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

>African lion has with a change of game and conditions lapsed from a

“solitary” to a gregarious, that is to say a prolonged family habit

of life.

 

Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher

apes, is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less. He has

passed within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to

a nearly cosmopolitan tolerance. And he has his tribe about him.

He is not, as Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST

gregarious beast. Why should his desire for God be regarded as the

overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when he has home,

town, society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at

hand to glut it? Why should gregariousness drive a man to God

rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house? Why

should gregariousness drive men out of crowded Egyptian cities into

the cells of the Thebaid? Schopenhauer in a memorable passage

(about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is flatly opposed to

Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when he declares that

the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious. The parallel with

the dog is not a valid one.

 

Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the

Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation? Is not

the real deception, our belief that we are completely

individualised, and is it not possible that this that Professor

Murray calls “instinct” is really not a vestige but a new thing

arising out of our increasing understanding, an intellectual

penetration to that greater being of the species, that vine, of

which we are the branches? Why should not the soul of the species,

many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul like our own?

 

Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff, and in many other

cases of atheism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate

understanding of individuation bars the way to at least the

intellectual recognition of the true God.

 

6. RELIGION AS ETHICS

 

And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent

interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston’s. You will note that

while in this book we use the word “God” to indicate the God of the

Heart, Sir Harry uses “God” for that idea of God-of-the-Universe,

which we have spoken of as the Infinite Being. This use of the word

“God” is of late theological origin; the original identity of the

words “good” and “god” and all the stories of the gods are against

him. But Sir Harry takes up God only to define him away into

incomprehensible necessity. Thus:

 

“We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force we call God; and,

assuming such an intelligent ruling force to be in existence,

permeating this universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of

millions of planets, we do not know under what conditions and

limitations It works. We are quite entitled to assume that the end

of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness

and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled

to identify the reactionary forces of brute Nature with the

anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of darkness

resisting the power of light. But in these conjectures we must

surely come to the conclusion that the theoretical potency we call

‘God’ makes endless experiments, and scrap-heaps the failures.

Think of the Dinosaurs and the expenditure of creative energy that

went to their differentiation and their wellnigh incredible physical

development… .

 

“To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and

perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may

seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out,

the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should

feel as little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and fragments

as must the Creative Force of the immeasurably vast universe feel

for the DISJECTA MEMBRA of perfected life on this planet… .”

 

But thence he goes on to a curiously imperfect treatment of the God

of man as if he consisted in nothing more than some vague sort of

humanitarianism. Sir Harry’s ideas are much less thoroughly thought

out than those of any other of these sceptical writers I have

quoted. On that account they are perhaps more typical. He speaks

as though Christ were simply an eminent but illreported and

abominably served teacher of ethics—and yet of the only right ideal

and ethics. He speaks as though religions were nothing more than

ethical movements, and as though Christianity were merely someone

remarking with a bright impulsiveness that everything was simply

horrid, and so, “Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal axiom.

He ignores altogether the fundamental essential of religion, which

is THE DEVELOPMENT AND SYNTHESIS OF THE DIVERGENT AND CONFLICTING

MOTIVES OF THE UNCONVERTED LIFE, AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE

INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITH THE IMMORTAL PURPOSE OF GOD. He presents a

conception of religion relieved of its “nonsense” as the cheerful

self-determination of a number of bright little individuals (much

stirred but by no means overcome by Cosmic Pity) to the Service of

Man. As he seems to present it, it is as outward a thing, it goes

as little into the intimacy of their lives, as though they had after

proper consideration agreed to send a subscription to a Red Cross

Ambulance or take part in a public demonstration against the

Armenian Massacres, or do any other rather nice-spirited exterior

thing. This is what he says:

 

“I hope that the religion of the future will devote itself wholly to

the Service of Man. It can do so without departing from the

Christian ideal and Christian ethics. It need only drop all that is

silly and disputable, and ‘mattering not neither here nor there,’ of

Christian theology—a theology virtually absent from the direct

teaching of Christ—and all of Judaistic literature or prescriptions

not made immortal in their application by unassailable truth and by

the confirmation of science. An excellent remedy for the nonsense

which still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter

Monson’s ‘Service of Man,’ which was published as long ago as 1887,

and has since been re-issued by the Rationalist Press Association in

its well-known sixpenny series, and J. Allanson Picton’s ‘Man and

the Bible.’ Similarly, those who wish to acquire a sane view of the

relations between man and God would do well to read Winwood Reade’s

‘Martyrdom of Man.’”

 

Sir Harry in fact clears the ground for God very ably, and then

makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space. There is no help

nor strength in his gesture unless God is there. Without God, the

“Service of Man” is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an

hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison of the mortal life.