.

There may be such a quasi-sacramental union in many cases, but only
after years can one be sure of it; it is not to be brought about by
vows and promises but by an essential kindred and cleaving of body
and spirit; and it concerns only the two who can dare to say they
have it, and God.  And the divine thing in marriage, the thing that
is most like the love of God, is, even then, not the relationship of
the man and woman as man and woman but the comradeship and trust and
mutual help and pity that joins them.  No doubt that from the mutual
necessities of bodily love and the common adventure, the necessary
honesties and helps of a joint life, there springs the stoutest,
nearest, most enduring and best of human companionship; perhaps only
upon that root can the best of mortal comradeship be got; but it
does not follow that the mere ordinary coming together and pairing
off of men and women is in itself divine or sacramental or anything
of the sort.  Being in love is a condition that may have its moments
of sublime exaltation, but it is for the most part an experience far
down the scale below divine experience; it is often love only in so
far as it shares the name with better things; it is greed, it is
admiration, it is desire, it is the itch for excitement, it is the
instinct for competition, it is lust, it is curiosity, it is
adventure, it is jealousy, it is hate.  On a hundred scores 'lovers'
meet and part.  Thereby some few find true love and the spirit of
God in themselves or others.

Lovers may love God in one another; I do not deny it.  That is no
reason why the imitation and outward form of this great happiness
should be made an obligation upon all men and women who are
attracted by one another, nor why it should be woven into the
essentials of religion.  For women much more than for men is this
confusion dangerous, lest a personal love should shape and dominate
their lives instead of God.  "He for God only; she for God in him,"
phrases the idea of Milton and of ancient Islam; it is the formula
of sexual infatuation, a formula quite easily inverted, as the end
of Goethe's Faust ("The woman soul leadeth us upward and on") may
witness.  The whole drift of modern religious feeling is against
this exaggeration of sexual feeling, these moods of sexual
slavishness, in spiritual things.  Between the healthy love of
ordinary mortal lovers in love and the love of God, there is an
essential contrast and opposition in this, that preference,
exclusiveness, and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the
former and are absolutely incompatible with the latter.  The former
is the intensest realisation of which our individualities are
capable; the latter is the way of escape from the limitations of
individuality.  It may be true that a few men and more women do
achieve the completest unselfishness and self-abandonment in earthly
love.  So the poets and romancers tell us.  If so, it is that by an
imaginative perversion they have given to some attractive person a
worship that should be reserved for God and a devotion that is
normally evoked only by little children in their mother's heart.  It
is not the way between most of the men and women one meets in this
world.

But between God and the believer there is no other way, there is
nothing else, but self-surrender and the ending of self.



CHAPTER THE SIXTH

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION



1. THE BIOLOGICAL EQUIVALENT OF SIN


If the reader who is unfamiliar with scientific things will obtain
and read Metchnikoff's "Nature of Man," he will find there an
interesting summary of the biological facts that bear upon and
destroy the delusion that there is such a thing as individual
perfection, that there is even ideal perfection for humanity.  With
an abundance of convincing instances Professor Metchnikoff
demonstrates that life is a system of "disharmonies," capable of no
perfect way, that there is no "perfect" dieting, no "perfect" sexual
life, no "perfect" happiness, no "perfect" conduct.  He releases one
from the arbitrary but all too easy assumption that there is even an
ideal "perfection" in organic life.  He sweeps out of the mind with
all the confidence and conviction of a physiological specialist, any
idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man.  It
is in the nature of every man to fall short at every point from
perfection.  From the biological point of view we are as individuals
a series of involuntary "tries" on the part of an imperfect species
towards an unknown end.

Our spiritual nature follows our bodily as a glove follows a hand.
We are disharmonious beings and salvation no more makes an end to
the defects of our souls than it makes an end to the decay of our
teeth or to those vestigial structures of our body that endanger our
physical welfare.  Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds
not an inch to our spiritual and moral stature.



2. WHAT IS DAMNATION?


Let us now take up the question of what is Sin? and what we mean by
the term "damnation," in the light of this view of human reality.
Most of the great world religions are as clear as Professor
Metchnikoff that life in the world is a tangle of disharmonies, and
in most cases they supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they
declare that evil is one side of the conflict between Ahriman and
Ormazd, or that it is the punishment of an act of disobedience, of
the fall of man and world alike from a state of harmony.  Their
case, like his, is that THIS world is damned.

We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this
world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after
death, so nearly universal.  The endless punishments of hell appear
to be an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even
in the Christian system; the same common tendency to superlatives
and absolutes that makes men ashamed to admit that God is finite,
makes them seek to enhance the merits of their Saviour by the device
of everlasting fire.  Conquest over the sorrow of life and the fear
of death do not seem to them sufficient for Christ's glory.

Now the turning round of the modern mind from a conception of the
universe as something derived deductively from the past to a
conception of it as something gathering itself adventurously towards
the future, involves a release from the supposed necessity to tell a
story and explain why.  Instead comes the inquiry, "To what end?"
We can say without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are here,
this damnation is here--inexplicably.  We can, without any
distressful inquiry into ultimate origins, bring our minds to the
conception of a spontaneous and developing God arising out of those
stresses in our hearts and in the universe, and arising to overcome
them.  Salvation for the individual is escape from the individual
distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the
Kingdom of God.  And damnation can be nothing more and nothing less
than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape.

Something of that idea of damnation as a lack of the will for
salvation has crept at a number of points into contemporary
religious thought.  It was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the
damned go to their own hells of their own accord.  It underlies a
queer poem, "Simpson," by that interesting essayist upon modern
Christianity, Mr. Clutton Brock, which I have recently read.
Simpson dies and goes to hell--it is rather like the Cromwell Road--
and approves of it very highly, and then and then only is he
completely damned.  Not to realise that one can be damned is
certainly to be damned; such is Mr. Brock's idea.  It is his
definition of damnation.  Satisfaction with existing things is
damnation.  It is surrender to limitation; it is acquiescence in
"disharmony"; it is making peace with that enemy against whom God
fights for ever.

(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who acquiesce always and for
ever remains for me, as I have already confessed in the previous
chapter, a quite open question.  My Arminian temperament turns me
from the Calvinistic conclusion of Mr. Brock's satire.)



3. SIN IS NOT DAMNATION


Now the question of sin will hardly concern those damned and lost by
nature, if such there be.  Sin is not the same thing as damnation,
as we have just defined damnation.  Damnation is a state, but sin is
an incident.  One is an essential and the other an incidental
separation from God.  It is possible to sin without being damned;
and to be damned is to be in a state when sin scarcely matters, like
ink upon a blackamoor.  You cannot have questions of more or less
among absolute things.

It is the amazing and distressful discovery of every believer so
soon as the first exaltation of belief is past, that one does not
remain always in touch with God.  At first it seems incredible that
one should ever have any motive again that is not also God's motive.
Then one finds oneself caught unawares by a base impulse.  We
discover that discontinuousness of our apparently homogeneous
selves, the unincorporated and warring elements that seemed at first
altogether absent from the synthesis of conversion.  We are tripped
up by forgetfulness, by distraction, by old habits, by tricks of
appearance.  There come dull patches of existence; those mysterious
obliterations of one's finer sense that are due at times to the
little minor poisons one eats or drinks, to phases of fatigue, ill-
health and bodily disorder, or one is betrayed by some unanticipated
storm of emotion, brewed deep in the animal being and released by
any trifling accident, such as personal jealousy or lust, or one is
relaxed by contentment into vanity.  All these rebel forces of our
ill-coordinated selves, all these "disharmonies," of the inner
being, snatch us away from our devotion to God's service, carry us
off to follies, offences, unkindness, waste, and leave us
compromised, involved, and regretful, perplexed by a hundred
difficulties we have put in our own way back to God.

This is the personal problem of Sin.  Here prayer avails; here God
can help us.  From God comes the strength to repent and make such
reparation as we can, to begin the battle again further back and
lower down.  From God comes the power to anticipate the struggle
with one's rebel self, and to resist and prevail over it.



4. THE SINS OF THE INSANE


An extreme case is very serviceable in such a discussion as this.

It happens that the author carries on a correspondence with several
lunatics in asylums.  There is a considerable freedom of notepaper
in these institutions; the outgoing letters are no doubt censored or
selected in some way, but a proportion at any rate are allowed to go
out to their addresses.  As a journalist who signs his articles and
as the author of various books of fiction, as a frequent NAME, that
is, to any one much forced back upon reading, the writer is
particularly accessible to this type of correspondent.  The letters
come, some manifesting a hopeless disorder that permits of no reply,
but some being the expression of minds overlaid not at all
offensively by a web of fantasy, and some (and these are the more
touching ones and the ones that most concern us now) as sanely
conceived and expressed as any letters could be.  They are written
by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called
"sane," except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a
lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or
melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take
abnormal forms.  They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the
safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of
drugs, or in dreams and rare moments of controllable extravagance.
Then the insane become "glorious," or they become murderous, or they
become suicidal.  All these letter-writers in confinement have
convinced their fellow-creatures by some extravagance that they are
a danger to themselves or others.

The letters that come from such types written during their sane
intervals, are entirely sane.  Some, who are probably unaware--I
think they should know--of the offences or possibilities that
justify their incarceration, write with a certain resentment at
their position; others are entirely acquiescent, but one or two
complain of the neglect of friends and relations.  But all are as
manifestly capable of religion and of the religious life as any
other intelligent persons during the lucid interludes that make up
nine-tenths perhaps of their lives. . . .  Suppose now one of these
cases, and suppose that the infirmity takes the form of some cruel,
disgusting, or destructive disposition that may become at times
overwhelming, and you have our universal trouble with sinful
tendency, as it were magnified for examination.  It is clear that
the mania which defines his position must be the primary if not the
cardinal business in the life of a lunatic, but his problem with
that is different not in kind but merely in degree from the problem
of lusts, vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal lives.  It
is an unconquered tract, a great rebel province in his being, which
refuses to serve God and tries to prevent him serving God, and
succeeds at times in wresting his capital out of his control.  But
his relationship to that is the same relationship as ours to the
backward and insubordinate parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly
houses in our own private texture.

It is clear that the believer who is a lunatic is, as it were, only
the better part of himself.  He serves God with this unconquered
disposition in him, like a man who, whatever else he is and does, is
obliged to be the keeper of an untrustworthy and wicked animal.  His
beast gets loose.  His only resort is to warn those about him when
he feels that jangling or excitement of the nerves which precedes
its escapes, to limit its range, to place weapons beyond its reach.
And there are plenty of human beings very much in his case, whose
beasts have never got loose or have got caught back before their
essential insanity was apparent.  And there are those uncertifiable
lunatics we call men and women of "impulse" and "strong passions."
If perhaps they have more self-control than the really mad, yet it
happens oftener with them that the whole intelligent being falls
under the dominion of evil.  The passion scarcely less than the
obsession may darken the whole moral sky.  Repentance and atonement;
nothing less will avail them after the storm has passed, and the
sedulous preparation of defences and palliatives against the return
of the storm.

This discussion of the lunatic's case gives us indeed, usefully
coarse and large, the lines for the treatment of every human
weakness by the servants of God.  A "weakness," just like the
lunatic's mania, becomes a particular charge under God, a special
duty for the person it affects.  He has to minimise it, to isolate
it, to keep it out of mischief.  If he can he must adopt preventive
measures. . . .

These passions and weaknesses that get control of us hamper our
usefulness to God, they are an incessant anxiety and distress to us,
they wound our self-respect and make us incomprehensible to many who
would trust us, they discredit the faith we profess.  If they break
through and break through again it is natural and proper that men
and women should cease to believe in our faith, cease to work with
us or to meet us frankly. . . .  Our sins do everything evil to us
and through us except separate us from God.

Yet let there be no mistake about one thing.  Here prayer is a
power.  Here God can indeed work miracles.  A man with the light of
God in his heart can defeat vicious habits, rise again combative and
undaunted after a hundred falls, escape from the grip of lusts and
revenges, make head against despair, thrust back the very onset of
madness.  He is still the same man he was before he came to God,
still with his libidinous, vindictive, boastful, or indolent vein;
but now his will to prevail over those qualities can refer to an
exterior standard and an external interest, he can draw upon a
strength, almost boundless, beyond his own.



5. BELIEVE, AND YOU ARE SAVED


But be a sin great or small, it cannot damn a man once he has found
God.  You may kill and hang for it, you may rob or rape; the moment
you truly repent and set yourself to such atonement and reparation
as is possible there remains no barrier between you and God.
Directly you cease to hide or deny or escape, and turn manfully
towards the consequences and the setting of things right, you take
hold again of the hand of God.  Though you sin seventy times seven
times, God will still forgive the poor rest of you.  Nothing but
utter blindness of the spirit can shut a man off from God.

There is nothing one can suffer, no situation so unfortunate, that
it can shut off one who has the thought of God, from God.  If you
but lift up your head for a moment out of a stormy chaos of madness
and cry to him, God is there, God will not fail you.  A convicted
criminal, frankly penitent, and neither obdurate nor abject,
whatever the evil of his yesterdays, may still die well and bravely
on the gallows to the glory of God.  He may step straight from that
death into the immortal being of God.

This persuasion is the very essence of the religion of the true God.
There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented of, can
stand between God and man.



CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH



1. THE WORLD DAWN


As yet those who may be counted as belonging definitely to the new
religion are few and scattered and unconfessed, their realisations
are still uncertain and incomplete.  But that is no augury for the
continuance of this state of affairs even for the next few decades.
There are many signs that the revival is coming very swiftly, it may
be coming as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical night.
It may seem at present as though nothing very much were happening,
except for the fact that the old familiar constellations of theology
have become a little pallid and lost something of their multitude of
points.  But nothing fades of itself.  The deep stillness of the
late night is broken by a stirring, and the morning star of
creedless faith, the last and brightest of the stars, the star that
owes its light to the coming sun is in the sky.

There is a stirring and a movement.  There is a stir, like the stir
before a breeze.  Men are beginning to speak of religion without the
bluster of the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak of God
without any reference to Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence.
The Deists and Theists of an older generation, be it noted, never
did that.  Their "Supreme Being" repudiated nothing.  He was merely
the whittled stump of the Trinity.  It is in the last few decades
that the western mind has slipped loose from this absolutist
conception of God that has dominated the intelligence of Christendom
at least, for many centuries.  Almost unconsciously the new thought
is taking a course that will lead it far away from the moorings of
Omnipotence.  It is like a ship that has slipped its anchors and
drifts, still sleeping, under the pale and vanishing stars, out to
the open sea. . . .



2. CONVERGENT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS


In quite a little while the whole world may be alive with this
renascent faith.

For emancipation from the Trinitarian formularies and from a belief
in an infinite God means not merely a great revivification of minds
trained under the decadence of orthodox Christianity, minds which
have hitherto been hopelessly embarrassed by the choice between
pseudo-Christian religion or denial, but also it opens the way
towards the completest understanding and sympathy and participation
with the kindred movements for release and for an intensification of
the religious life, that are going on outside the sphere of the
Christian tradition and influence altogether.  Allusion has already
been made to the sympathetic devotional poetry of Rabindranath
Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism parallel with and
assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.

It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is
entirely towards other-worldness, to a treatment of this life as an
evil entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing.  It is
too easily assumed that Eastern teaching is wholly concerned with
renunciation, not merely of self but of being, with the escape from
all effort of any sort into an exalted vacuity.  This is indeed
neither the spirit of China nor of Islam nor of the every-day life
of any people in the world.  It is not the spirit of the Sikh nor of
these newer developments of Hindu thought.  It has never been the
spirit of Japan.  To-day less than ever does Asia seem disposed to
give up life and the effort of life.  Just as readily as Europeans,
do the Asiatics reach out their arms to that fuller life we can
live, that greater intensity of existence, to which we can attain by
escaping from ourselves.  All mankind is seeking God.  There is not
a nation nor a city in the globe where men are not being urged at
this moment by the spirit of God in them towards the discovery of
God.  This is not an age of despair but an age of hope in Asia as in
all the world besides.

Islam is undergoing a process of revision closely parallel to that
which ransacks Christianity.  Tradition and mediaeval doctrines are
being thrust aside in a similar way.  There is much probing into the
spirit and intention of the Founder.  The time is almost ripe for a
heart-searching Dialogue of the Dead, "How we settled our religions
for ever and ever," between, let us say, Eusebius of Caesarea and
one of Nizam-al-Mulk's tame theologians.  They would be drawn
together by the same tribulations; they would be in the closest
sympathy against the temerity of the moderns; they would have a
common courtliness.  The Quran is but little read by Europeans; it
is ignorantly supposed to contain many things that it does not
contain; there is much confusion in people's minds between its text
and the ancient Semitic traditions and usages retained by its
followers; in places it may seem formless and barbaric; but what it
has chiefly to tell of is the leadership of one individualised
militant God who claims the rule of the whole world, who favours
neither rank nor race, who would lead men to righteousness.  It is
much more free from sacramentalism, from vestiges of the ancient
blood sacrifice, and its associated sacerdotalism, than
Christianity.  The religion that will presently sway mankind can be
reached more easily from that starting-point than from the confused
mysteries of Trinitarian theology.  Islam was never saddled with a
creed.  With the very name "Islam" (submission to God) there is no
quarrel for those who hold the new faith. . . .

All the world over there is this stirring in the dry bones of the
old beliefs.  There is scarcely a religion that has not its Bahaism,
its Modernists, its Brahmo Somaj, its "religion without theology,"
its attempts to escape from old forms and hampering associations to
that living and world-wide spiritual reality upon which the human
mind almost instinctively insists. . . .

It is the same God we all seek; he becomes more and more plainly the
same God.

So that all this religious stir, which seems so multifold and
incidental and disconnected and confused and entirely ineffective
to-day, may be and most probably will be, in quite a few years a
great flood of religious unanimity pouring over and changing all
human affairs, sweeping away the old priesthoods and tabernacles and
symbols and shrines, the last crumb of the Orphic victim and the
last rag of the Serapeum, and turning all men about into one
direction, as the ships and houseboats swing round together in some
great river with the uprush of the tide. . . .



3. CAN THERE BE A TRUE CHURCH?


Among those who are beginning to realise the differences and
identities of the revived religion that has returned to them,
certain questions of organisation and assembly are being discussed.
Every new religious development is haunted by the precedents of the
religion it replaces, and it was only to be expected that among
those who have recovered their faith there should be a search for
apostles and disciples, an attempt to determine sources and to form
original congregations, especially among people with European
traditions.

These dispositions mark a relapse from understanding.  They are
imitative.  This time there has been no revelation here or there;
there is no claim to a revelation but simply that God has become
visible.  Men have thought and sought until insensibly the fog of
obsolete theology has cleared away.  There seems no need therefore
for special teachers or a special propaganda, or any ritual or
observances that will seem to insist upon differences.  The
Christian precedent of a church is particularly misleading.  The
church with its sacraments and its sacerdotalism is the disease of
Christianity.  Save for a few doubtful interpolations there is no
evidence that Christ tolerated either blood sacrifices or the
mysteries of priesthood.  All these antique grossnesses were
superadded after his martyrdom.  He preached not a cult but a
gospel; he sent out not medicine men but apostles.

No doubt all who believe owe an apostolic service to God.  They
become naturally apostolic.  As men perceive and realise God, each
will be disposed in his own fashion to call his neighbour's
attention to what he sees.  The necessary elements of religion could
be written on a post card; this book, small as it is, bulks large
not by what it tells positively but because it deals with
misconceptions.  We may (little doubt have I that we do) need
special propagandas and organisations to discuss errors and keep
back the jungle of false ideas, to maintain free speech and restrain
the enterprise of the persecutor, but we do not want a church to
keep our faith for us.  We want our faith spread, but for that there
is no need for orthodoxies and controlling organisations of
statement.  It is for each man to follow his own impulse, and to
speak to his like in his own fashion.

Whatever religious congregations men may form henceforth in the name
of the true God must be for their own sakes and not to take charge
of religion.

The history of Christianity, with its encrustation and suffocation
in dogmas and usages, its dire persecutions of the faithful by the
unfaithful, its desiccation and its unlovely decay, its invasion by
robes and rites and all the tricks and vices of the Pharisees whom
Christ detested and denounced, is full of warning against the
dangers of a church.  Organisation is an excellent thing for the
material needs of men, for the draining of towns, the marshalling of
traffic, the collecting of eggs, and the carrying of letters, the
distribution of bread, the notification of measles, for hygiene and
economics and suchlike affairs.  The better we organise such things,
the freer and better equipped we leave men's minds for nobler
purposes, for those adventures and experiments towards God's purpose
which are the reality of life.  But all organisations must be
watched, for whatever is organised can be "captured" and misused.
Repentance, moreover, is the beginning and essential of the
religious life, and organisations (acting through their secretaries
and officials) never repent.  God deals only with the individual for
the individual's surrender.  He takes no cognisance of committees.

Those who are most alive to the realities of living religion are
most mistrustful of this congregating tendency.  To gather together
is to purchase a benefit at the price of a greater loss, to
strengthen one's sense of brotherhood by excluding the majority of
mankind.  Before you know where you are you will have exchanged the
spirit of God for ESPRIT DE CORPS.  You will have reinvented the
SYMBOL; you will have begun to keep anniversaries and establish
sacramental ceremonies.  The disposition to form cliques and exclude
and conspire against unlike people is all too strong in humanity, to
permit of its formal encouragement.  Even such organisation as is
implied by a creed is to be avoided, for all living faith coagulates
as you phrase it.  In this book I have not given so much as a
definite name to the faith of the true God.  Organisation for
worship and collective exaltation also, it may be urged, is of
little manifest good.  You cannot appoint beforehand a time and
place for God to irradiate your soul.

All these are very valid objections to the church-forming
disposition.



4. ORGANISATIONS UNDER GOD


Yet still this leaves many dissatisfied.  They want to shout out
about God.  They want to share this great thing with all mankind.

Why should they not shout and share?

Let them express all that they desire to express in their own
fashion by themselves or grouped with their friends as they will.
Let them shout chorally if they are so disposed.  Let them work in a
gang if so they can work the better.  But let them guard themselves
against the idea that they can have God particularly or exclusively
with them in any such undertaking.  Or that so they can express God
rather than themselves.

That I think states the attitude of the modern spirit towards the
idea of a church.  Mankind passes for ever out of the idolatry of
altars, away from the obscene rites of circumcision and symbolical
cannibalism, beyond the sway of the ceremonial priest.  But if the
modern spirit holds that religion cannot be organised or any
intermediary thrust between God and man, that does not preclude
infinite possibilities of organisation and collective action UNDER
God and within the compass of religion.  There is no reason why
religious men should not band themselves the better to attain
specific ends.  To borrow a term from British politics, there is no
objection to AD HOC organisations.  The objection lies not against
subsidiary organisations for service but against organisations that
may claim to be comprehensive.

For example there is no reason why one should not--and in many cases
there are good reasons why one should--organise or join associations
for the criticism of religious ideas, an employment that may pass
very readily into propaganda.

Many people feel the need of prayer to resist the evil in themselves
and to keep them in mind of divine emotion.  And many want not
merely prayer but formal prayer and the support of others, praying
in unison.  The writer does not understand this desire or need for
collective prayer very well, but there are people who appear to do
so and there is no reason why they should not assemble for that
purpose.  And there is no doubt that divine poetry, divine maxims,
religious thought finely expressed, may be heard, rehearsed,
collected, published, and distributed by associations.  The desire
for expression implies a sort of assembly, a hearer at least as well
as a speaker.  And expression has many forms.  People with a strong
artistic impulse will necessarily want to express themselves by art
when religion touches them, and many arts, architecture and the
drama for example, are collective undertakings.  I do not see why
there should not be, under God, associations for building cathedrals
and suchlike great still places urgent with beauty, into which men
and women may go to rest from the clamour of the day's confusions; I
do not see why men should not make great shrines and pictures
expressing their sense of divine things, and why they should not
combine in such enterprises rather than work to fill heterogeneous
and chaotic art galleries.  A wave of religious revival and
religious clarification, such as I foresee, will most certainly
bring with it a great revival of art, religious art, music, songs,
and writings of all sorts, drama, the making of shrines, praying
places, tempies and retreats, the creation of pictures and
sculptures.  It is not necessary to have priestcraft and an
organised church for such ends.  Such enrichments of feeling and
thought are part of the service of God.

And again, under God, there may be associations and fraternities for
research in pure science; associations for the teaching and
simplification of languages; associations for promoting and watching
education; associations for the discussion of political problems and
the determination of right policies.  In all these ways men may
multiply their use by union.  Only when associations seek to control
things of belief, to dictate formulae, restrict religious activities
or the freedom of religious thought and teaching, when they tend to
subdivide those who believe and to set up jealousies or exclusions,
do they become antagonistic to the spirit of modern religion.



5. THE STATE IS GOD'S INSTRUMENT


Because religion cannot be organised, because God is everywhere and
immediately accessible to every human being, it does not follow that
religion cannot organise every other human affair.  It is indeed
essential to the idea that God is the Invisible King of this round
world and all mankind, that we should see in every government, great
and small, from the council of the world-state that is presently
coming, down to the village assembly, the instrument of God's
practical control.  Religion which is free, speaking freely through
whom it will, subject to a perpetual unlimited criticism, will be
the life and driving power of the whole organised world.  So that if
you prefer not to say that there will be no church, if you choose
rather to declare that the world-state is God's church, you may have
it so if you will.  Provided that you leave conscience and speech
and writing and teaching about divine things absolutely free, and
that you try to set no nets about God.

The world is God's and he takes it.  But he himself remains freedom,
and we find our freedom in him.



THE ENVOY


So I end this compact statement of the renascent religion which I
believe to be crystallising out of the intellectual, social, and
spiritual confusions of this time.  It is an account rendered.  It
is a statement and record; not a theory.  There is nothing in all
this that has been invented or constructed by the writer; I have
been but scribe to the spirit of my generation; I have at most
assembled and put together things and thoughts that I have come
upon, have transferred the statements of "science" into religious
terminology, rejected obsolescent definitions, and re-coordinated
propositions that had drifted into opposition.  Thus, I see, ideas
are developing, and thus have I written them down.  It is a
secondary matter that I am convinced that this trend of intelligent
opinion is a discovery of truth.  The reader is told of my own
belief merely to avoid an affectation of impartiality and aloofness.

The theogony here set forth is ancient; one can trace it appearing
and disappearing and recurring in the mutilated records of many
different schools of speculation; the conception of God as finite is
one that has been discussed very illuminatingly in recent years in
the work of one I am happy to write of as my friend and master, that
very great American, the late William James.  It was an idea that
became increasingly important to him towards the end of his life.
And it is the most releasing idea in the system.

Only in the most general terms can I trace the other origins of
these present views.  I do not think modern religion owes much to
what is called Deism or Theism.  The rather abstract and futile
Deism of the eighteenth century, of "votre Etre supreme" who bored
the friends of Robespierre, was a sterile thing, it has little
relation to these modern developments, it conceived of God as an
infinite Being of no particular character whereas God is a finite
being of a very especial character.  On the other hand men and women
who have set themselves, with unavoidable theological
preconceptions, it is true, to speculate upon the actual teachings
and quality of Christ, have produced interpretations that have
interwoven insensibly with thoughts more apparently new.  There is a
curious modernity about very many of Christ's recorded sayings.
Revived religion has also, no doubt, been the receiver of many
religious bankruptcies, of Positivism for example, which failed
through its bleak abstraction and an unspiritual texture.  Religion,
thus restated, must, I think, presently incorporate great sections
of thought that are still attached to formal Christianity.  The time
is at hand when many of the organised Christian churches will be
forced to define their positions, either in terms that will identify
them with this renascence, or that will lead to the release of their
more liberal adherents.  Its probable obligations to Eastern thought
are less readily estimated by a European writer.

Modern religion has no revelation and no founder; it is the
privilege and possession of no coterie of disciples or exponents; it
is appearing simultaneously round and about the world exactly as a
crystallising substance appears here and there in a super-saturated
solution.  It is a process of truth, guided by the divinity in men.
It needs no other guidance, and no protection.  It needs nothing but
freedom, free speech, and honest statement.  Out of the most mixed
and impure solutions a growing crystal is infallibly able to select
its substance.  The diamond arises bright, definite, and pure out of
a dark matrix of structureless confusion.

This metaphor of crystallisation is perhaps the best symbol of the
advent and growth of the new understanding.  It has no church, no
authorities, no teachers, no orthodoxy.  It does not even thrust and
struggle among the other things; simply it grows clear.  There will
be no putting an end to it.  It arrives inevitably, and it will
continue to separate itself out from confusing ideas.  It becomes,
as it were the Koh-i-noor; it is a Mountain of Light, growing and
increasing.  It is an all-pervading lucidity, a brightness and
clearness.  It has no head to smite, no body you can destroy; it
overleaps all barriers; it breaks out in despite of every enclosure.
It will compel all things to orient themselves to it.

It comes as the dawn comes, through whatever clouds and mists may be
here or whatever smoke and curtains may be there.  It comes as the
day comes to the ships that put to sea.

It is the Kingdom of God at hand.





End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells