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

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