God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells (best contemporary novels .txt) 📖

>have reached Pisgah’s slope and in increasing numbers men and women

are pressing on to see if it be really the Promised Land.”

 

“Pisgah—the Promised Land!” Mr. McCabe in that passage sounds as

if he were halfway to “Oh! Beulah Land!” and the tambourine.

 

That “larger spirit,” we maintain, is God; those “impulses” are the

power of God, and Mr. McCabe serves a Master he denies. He has but

to realise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the

Catholic Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be

lured back to that altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from

that preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to realise the

presence of Divinity.

 

3. GOD IS AN EXTERNAL REALITY

 

It may be argued that if atheists and agnostics when they set

themselves to express the good will that is in them, do shape out

God, that if their conception of right living falls in so completely

with the conception of God’s service as to be broadly identical,

then indeed God, like the ether of scientific speculation, is no

more than a theory, no more than an imaginative externalisation of

man’s inherent good will. Why trouble about God then? Is not the

declaration of a good disposition a sufficient evidence of

salvation? What is the difference between such benevolent

unbelievers as Professor Metchnikoff or Mr. McCabe and those who

have found God?

 

The difference is this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone

upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard,

trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral

strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs

like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs

beneath his feet. He has not really given himself or got away from

himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is still a

masterless man. His exaltation is self-centred, is priggishness,

his fall is unrestrained by any exterior obligation. His devotion

is only the good will in himself, a disposition; it is a mood that

may change. At any moment it may change. He may have pledged

himself to his own pride and honour, but who will hold him to his

bargain? He has no source of strength beyond his own amiable

sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported voice, and no

one watches while he sleeps. He cannot pray; he can but ejaculate.

He has no real and living link with other men of good will.

 

And those whose acquiescence in the idea of God is merely

intellectual are in no better case than those who deny God

altogether. They may have all the forms of truth and not divinity.

The religion of the atheist with a God-shaped blank at its heart and

the persuasion of the unconverted theologian, are both like lamps

unlit. The lit lamp has no difference in form from the lamp unlit.

But the lit lamp is alive and the lamp unlit is asleep or dead.

 

The difference between the unconverted and the unbeliever and the

servant of the true God is this; it is that the latter has

experienced a complete turning away from self. This only difference

is all the difference in the world. It is the realisation that this

goodness that I thought was within me and of myself and upon which I

rather prided myself, is without me and above myself, and infinitely

greater and stronger than I. It is the immortal and I am mortal.

It is invincible and steadfast in its purpose, and I am weak and

insecure. It is no longer that I, out of my inherent and remarkable

goodness, out of the excellence of my quality and the benevolence of

my heart, give a considerable amount of time and attention to the

happiness and welfare of others—because I choose to do so. On the

contrary I have come under a divine imperative, I am obeying an

irresistible call, I am a humble and willing servant of the

righteousness of God. That altruism which Professor Metchnikoff and

Mr. McCabe would have us regard as the goal and refuge of a broad

and free intelligence, is really the first simple commandment in the

religious life.

 

4. ANOTHER RELIGIOUS MATERIALIST

 

Now here is a passage from a book, “Evolution and the War,” by

Professor Metchnikoff’s translator, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, which

comes even closer to our conception of God as an immortal being

arising out of man, and external to the individual man. He has been

discussing that well-known passage of Kant’s: “Two things fill my

mind with ever-renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I

dwell on them—the starry vault above me, and the moral law within

me.”

 

From that discussion, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell presently comes to this

most definite and interesting statement:

 

“Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the

scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as

one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not

shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a

secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert

as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external

to man as the starry vault. It has no secure seat in any single man

or in any single nation. It is the work of the blood and tears of

long generations of men. It is not in man, inborn or innate, but is

enshrined in his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and

his religion. Its creation and sustenance are the crowning glory of

man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a high place above the

animal world. Men live and die; nations rise and fall, but the

struggle of individual lives and of individual nations must be

measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the

debasement or perfection of man’s great achievement.”

 

This is the same reality. This is the same Link and Captain that

this book asserts. It seems to me a secondary matter whether we

call Him “Man’s Great Achievement” or “The Son of Man” or the “God

of Mankind” or “God.” So far as the practical and moral ends of

life are concerned, it does not matter how we explain or refuse to

explain His presence in our lives.

 

There is but one possible gap left between the position of Dr.

Chalmers Mitchell and the position of this book. In this book it is

asserted that GOD RESPONDS, that he GIVES courage and the power of

self-suppression to our weakness.

 

5. A NOTE ON A LECTURE BY PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY

 

Let me now quote and discuss a very beautiful passage from a lecture

upon Stoicism by Professor Gilbert Murray, which also displays the

same characteristic of an involuntary shaping out of God in the

forms of denial. It is a passage remarkable for its conscientious

and resolute Agnosticism. And it is remarkable too for its

blindness to the possibility of separating quite completely the idea

of the Infinite Being from the idea of God. It is another striking

instance of that obsession of modern minds by merely Christian

theology of which I have already complained. Professor Murray has

quoted Mr. Bevan’s phrase for God, “the Friend behind phenomena,”

and he does not seem to realise that that phrase carries with it no

obligation whatever to believe that this Friend is in control of the

phenomena. He assumes that he is supposed to be in control as if it

were a matter of course:

 

“We do seem to find,” Professor Murray writes, “not only in all

religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man

is not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours

towards the good by some external help or sympathy. We find it

everywhere in the unsophisticated man. We find it in the unguarded

self-revelations of the most severe and conscientious Atheists.

Now, the Stoics, like many other schools of thought, drew an

argument from this consensus of all mankind. It was not an absolute

proof of the existence of the Gods or Providence, but it was a

strong indication. The existence of a common instinctive belief in

the mind of man gives at least a presumption that there must be a

good cause for that belief.

 

“This is a reasonable position. There must be some such cause. But

it does not follow that the only valid cause is the truth of the

content of the belief. I cannot help suspecting that this is

precisely one of those points on which Stoicism, in company with

almost all philosophy up to the present time, has gone astray

through not sufficiently realising its dependence on the human mind

as a natural biological product. For it is very important in this

matter to realise that the so-called belief is not really an

intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature.

 

“It is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to

realise the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is

normally unconscious. We cannot escape as easily as these brave men

dreamed from the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold.

Indeed, as I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this

unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I

myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from

making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we

are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct. We are

gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages.

We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we

see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship. Students of animals

under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious

creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details

by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there—the pack

which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out

walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens. It is

a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious

animal for the herd of friends who are not there. And it may be, it

may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind

phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable

instinctive conviction, since they are certainly not founded on

either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-souled gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the

great spaces between the stars.

 

“At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of.”

 

There the passage and the lecture end.

 

I would urge that here again is an inadvertent witness to the

reality of God.

 

Professor Murray writes of gregarious animals as though there

existed solitary animals that are not gregarious, pure

individualists, “atheists” so to speak, and as though this appeal to

a life beyond one’s own was not the universal disposition of living

things. His classical training disposes him to a realistic

exaggeration of individual difference. But nearly every animal, and

certainly every mentally considerable animal, begins under parental

care, in a nest or a litter, mates to breed, and is associated for

much of its life. Even the great carnivores do not go alone except

when they are old and have done with the most of life. Every pack,

every herd, begins at some point in a couple, it is the equivalent

of the tiger’s litter if that were to remain undispersed. And it is

within the memory of men still living that in many districts the