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

>God’s agent. If you are not prepared for so complete a surrender,

then you are infinitely remote from God. You must go your way.

Here you are merely a curious interloper. Perhaps you have been

desiring God as an experience, or covetmg him as a possession. You

have not begun to understand. This that we are discussing in this

book is as yet nothing for you.

 

7. ADJUSTING LIFE

 

This picturing of a human world more to the mind of God than this

present world and the discovery and realisation of one’s own place

and work in and for that kingdom of God, is the natural next phase

in the development of the believer. He will set about revising and

adjusting his scheme of life, his ways of living, his habits and his

relationships in the light of his new convictions.

 

Most men and women who come to God will have already a certain

righteousness in their lives; these things happen like a thunderclap

only in strange exceptional cases, and the same movements of the

mind that have brought them to God will already have brought their

lives into a certain rightness of direction and conduct. Yet

occasionally there will be someone to whom the self-examination that

follows conversion will reveal an entirely wrong and evil way of

living. It may be that the light has come to some rich idler doing

nothing but follow a pleasurable routine. Or to someone following

some highly profitable and amusing, but socially useless or socially

mischievous occupation. One may be an advocate at the disposal of

any man’s purpose, or an actor or actress ready to fall in with any

theatrical enterprise. Or a woman may find herself a prostitute or

a pet wife, a mere kept instrument of indulgence. These are lives

of prey, these are lives of futility; the light of God will not

tolerate such lives. Here religion can bring nothing but a

severance from the old way of life altogether, a break and a

struggle towards use and service and dignity.

 

But even here it does not follow that because a life has been wrong

the new life that begins must be far as the poles asunder from the

old. Every sort of experience that has ever come to a human being

is in the self that he brings to God, and there is no reason why a

knowledge of evil ways should not determine the path of duty. No

one can better devise protections against vices than those who have

practised them; none know temptations better than those who have

fallen. If a man has followed an evil trade, it becomes him to use

his knowledge of the tricks of that trade to help end it. He knows

the charities it may claim and the remedies it needs… .

 

A very interesting case to discuss in relation to this question of

adjustment is that of the barrister. A practising barrister under

contemporary conditions does indeed give most typically the

opportunity for examining the relation of an ordinary self-respecting wordly life, to life under the dispensation of God

discovered. A barrister is usually a man of some energy and

ambition, his honour is moulded by the traditions of an ancient and

antiquated profession, instinctively self-preserving and yet with a

real desire for consistency and respect. As a profession it has

been greedy and defensively conservative, but it has never been

shameless nor has it ever broken faith with its own large and

selfish, but quite definite, propositions. It has never for

instance had the shamelessness of such a traditionless and

undisciplined class as the early factory organisers. It has never

had the dull incoherent wickedness of the sort of men who exploit

drunkenness and the turf. It offends within limits. Barristers can

be, and are, disbarred. But it is now a profession extraordinarily

out of date; its code of honour derives from a time of cruder and

lower conceptions of human relationship. It apprehends the State as

a mere “ring” kept about private disputations; it has not begun to

move towards the modern conception of the collective enterprise as

the determining criterion of human conduct. It sees its business as

a mere play upon the rules of a game between man and man, or between

men and men. They haggle, they dispute, they inflict and suffer

wrongs, they evade dues, and are liable or entitled to penalties and

compensations. The primary business of the law is held to be

decision in these wrangles, and as wrangling is subject to artistic

elaboration, the business of the barrister is the business of a

professional wrangler; he is a bravo in wig and gown who fights the

duels of ordinary men because they are incapable, very largely on

account of the complexities of legal procedure, of fighting for

themselves. His business is never to explore any fundamental right

in the matter. His business is to say all that can be said for his

client, and to conceal or minimise whatever can be said against his

client. The successful promoted advocate, who in Britain and the

United States of America is the judge, and whose habits and

interests all incline him to disregard the realities of the case in

favour of the points in the forensic game, then adjudicates upon the

contest… .

 

Now this condition of things is clearly incompatible with the modern

conception of the world as becoming a divine kingdom. When the

world is openly and confessedly the kingdom of God, the law court

will exist only to adjust the differing views of men as to the

manner of their service to God; the only right of action one man

will have against another will be that he has been prevented or

hampered or distressed by the other in serving God. The idea of the

law court will have changed entirely from a place of dispute,

exaction and vengeance, to a place of adjustment. The individual or

some state organisation will plead ON BEHALF OF THE COMMON GOOD

either against some state official or state regulation, or against

the actions or inaction of another individual. This is the only

sort of legal proceedings compatible with the broad beliefs of the

new faith… . Every religion that becomes ascendant, in so far

as it is not otherworldly, must necessarily set its stamp upon the

methods and administration of the law. That this was not the case

with Christianity is one of the many contributory aspects that lead

one to the conviction that it was not Christianity that took

possession of the Roman empire, but an imperial adventurer who took

possession of an all too complaisant Christianity.

 

Reverting now from these generalisations to the problem of the

religious from which they arose, it will have become evident that

the essential work of anyone who is conversant with the existing

practice and literature of the law and whose natural abilities are

forensic, will lie in the direction of reconstructing the theory and

practice of the law in harmony with modern conceptions, of making

that theory and practice clear and plain to ordinary men, of

reforming the abuses of the profession by working for the separation

of bar and judiciary, for the amalgamation of the solicitors and the

barristers, and the like needed reforms. These are matters that

will probably only be properly set right by a quickening of

conscience among lawyers themselves. Of no class of men is the help

and service so necessary to the practical establishment of God’s

kingdom, as of men learned and experienced in the law. And there is

no reason why for the present an advocate should not continue to

plead in the courts, provided he does his utmost only to handle

cases in which he believes he can serve the right. Few righteous

cases are ill-served by a frank disposition on the part of lawyer

and client to put everything before the court. Thereby of course

there arises a difficult case of conscience. What if a lawyer,

believing his client to be in the right, discovers him to be in the

wrong? He cannot throw up the case unless he has been scandalously

deceived, because so he would betray the confidence his client has

put in him to “see him through.” He has a right to “give himself

away,” but not to “give away” his client in this fashion. If he has

a chance of a private consultation I think he ought to do his best

to make his client admit the truth of the case and give in, but

failing this he has no right to be virtuous on behalf of another.

No man may play God to another; he may remonstrate, but that is the

limit of his right. He must respect a confidence, even if it is

purely implicit and involuntary. I admit that here the barrister is

in a cleft stick, and that he must see the business through

according to the confidence his client has put in him—and

afterwards be as sorry as he may be if an injustice ensues. And

also I would suggest a lawyer may with a fairly good conscience

defend a guilty man as if he were innocent, to save him from

unjustly heavy penalties… .

 

This comparatively full discussion of the barrister’s problem has

been embarked upon because it does bring in, in a very typical

fashion, just those uncertainties and imperfections that abound in

real life. Religious conviction gives us a general direction, but

it stands aside from many of these entangled struggles in the jungle

of conscience. Practice is often easier than a rule. In practice a

lawyer will know far more accurately than a hypothetical case can

indicate, how far he is bound to see his client through, and how far

he may play the keeper of his client’s conscience. And nearly every

day there happens instances where the most subtle casuistry will

fail and the finger of conscience point unhesitatingly. One may

have worried long in the preparation and preliminaries of the issue,

one may bring the case at last into the final court of conscience in

an apparently hopeless tangle. Then suddenly comes decision.

 

The procedure of that silent, lit, and empty court in which a man

states his case to God, is very simple and perfect. The excuses and

the special pleading shrivel and vanish. In a little while the case

lies bare and plain.

 

8. THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE

 

The question of oaths of allegiance, acts of acquiescence in

existing governments, and the like, is one that arises at once with

the acceptance of God as the supreme and real King of the Earth. At

the worst Caesar is a usurper, a satrap claiming to be sovereign; at

the best he is provisional. Modern casuistry makes no great trouble

for the believing public official. The chief business of any

believer is to do the work for which he is best fitted, and since

all state affairs are to become the affairs of God’s kingdom it is

of primary importance that they should come into the hands of God’s

servants. It is scarcely less necessary to a believing man with

administrative gifts that he should be in the public administration,

than that he should breathe and eat. And whatever oath or the like

to usurper church or usurper king has been set up to bar access to

service, is an oath imposed under duress. If it cannot be avoided

it must be taken rather than that a man should become unserviceable.

All such oaths are unfair and foolish things. They exclude no

scoundrels; they are appeals to superstition. Whenever an

opportunity occurs for the abolition of an oath, the servant of God

will seize it, but where the oath is unavoidable he will take it.

 

The service of God is not to achieve a delicate consistency of

statement; it