God The Invisible King - H. G. Wells (grave mercy TXT) 📗

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 cooperative 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