God The Invisible King
by Herbert George Wells
CONTENTS:
PREFACE
1. THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION
2. HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT
3. THE LIKENESS OF GOD
4. THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS
5. THE INVISIBLE KING
6. MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION
7. THE IDEA OF A CHURCH
THE ENVOY
PREFACE
This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious
belief of the writer. That belief is not orthodox Christianity; it
is not, indeed, Christianity at all; its core nevertheless is a
profound belief in a personal and intimate God. There is nothing in
its statements that need shock or offend anyone who is prepared for
the expression of a faith different from and perhaps in several
particulars opposed to his own. The writer will be found to be
sympathetic with all sincere religious feeling. Nevertheless it is
well to prepare the prospective reader for statements that may jar
harshly against deeply rooted mental habits. It is well to warn him
at the outset that the departure from accepted beliefs is here no
vague scepticism, but a quite sharply defined objection to dogmas
very widely revered. Let the writer state the most probable
occasion of trouble forthwith. An issue upon which this book will
be found particularly uncompromising is the dogma of the Trinity.
The writer is of opinion that the Council of Nicaea, which forcibly
crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the
creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was
one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all
religious gatherings, and he holds that the Alexandrine speculations
which were then conclusively imposed upon Christianity merit only
disrespectful attention at the present time. There you have a chief
possibility of offence. He is quite unable to pretend any awe for
what he considers the spiritual monstrosities established by that
undignified gathering. He makes no attempt to be obscure or
propitiatory in this connection. He criticises the creeds
explicitly and frankly, because he believes it is particularly
necessary to clear them out of the way of those who are seeking
religious consolation at this present time of exceptional religious
need. He does little to conceal his indignation at the role played
by these dogmas in obscuring, perverting, and preventing the
religious life of mankind. After this warning such readers from
among the various Christian churches and sects as are accessible to
storms of theological fear or passion to whom the Trinity is an
ineffable mystery and the name of God almost unspeakably awful, read
on at their own risk. This is a religious book written by a
believer, but so far as their beliefs and religion go it may seem to
them more sceptical and more antagonistic than blank atheism. That
the writer cannot tell. He is not simply denying their God. He is
declaring that there is a living God, different altogether from that
Triune God and nearer to the heart of man. The spirit of this book
is like that of a missionary who would only too gladly overthrow and
smash some Polynesian divinity of shark’s teeth and painted wood and
mother-of-pearl. To the writer such elaborations as “begotten of
the Father before all worlds” are no better than intellectual
shark’s teeth and oyster shells. His purpose, like the purpose of
that missionary, is not primarily to shock and insult; but he is
zealous to liberate, and he is impatient with a reverence that
stands between man and God. He gives this fair warning and proceeds
with his matter.
His matter is modern religion as he sees it. It is only
incidentally and because it is unavoidable that he attacks doctrinal
Christianity.
In a previous book, “First and Last Things” (Constable and Co.), he
has stated his convictions upon certain general ideas of life and
thought as clearly as he could. All of philosophy, all of
metaphysics that is, seems to him to be a discussion of the
relations of class and individual. The antagonism of the Nominalist
and the Realist, the opposition of the One and the Many, the
contrast of the Ideal and the Actual, all these oppositions express
a certain structural and essential duality in the activity of the
human mind. From an imperfect recognition of that duality ensue
great masses of misconception. That was the substance of “First and
Last Things.” In this present book there is no further attack on
philosophical or metaphysical questions. Here we work at a less
fundamental level and deal with religious feeling and religious
ideas. But just as the writer was inclined to attribute a whole
world of disputation and inexactitudes to confused thinking about
the exact value of classes and terms, so here he is disposed to
think that interminable controversies and conflicts arise out of a
confusion of intention due to a double meaning of the word “God”;
that the word “God” conveys not one idea or set of ideas, but
several essentially different ideas, incompatible one with another,
and falling mainly into one or other of two divergent groups; and
that people slip carelessly from one to the other of these groups of
ideas and so get into ultimately inextricable confusions.
The writer believes that the centuries of fluid religious thought
that preceded the violent ultimate crystallisation of Nicaea, was
essentially a struggle—obscured, of course, by many complexities—
to reconcile and get into a relationship these two separate main
series of God-ideas.
Putting the leading id a part against evil.
The writer believes that these dogmas of relationship are not merely
extraneous to religion, but an impediment to religion. His aim in
this book is to give a statement of religion which is no longer
entangled in such speculations and disputes.
Let him add only one other note of explanation in this preface, and
that is to remark that except for one incidental passage (in Chapter
IV., 1), nowhere does he discuss the question of personal
immortality. [It is discussed in “First and Last Things,” Book IV,
4.] He omits this question because he does not consider that it has
any more bearing upon the essentials of religion, than have the
theories we may hold about the relation of God and the moral law to
the starry universe. The latter is a question for the theologian,
the former for the psychologist. Whether we are mortal or immortaea of this book very roughly, these two
antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by
speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the
other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward
God; the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps
developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a
conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a
comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a
conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second
idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God
of the human heart. The writer would suggest that the great outline
of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world
unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful
attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus. It
was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of
the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love
and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers and the
dignity of inexorable justice. There could be no finer metaphor for
such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship. But the trouble is
that it seems impossible to most people to continue to regard the
relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical
metaphor. Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment
of intellectual carelessness back to the idea of sexual filiation.
And it may further be suggested that the extreme aloofness and
inhumanity, which is logically necessary in the idea of a Creator
God, of an Infinite God, was the reason, so to speak, for the
invention of a Holy Spirit, as something proceeding from him, as
something bridging the great gulf, a Comforter, a mediator
descending into the sphere of the human understanding. That, and
the suggestive influence of the Egyptian Trinity that was then being
worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had saturated the thought of
Alexandria with the conception of a trinity in unity, are probably
the realities that account for the Third Person of the Christian
Trinity. At any rate the present writer believes that the
discussions that shaped the Christian theology we know were
dominated by such natural and fundamental thoughts. These
discussions were, of course, complicated from the outset; and
particularly were they complicated by the identification of the man
Jesus with the theological Christ, by materialistic expectations of
his second coming, by materialistic inventions about his