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

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