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

His

sufferings caused much suffering to others. He did his utmost to

see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and

the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a

fine essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he

could not do so. His confidence in the benevolent intervention of

God was altogether destroyed. His book tells of this shattering,

and how labouriously he reconstructed his religion upon less

confident lines. It is a book typical of an age and of a very

English sort of mind, a book well worth reading.

 

That he came to a full sense of the true God cannot be asserted, but

how near he came to God, let one quotation witness.

 

“The existence of an outside Providence,” he writes, “who created

us, who watches over us, and who guides our lives like a Merciful

Father, we have found impossible longer to believe in. But of the

existence of a Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate

beings, and finding its fullest expression, in man in love, and in

the flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of anything in the

world. This fiery spiritual impulsion at the centre and the source

of things, ever burning in us, is the supremely important factor in

our existence. It does not always attain to light. In many

directions it fails; the conditions are too hard and it is utterly

blocked. In others it only partially succeeds. But in a few it

bursts forth into radiant light. There are few who in some heavenly

moment of their lives have not been conscious of its presence. We

may not be able to give it outward expression, but we know that it

is there.” …

 

God does not guide our feet. He is no sedulous governess

restraining and correcting the wayward steps of men. If you would

fly into the air, there is no God to bank your aeroplane correctly

for you or keep an ill-tended engine going; if you would cross a

glacier, no God nor angel guides your steps amidst the slippery

places. He will not even mind your innocent children for you if you

leave them before an unguarded fire. Cherish no delusions; for

yourself and others you challenge danger and chance on your own

strength; no talisman, no God, can help you or those you care for.

Nothing of such things will God do; it is an idle dream. But God

will be with you nevertheless. In the reeling aeroplane or the dark

ice-cave God will be your courage. Though you suffer or are killed,

it is not an end. He will be with you as you face death; he will

die with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave

deaths. He will come so close to you that at the last you will not

know whether it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be

swallowed up in his victory.

 

5. THE HERESY OF QUIETISM

 

God comes to us within and takes us for his own. He releases us

from ourselves; he incorporates us with his own undying experience

and adventure; he receives us and gives himself. He is a stimulant;

he makes us live immortally and more abundantly. I have compared

him to the sensation of a dear, strong friend who comes and stands

quietly beside one, shoulder to shoulder.

 

The finding of God is the beginning of service. It is not an escape

from life and action; it is the release of life and action from the

prison of the mortal self. Not to realise that, is the heresy of

Quietism, of many mystics. Commonly such people are people of some

wealth, able to command services for all their everyday needs. They

make religion a method of indolence. They turn their backs on the

toil and stresses of existence and give themselves up to a delicious

reverie in which they flirt with the divinity. They will recount

their privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and wonderfully

God has tried and proved them. But indeed the true God was not the

lover of Madame Guyon. The true God is not a spiritual troubadour

wooing the hearts of men and women to no purpose. The true God goes

through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for

recruits along the street. We must go out to him. We must accept

his discipline and fight his battle. The peace of God comes not by

thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him.

 

6. GOD DOES NOT PUNISH

 

Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for

moral indignation. Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear.

They were more often “wrath” than not. Such was the temperament of

the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps

under the influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian

Trinity and who became also the Moslem God.* The natural hatred of

unregenerate men against everything that is unlike themselves,

against strange people and cheerful people, against unfamiliar

usages and things they do not understand, embodied itself in this

conception of a malignant and partisan Deity, perpetually “upset” by

the little things people did, and contriving murder and vengeance.

Now this God would be drowning everybody in the world, now he would

be burning Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting his

congenial Israelites to the most terrific pogroms. This divine

“frightfulness” is of course the natural human dislike and distrust

for queer practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike

reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape in us, liberating the

latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it an excuse and pressing

permission upon it, handing the thing hated and feared over to its

secular arm… .

 

* It is not so generally understood as it should be among English

and American readers that a very large proportion of early

Christians before the creeds established and regularised the

doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely that Jehovah was God;

they regarded Christ as a rebel against Jehovah and a rescuer of

humanity from him, just as Prometheus was a rebel against Jove.

These beliefs survived for a thousand years tbroughout Christendom:

they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the

Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The catholic

church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old

Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of

the Cathars against the Hebrew God. But in this book, be it noted,

the word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to

indicate only the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.

 

It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct

for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish

sweet familiar things, that these things of the True God should so

readily liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with

a light to tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the

house on fire. None the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of

God the Revengeful, God the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion.

It is only in quite recent years that the growing gentleness of

everyday life has begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less

tolerant and gentle than themselves. The recent literature of the

Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this trouble.

 

Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for

denying the irascibility of his God and teaching “the Kaffirs of

Natal” the dangerous heresy that God is all mercy. “We cannot allow

it to be said,” the Dean of Cape Town insisted, “that God was not

angry and was not appeased by punishment.” He was angry “on account

of Sin, which is a great evil and a great insult to His Majesty.”

The case of the Rev. Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a

second assertion of the Church’s insistence upon the fierceness of

her God. This case is not to be found in the ordinary church

histories nor is it even mentioned in the latest edition of the

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it appears to have been a

very illuminating case. It is doubtful if the church would

prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey to-day.

 

7. GOD AND THE NURSERY-MAID

 

Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger, is that kind of

miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the

overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with

such a God and he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word

“God” first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational

restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye.

God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to

leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while

she goes off upon her own aims. But indeed, the teaching of God

Bogey is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less dreadful

than an indecent assault. The reason rebels and is crushed under

this horrible and pursuing suggestion. Many minds never rise again

from their injury. They remain for the rest of life spiritually

crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion

of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.

 

I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered. He and his

Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still

believed in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him as a

fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening,

perpetually waiting to condemn and to “strike me dead”; his flames

as ready as a grill-room fire. He was over me and about my

feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would

be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a

child of thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this

Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that God

himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to

me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.

 

I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mental cripples with

this bogey God of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges,

still living like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place

where God should be. They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not

be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish

observances; they dare not look at the causes of things. They are

afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of

science, lest that old watching spider take offence. The voice of

the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing,

but they avert themselves, fear-driven. For the true God has no

lash of fear. And how the foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven

face, his greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his

bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest of fear the

ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown for him! How he loves

the importance of denunciation, and, himself a malignant cripple, to

rally the company of these crippled souls to persecute and destroy

the happy children of God! …

 

Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children. There is a

real wickedness of the priest that is different from other

wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and

strange perversions of instinct affect it. Let a former Archbishop

of Canterbury speak for me. This that follows is the account given

by Archbishop