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

He is by our poor scales of

measurement boundless love, boundless courage, boundless generosity.

He is thought and a steadfast will. He is our friend and brother

and the light of the world. That briefly is the belief of the

modern mind with regard to God. There is no very novel idea about

this God, unless it be the idea that he had a beginning. This is

the God that men have sought and found in all ages, as God or as the

Messiah or the Saviour. The finding of him is salvation from the

purposelessness of life. The new religion has but disentangled the

idea of him from the absolutes and infinities and mysteries of the

Christian theologians; from mythological virgin births and the

cosmogonies and intellectual pretentiousness of a vanished age.

 

Modern religion appeals to no revelation, no authoritative teaching,

no mystery. The statement it makes is, it declares, a mere

statement of what we may all perceive and experience. We all live

in the storm of life, we all find our understandings limited by the

Veiled Being; if we seek salvation and search within for God,

presently we find him. All this is in the nature of things. If

every one who perceives and states it were to be instantly killed

and blotted out, presently other people would find their way to the

same conclusions; and so on again and again. To this all true

religion, casting aside its hulls of misconception, must ultimately

come. To it indeed much religion is already coming. Christian

thought struggles towards it, with the millstones of Syrian theology

and an outrageous mythology of incarnation and resurrection about

its neck. When at last our present bench of bishops join the early

fathers of the church in heaven there will be, I fear, a note of

reproach in their greeting of the ingenious person who saddled them

with OMNIPOTENS. Still more disastrous for them has been the virgin

birth, with the terrible fascination of its detail for unpoetic

minds. How rich is the literature of authoritative Christianity

with decisions upon the continuing virginity of Mary and the

virginity of Joseph—ideas that first arose in Arabia as a Moslem

gloss upon Christianity—and how little have these peepings and

pryings to do with the needs of the heart and the finding of God!

 

Within the last few years there have been a score or so of such

volumes as that recently compiled by Dr. Foakes Jackson, entitled

“The Faith and the War,” a volume in which the curious reader may

contemplate deans and canons, divines and church dignitaries, men

intelligent and enquiring and religiously disposed, all lying like

overladen camels, panting under this load of obsolete theological

responsibility, groaning great articles, outside the needle’s eye

that leads to God.

 

6. THE COMING OF GOD

 

Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God

entirely upon experience. It has encountered God. It does not

argue about God; it relates. It relates without any of those

wrappings of awe and reverence that fold so necessarily about

imposture, it relates as one tells of a friend and his assistance,

of a happy adventure, of a beautiful thing found and picked up by

the wayside.

 

So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal

salvation tallies very closely with the account of “conversion” as

it is given by other religions. It has little to tell that is not

already familiar to the reader of William James’s “Varieties of

Religious Experience.” It describes an initial state of distress

with the aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with

the futility of the individual life, a state of helpless self-disgust, of inability to form any satisfactory plan of living. This

is the common prelude known to many sorts of Christian as

“conviction of sin”; it is, at any rate, a conviction of hopeless

confusion… . Then in some way the idea of God comes into the

distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without substance or

belief. It is read about or it is remembered; it is expounded by

some teacher or some happy convert. In the case of all those of the

new faith with whose personal experience I have any intimacy, the

idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea floating

about in a mind still dissatisfied. God is not believed in, but it

is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the

needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit

together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take

the sting from death. Under this realisation the idea is pursued

and elaborated. For a time there is a curious resistance to the

suggestion that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by

such phrases as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness,

as the Collective Mind.

 

I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the

idea of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous

prejudice against divine personality created by the absurdities of

the Christian teaching and the habitual monopoly of the Christian

idea. The picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself

before minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are lambs. The

cross in the twilight bars the way. It is a novelty and an enormous

relief to such people to realise that one may think of God without

being committed to think of either the Father, the Son, or the Holy

Ghost, or of all of them at once. That freedom had not seemed

possible to them. They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea

that the Christian God is the only thinkable God. They had heard so

much about that God and so little of any other. With that release

their minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of

God.

 

Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes. This

cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God. It is

the attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in

oneself. It is as if one was touched at every point by a being akin

to oneself, sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in

aim. It is completer and more intimate, but it is like standing

side by side with and touching someone that we love very dearly and

trust completely. It is as if this being bridged a thousand

misunderstandings and brought us into fellowship with a great

multitude of other people… .

 

“Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”

 

The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the

stars, or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit

and muse. It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the

battle. There is no saying when it may not come to us… . But

after it has come our lives are changed, God is with us and there is

no more doubt of God. Thereafter one goes about the world like one

who was lonely and has found a lover, like one who was perplexed and

has found a solution. One is assured that there is a Power that

fights with us against the confusion and evil within us and without.

There comes into the heart an essential and enduring happiness and

courage.

 

There is but one God, there is but one true religious experience,

but under a multitude of names, under veils and darknesses, God has

in this manner come into countless lives. There is scarcely a

faith, however mean and preposterous, that has not been a way to

holiness. God who is himself finite, who himself struggles in his

great effort from strength to strength, has no spite against error.

Far beyond halfway he hastens to meet the purblind. But God is

against the darkness in their eyes. The faith which is returning to

men girds at veils and shadows, and would see God plainly. It has

little respect for mysteries. It rends the veil of the temple in

rags and tatters. It has no superstitious fear of this huge

friendliness, of this great brother and leader of our little beings.

To find God is but the beginning of wisdom, because then for all our

days we have to learn his purpose with us and to live our lives with

him.