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

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