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

Tait in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation

(July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a certain SOCIETY OF

THE HOLY CROSS:

 

“I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the

instruction of very young children. I find, in one of the pages of

it, the statement that between the ages of six and six and a half

years would be the proper time for the inculcation of the teaching

which is to be found in the book. Now, six to six and a half is

certainly a very tender age, and to these children I find these

statements addressed in the book:

 

“‘It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must

acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him.’

 

“I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many

there were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that

they did not mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to

God direct; that it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six,

to its mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse to

the priest. But the words, to say the least of them, are rash.

Then comes the very obvious question:

 

“‘Do you know why? It is because God, when he was on earth, gave to

his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men

their sins. It was to priests alone that Jesus said: “Receive ye

the Holy Ghost.” … Those who will not confess will not be

cured. Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.’

 

“That is addressed to a child six years of age.

 

“‘I have known,’ the book continues, ‘poor children who concealed

their sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were

tormented with remorse, and if they had died in that state they

would certainly have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.’” …

 

Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen

time after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in

their preaching. It is a distinct lust. Much nobility and devotion

there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of

real worship, lives no man may better; this that I write is not of

all, perhaps not of many priests. But there has been in all ages

that have known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest;

priestcraft and priestly power release an aggressive and narrow

disposition to a recklessness of suffering and a hatred of liberty

that surely exceeds the badness of any other sort of men.

 

8. THE CHILDREN’S GOD

 

Children do not naturally love God. They have no great capacity for

an idea so subtle and mature as the idea of God. While they are

still children in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy

for them to feel any great need of God. All things are still

something God-like… .

 

The true God, our modern minds insist upon believing, can have no

appetite for unnatural praise and adoration. He does not clamour

for the attention of children. He is not like one of those senile

uncles who dream of glory in the nursery, who love to hear it said,

“The children adore him.” If children are loved and trained to

truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the

true God as their needs bring them within his scope. They should be

left to their innocence, and to their trust in the innocence of the

world, as long as they can be. They should be told only of God as a

Great Friend whom some day they will need more and understand and

know better. That is as much as most children need. The phrases of

religion put too early into their mouths may become a cant,

something worse than blasphemy.

 

Yet children are sometimes very near to God. Creative passion stirs

in their play. At times they display a divine simplicity. But it

does not follow that therefore they should be afflicted with

theological formulae or inducted into ceremonies and rites that they

may dislike or misinterpret. If by any accident, by the death of a

friend or a distressing story, the thought of death afflicts a

child, then he may begin to hear of God, who takes those that serve

him out of their slain bodies into his shining immortality. Or if

by some menial treachery, through some prowling priest, the whisper

of Old Bogey reaches our children, then we may set their minds at

ease by the assurance of his limitless charity… .

 

With adolescence comes the desire for God and to know more of God,

and that is the most suitable time for religious talk and teaching.

 

9. GOD IS NOT SEXUAL

 

In the last two or three hundred years there has been a very

considerable disentanglement of the idea of God from the complex of

sexual thought and feeling. But in the early days of religion the

two things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew

prophets, for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary

“wrath” of their God at this or that little dirtiness or

irregularity or breach of the sexual tabus. The ceremony of

circumcision is clearly indicative of the original nature of the

Semitic deity who developed into the Trinitarian God. So far as

Christianity dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed the

old associations. But to this day the representative Christian

churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with

some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of

celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the mischievousness and

maliciousness that so often ensue. Nearly every Christian church

inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can contrive upon the

illegitimate child. They do not treat illegitimate children as

unfortunate children, but as children with a mystical and an

incurable taint of SIN. Kindly easy-going Christians may resent

this statement because it does not tally with their own attitudes,

but let them consult their orthodox authorities.

 

One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred

or sinful in itself and what is held to be one’s duty or a nation’s

duty because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best

thing to do. By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or

all of our institutions regulating the relations of the sexes may be

justifiable. But my case is not whether they can be justified by

these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged

even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world.

It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies

that I would criticise. These sexual questions are guarded by a

holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made—with a

sense of complete righteousness—to prohibit their discussion. That

fury about sexual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis

that the Christian God remains a sex God in the minds of great

numbers of his exponents. His disentanglement from that plexus is

incomplete. Sexual things are still to the orthodox Christian,

sacred things.

 

Now the God whom those of the new faith are finding is only

mediately concerned with the relations of men and women. He is no

more sexual essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hygienic.

The God of Leviticus was all these things. He is represented as

prescribing the most petty and intimate of observances—many of

which are now habitually disregarded by the Christians who profess

him… . It is part of the evolution of the idea of God that we

have now so largely disentangled our conception of him from the

dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual rules that were once

inseparably bound up with his majesty. Christ himself was one of

the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is the clearest

evidence in several instances of his disregard of the rule and his

insistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit underlying

and often masked by the rule. His Church, being made of baser

matter, has followed him as reluctantly as possible and no further

than it was obliged. But it has followed him far enough to admit

his principle that in all these matters there is no need for

superstitious fear, that the interpretation of the divine purpose is

left to the unembarrassed intelligence of men. The church has

followed him far enough to make the harsh threatenings of priests

and ecclesiastics against what they are pleased to consider impurity

or sexual impiety, a profound inconsistency. One seems to hear

their distant protests when one reads of Christ and the Magdalen, or

of Christ eating with publicans and sinners. The clergy of our own

days play the part of the New Testament Pharisees with the utmost

exactness and complete unconsciousness. One cannot imagine a modern

ecclesiastic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary

civility, unless she was in a very high social position indeed, or

blending with disreputable characters without a dramatic sense of

condescension and much explanatory by-play. Those who profess

modern religion do but follow in these matters a course entirely

compatible with what has survived of the authentic teachings of

Christ, when they declare that God is not sexual, and that religious

passion and insult and persecution upon the score of sexual things

are a barbaric inheritance.

 

But lest anyone should fling off here with some hasty assumption

that those who profess the religion of the true God are sexually

anarchistic, let stress be laid at once upon the opening sentence of

the preceding paragraph, and let me a little anticipate a section

which follows. We would free men and women from exact and

superstitious rules and observances, not to make them less the

instruments of God but more wholly his. The claim of modern

religion is that one should give oneself unreservedly to God, that

there is no other salvation. The believer owes all his being and

every moment of his life to God, to keep mind and body as clean,

fine, wholesome, active and completely at God’s service as he can.

There is no scope for indulgence or dissipation in such a

consecrated life. It is a matter between the individual and his

conscience or his doctor or his social understanding what exactly he

may do or not do, what he may eat or drink or so forth, upon any

occasion. Nothing can exonerate him from doing his utmost to

determine and perform the right act. Nothing can excuse his failure

to do so. But what is here being insisted upon is that none of

these things has immediately to do with God or religious emotion,

except only the general will to do right in God’s service. The

detailed interpretation of that “right” is for the dispassionate

consideration of the human intelligence.

 

All this is set down here as distinctly as possible. Because of the

emotional reservoirs of sex, sexual dogmas are among the most

obstinately recurrent of all heresies, and sexual excitement is

always tending to leak back into religious feeling. Amongst the

sex-tormented priesthood of the Roman communion in particular,

ignorant of the extreme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic

cult and suchlike predecessors of Christianity, there seems to be an

extraordinary belief that chastity was not invented until

Christianity came, and that the religious life is largely the

propitiation of God by feats of sexual abstinence. But a

superstitious abstinence that scars and embitters the mind, distorts

the imagination, makes the body gross and keeps it unclean, is just

as offensive to God as any positive depravity.