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

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.