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

that he and our race may increase for ever, working

unendingly upon the development of the powers of life and the

mastery of the blind forces of matter throughout the deeps of space.

He sets out with us, we are persuaded, to conquer ourselves and our

world and the stars. And beyond the stars our eyes can as yet see

nothing, our imaginations reach and fail. Beyond the limits of our

understanding is the veiled Being of Fate, whose face is hidden from

us… .

 

It may be that minds will presently appear among us of such a

quality that the face of that Unknown will not be altogether

hidden… .

 

But the business of such ordinary lives as ours is the setting up of

this earthly kingdom of God. That is the form into which our lives

must fall and our consciences adapt themselves.

 

Belief in God as the Invisible King brings with it almost

necessarily a conception of this coming kingdom of God on earth.

Each believer as he grasps this natural and immediate consequence of

the faith that has come into his life will form at the same time a

Utopian conception of this world changed in the direction of God’s

purpose. The vision will follow the realisation of God’s true

nature and purpose as a necessary second step. And he will begin to

develop the latent citizen of this world-state in himself. He will

fall in with the idea of the world-wide sanities of this new order

being drawn over the warring outlines of the present, and of men

falling out of relationship with the old order and into relationship

with the new. Many men and women are already working to-day at

tasks that belong essentially to God’s kingdom, tasks that would be

of the same essential nature if the world were now a theocracy; for

example, they are doing or sustaining scientific research or

education or creative art; they are making roads to bring men

together, they are doctors working for the world’s health, they are

building homes, they are constructing machinery to save and increase

the powers of men… .

 

Such men and women need only to change their orientation as men will

change about at a work-table when the light that was coming in a

little while ago from the southern windows, begins presently to come

in chiefly from the west, to become open and confessed servants of

God. This work that they were doing for ambition, or the love of

men or the love of knowledge or what seemed the inherent impulse to

the work itself, or for money or honour or country or king, they

will realise they are doing for God and by the power of God. Self-transformation into a citizen of God’s kingdom and a new realisation

of all earthly politics as no more than the struggle to define and

achieve the kingdom of God in the earth, follow on, without any need

for a fresh spiritual impulse, from the moment when God and the

believer meet and clasp one another.

 

This transfiguration of the world into a theocracy may seem a merely

fantastic idea to anyone who comes to it freshly without such

general theological preparation as the preceding pages have made.

But to anyone who has been at the pains to clear his mind even a

little from the obsession of existing but transitory things, it

ceases to be a mere suggestion and becomes more and more manifestly

the real future of mankind. From the phase of “so things should

be,” the mind will pass very rapidly to the realisation that “so

things will be.” Towards this the directive wills among men have

been drifting more and more steadily and perceptibly and with fewer

eddyings and retardations, for many centuries. The purpose of

mankind will not be always thus confused and fragmentary. This

dissemination of will-power is a phase. The age of the warring

tribes and kingdoms and empires that began a hundred centuries or so

ago, draws to its close. The kingdom of God on earth is not a

metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream, not an uncertain

project; it is the thing before us, it is the close and inevitable

destiny of mankind.

 

In a few score years the faith of the true God will be spreading

about the world. The few halting confessions of God that one hears

here and there to-day, like that little twittering of birds which

comes before the dawn, will have swollen to a choral unanimity. In

but a few centuries the whole world will be openly, confessedly,

preparing for the kingdom. In but a few centuries God will have led

us out of the dark forest of these present wars and confusions into

the open brotherhood of his rule.

 

6. WHAT IS MY PLACE IN THE KINGDOM?

 

This conception of the general life of mankind as a transformation

at thousands of points of the confused, egotistical, proprietary,

partisan, nationalist, life-wasting chaos of human life to-day into

the coherent development of the world kingdom of God, provides the

form into which everyone who comes to the knowledge of God will

naturally seek to fit his every thought and activity. The material

greeds, the avarice, fear, rivalries, and ignoble ambitions of a

disordered world will be challenged and examined under one general

question: “What am I in the kingdom of God?”

 

It has already been suggested that there is a great and growing

number of occupations that belong already to God’s kingdom,

research, teaching, creative art, creative administration,

cultivation, construction, maintenance, and the honest satisfaction

of honest practical human needs. For such people conversion to the

intimacy of God means at most a change in the spirit of their work,

a refreshed energy, a clearer understanding, a new zeal, a completer

disregard of gains and praises and promotion. Pay, honours, and the

like cease to be the inducement of effort. Service, and service

alone, is the criterion that the quickened conscience will

recognise.

 

Most of such people will find themselves in positions in which

service is mingled with activities of a baser sort, in which service

is a little warped and deflected by old traditions and usage, by

mercenary and commercial considerations, by some inherent or special

degradation of purpose. The spirit of God will not let the believer

rest until his life is readjusted and as far as possible freed from

the waste of these base diversions. For example a scientific

investigator, lit and inspired by great inquiries, may be hampered

by the conditions of his professorship or research fellowship, which

exact an appearance of “practical” results. Or he may be obliged to

lecture or conduct classes. He may be able to give but half his

possible gift to the work of his real aptitude, and that at a

sacrifice of money and reputation among short-sighted but

influential contemporaries. Well, if he is by nature an

investigator he will know that the research is what God needs of

him. He cannot continue it at all if he leaves his position, and so

he must needs waste something of his gift to save the rest. But

should a poorer or a humbler post offer him better opportunity,

there lies his work for God. There one has a very common and simple

type of the problems that will arise in the lives of men when they

are lit by sudden realisation of the immediacy of God.

 

Akin to that case is the perplexity of any successful physician

between the increase of knowledge and the public welfare on the one

hand, and the lucrative possibilities of his practice among wealthy

people on the other. He belongs to a profession that is crippled by

a mediaeval code, a profession which was blind to the common

interest of the Public Health and regarded its members merely as

skilled practitioners employed to “cure” individual ailments. Very

slowly and tortuously do the methods of the profession adapt

themselves to the modern conception of an army of devoted men

working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as a whole,

broadening out from the frowsy den of the “leech,” with its

crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled

and illuminating cooperation with those who deal with the food and

housing and economic life of the community.

 

And again quite parallel with these personal problems is the trouble

of the artist between the market and vulgar fame on the one hand and

his divine impulse on the other.

 

The presence of God will be a continual light and help in every

decision that must be made by men and women in these more or less

vitiated, but still fundamentally useful and righteous, positions.

 

The trouble becomes more marked and more difficult in the case of a

man who is a manufacturer or a trader, the financier of business

enterprise or the proprietor of great estates. The world is in need

of manufactures and that goods should be distributed; land must be

administered and new economic possibilities developed. The drift of

things is in the direction of state ownership and control, but in a

great number of cases the state is not ripe for such undertakings,

it commands neither sufficient integrity nor sufficient ability, and

the proprietor of factory, store, credit or land, must continue in

possession, holding as a trustee for God and, so far as lies in his

power, preparing for his supersession by some more public

administration. Modern religion admits of no facile flights from

responsibility. It permits no headlong resort to the wilderness and

sterile virtue. It counts the recluse who fasts among scorpions in

a cave as no better than a deserter in hiding. It unhesitatingly

forbids any rich young man to sell all that he has and give to the

poor. Himself and all that he has must be alike dedicated to God.

 

The plain duty that will be understood by the proprietor of land and

of every sort of general need and service, so soon as he becomes

aware of God, is so to administer his possessions as to achieve the

maximum of possible efficiency, the most generous output, and the

least private profit. He may set aside a salary for his

maintenance; the rest he must deal with like a zealous public

official. And if he perceives that the affair could be better

administered by other hands than his own, then it is his business to

get it into those hands with the smallest delay and the least profit

to himself… .

 

The rights and wrongs of human equity are very different from right

and wrong in the sight of God. In the sight of God no landlord has

a RIGHT to his rent, no usurer has a RIGHT to his interest. A man

is not justified in drawing the profits from an advantageous

agreement nor free to spend the profits of a speculation as he will.

God takes no heed of savings nor of abstinence. He recognises no

right to the “rewards of abstinence,” no right to any rewards.

Those profits and comforts and consolations are the inducements that

dangle before the eyes of the spiritually blind. Wealth is an

embarrassment to the religious, for God calls them to account for

it. The servant of God has no business with wealth or power except

to use them immediately in the service of God. Finding these things

in his hands he is bound to administer them in the service of God.

 

The tendency of modern religion goes far beyond the alleged

communism of the early Christians, and far beyond the tithes of the

scribes and Pharisees. God takes all. He takes you, blood and

bones and house and acres, he takes skill and influence and

expectations. For all the rest of your life you are nothing but