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

can give

us. And from these great propositions there follow many very

definite maxims and rules of life for those who serve God. These we

will immediately consider.

 

3. THE CRUCIFIX

 

But first let me write a few words here about those who hold a kind

of intermediate faith between the worship of the God of Youth and

the vaguer sort of Christianity. There are a number of people

closely in touch with those who have found the new religion who,

biased probably by a dread of too complete a break with

Christianity, have adopted a theogony which is very reminiscent of

Gnosticism and of the Paulician, Catharist, and kindred sects to

which allusion has already been made. He, who is called in this

book God, they would call God-the-Son or Christ, or the Logos; and

what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled Being, they would

call God-the-Father. And what we speak of here as Life, they would

call, with a certain disregard of the poor brutes that perish, Man.

And they would assert, what we of the new belief, pleading our

profound ignorance, would neither assert nor deny, that that

Darkness, out of which came Life and God, since it produced them

must be ultimately sympathetic and of like nature with them. And

that ultimately Man, being redeemed and led by Christ and saved from

death by him, would be reconciled with God the Father.* And this

great adventurer out of the hearts of man that we here call God,

they would present as the same with that teacher from Galilee who

was crucified at Jerusalem.

 

* This probably was the conception of Spinoza. Christ for him is

the wisdom of God manifested in all things, and chiefly in the mind

of man. Through him we reach the blessedness of an intuitive

knowledge of God. Salvation is an escape from the “inadequate”

ideas of the mortal human personality to the “adequate” and timeless

ideas of God.

 

Now we of the modern way would offer the following criticisms upon

this apparent compromise between our faith and the current religion.

Firstly, we do not presume to theorise about the nature of the

veiled being nor about that being’s relations to God and to Life.

We do not recognise any consistent sympathetic possibilities between

these outer beings and our God. Our God is, we feel, like

Prometheus, a rebel. He is unfilial. And the accepted figure of

Jesus, instinct with meek submission, is not in the tone of our

worship. It is not by suffering that God conquers death, but by

fighting. Incidentally our God dies a million deaths, but the thing

that matters is not the deaths but the immortality. It may be he

cannot escape in this person or that person being nailed to a cross

or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock. These may be necessary

sufferings, like hunger and thirst in a campaign; they do not in

themselves bring victory. They may be necessary, but they are not

glorious. The symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-drenched figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father, “My God,

my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” these things jar with our

spirit. We little men may well fail and repent, but it is our faith

that our God does not fail us nor himself. We cannot accept the

Christian’s crucifix, or pray to a pitiful God. We cannot accept

the Resurrection as though it were an after-thought to a bitterly

felt death. Our crucifix, if you must have a crucifix, would show

God with a hand or a foot already torn away from its nail, and with

eyes not downcast but resolute against the sky; a face without pain,

pain lost and forgotten in the surpassing glory of the struggle and

the inflexible will to live and prevail… .

 

But we do not care how long the thorns are drawn, nor how terrible

the wounds, so long as he does not droop. God is courage. God is

courage beyond any conceivable suffering.

 

But when all this has been said, it is well to add that it concerns

the figure of Christ only in so far as that professes to be the

figure of God, and the crucifix only so far as that stands for

divine action. The figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think

of it as being no more than the tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man

who proclaimed the loving-kindness of God and the supremacy of God’s

kingdom over the individual life, and who, in the extreme agony of

his pain and exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, becomes

something altogether distinct from a theological symbol.

Immediately that we cease to worship, we can begin to love and pity.

Here was a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and of great

courage, of the utmost tolerance and the subtlest sympathy, a saint

of non-resistance… .

 

We of the new faith repudiate the teaching of non-resistance. We

are the militant followers of and participators in a militant God.

We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle

being upon whose nobility the theologians trade. But submission is

the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is

the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him. A

Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and

trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the

spirit of our worship.*

 

* It is curious, after writing the above, to find in a letter

written by Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to that pertinacious

correspondent, the late Lady Victoria Welby, almost exactly the same

sentiments I have here expressed. “If I could fill the Crucifix

with life as you do,” he says, “I would gladly look on it, but the

fallen Head and the closed Eye exclude from my thought the idea of

glorified humanity. The Christ to whom we are led is One who ‘hath

been crucified,’ who hath passed the trial victoriously and borne

the fruits to heaven. I dare not then rest on this side of the

glory.”

 

I find, too, a still more remarkable expression of the modern spirit

in a tract, “The Call of the Kingdom,” by that very able and subtle,

Anglican theologian, the Rev. W. Temple, who declares that under the

vitalising stresses of the war we are winning “faith in Christ as an

heroic leader. We have thought of Him so much as meek and gentle

that there is no ground in our picture of Him, for the vision which

His disciple had of Him: ‘His head and His hair were white, as white

wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire: and His

feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a

furnace; and His voice was as the voice of many waters. And He had

in His right hand seven stars; and out of His mouth proceeded a

sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in

its strength.’”

 

These are both exceptional utterances, interesting as showing how

clearly parallel are the tendencies within and without Christianity.

 

4. THE PRIMARY DUTIES

 

Now it follows very directly from the conception of God as a finite

intelligence of boundless courage and limitless possibilities of

growth and victory, who has pitted himself against death, who stands

close to our inmost beings ready to receive us and use us, to rescue

us from the chagrins of egotism and take us into his immortal

adventure, that we who have realised him and given ourselves

joyfully to him, must needs be equally ready and willing to give our

energies to the task we share with him, to do our utmost to increase

knowledge, to increase order and clearness, to fight against

indolence, waste, disorder, cruelty, vice, and every form of his and

our enemy, death, first and chiefest in ourselves but also in all

mankind, and to bring about the establishment of his real and

visible kingdom throughout the world.

 

And that idea of God as the Invisible King of the whole world means

not merely that God is to be made and declared the head of the

world, but that the kingdom of God is to be present throughout the

whole fabric of the world, that the Kingdom of God is to be in the

teaching at the village school, in the planning of the railway

siding of the market town, in the mixing of the mortar at the

building of the workman’s house. It means that ultimately no effigy

of intrusive king or emperor is to disfigure our coins and stamps

any more; God himself and no delegate is to be represented wherever

men buy or sell, on our letters and our receipts, a perpetual

witness, a perpetual reminder. There is no act altogether without

significance, no power so humble that it may not be used for or

against God, no life but can orient itself to him. To realise God

in one’s heart is to be filled with the desire to serve him, and the

way of his service is neither to pull up one’s life by the roots nor

to continue it in all its essentials unchanged, but to turn it

about, to turn everything that there is in it round into his way.

 

The outward duty of those who serve God must vary greatly with the

abilities they possess and the positions in which they find

themselves, but for all there are certain fundamental duties; a

constant attempt to be utterly truthful with oneself, a constant

sedulousness to keep oneself fit and bright for God’s service, and

to increase one’s knowledge and powers, and a hidden persistent

watchfulness of one’s baser motives, a watch against fear and

indolence, against vanity, against greed and lust, against envy,

malice, and uncharitableness. To have found God truly does in

itself make God’s service one’s essential motive, but these evils

lurk in the shadows, in the lassitudes and unwary moments. No one

escapes them altogether, there is no need for tragic moods on

account of imperfections. We can no more serve God without blunders

and set-backs than we can win battles without losing men. But the

less of such loss the better. The servant of God must keep his mind

as wide and sound and his motives as clean as he can, just as an

operating surgeon must keep his nerves and muscles as fit and his

hands as clean as he can. Neither may righteously evade exercise

and regular washing—of mind as of hands. An incessant watchfulness

of one’s self and one’s thoughts and the soundness of one’s

thoughts; cleanliness, clearness, a wariness against indolence and

prejudice, careful truth, habitual frankness, fitness and steadfast

work; these are the daily fundamental duties that every one who

truly comes to God will, as a matter of course, set before himself.

 

5. THE INCREASING KINGDOM

 

Now of the more intimate and personal life of the believer it will

be more convenient to write a little later. Let us for the present

pursue the idea of this world-kingdom of God, to whose establishment

he calls us. This kingdom is to be a peaceful and coordinated

activity of all mankind upon certain divine ends. These, we

conceive, are first, the maintenance of the racial life; secondly,

the exploration of the external being of nature as it is and as it

has been, that is to say history and science; thirdly, that

exploration of inherent human possibility which is art; fourthly,

that clarification of thought and knowledge which is philosophy; and

finally, the progressive enlargement and development of the racial

life under these lights, so that God may work through a continually

better body of humanity and through better and better equipped

minds,