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

and the carrying of letters, the

distribution of bread, the notification of measles, for hygiene and

economics and suchlike affairs. The better we organise such things,

the freer and better equipped we leave men’s minds for nobler

purposes, for those adventures and experiments towards God’s purpose

which are the reality of life. But all organisations must be

watched, for whatever is organised can be “captured” and misused.

Repentance, moreover, is the beginning and essential of the

religious life, and organisations (acting through their secretaries

and officials) never repent. God deals only with the individual for

the individual’s surrender. He takes no cognisance of committees.

 

Those who are most alive to the realities of living religion are

most mistrustful of this congregating tendency. To gather together

is to purchase a benefit at the price of a greater loss, to

strengthen one’s sense of brotherhood by excluding the majority of

mankind. Before you know where you are you will have exchanged the

spirit of God for ESPRIT DE CORPS. You will have reinvented the

SYMBOL; you will have begun to keep anniversaries and establish

sacramental ceremonies. The disposition to form cliques and exclude

and conspire against unlike people is all too strong in humanity, to

permit of its formal encouragement. Even such organisation as is

implied by a creed is to be avoided, for all living faith coagulates

as you phrase it. In this book I have not given so much as a

definite name to the faith of the true God. Organisation for

worship and collective exaltation also, it may be urged, is of

little manifest good. You cannot appoint beforehand a time and

place for God to irradiate your soul.

 

All these are very valid objections to the church-forming

disposition.

 

4. ORGANISATIONS UNDER GOD

 

Yet still this leaves many dissatisfied. They want to shout out

about God. They want to share this great thing with all mankind.

 

Why should they not shout and share?

 

Let them express all that they desire to express in their own

fashion by themselves or grouped with their friends as they will.

Let them shout chorally if they are so disposed. Let them work in a

gang if so they can work the better. But let them guard themselves

against the idea that they can have God particularly or exclusively

with them in any such undertaking. Or that so they can express God

rather than themselves.

 

That I think states the attitude of the modern spirit towards the

idea of a church. Mankind passes for ever out of the idolatry of

altars, away from the obscene rites of circumcision and symbolical

cannibalism, beyond the sway of the ceremonial priest. But if the

modern spirit holds that religion cannot be organised or any

intermediary thrust between God and man, that does not preclude

infinite possibilities of organisation and collective action UNDER

God and within the compass of religion. There is no reason why

religious men should not band themselves the better to attain

specific ends. To borrow a term from British politics, there is no

objection to AD HOC organisations. The objection lies not against

subsidiary organisations for service but against organisations that

may claim to be comprehensive.

 

For example there is no reason why one should not—and in many cases

there are good reasons why one should—organise or join associations

for the criticism of religious ideas, an employment that may pass

very readily into propaganda.

 

Many people feel the need of prayer to resist the evil in themselves

and to keep them in mind of divine emotion. And many want not

merely prayer but formal prayer and the support of others, praying

in unison. The writer does not understand this desire or need for

collective prayer very well, but there are people who appear to do

so and there is no reason why they should not assemble for that

purpose. And there is no doubt that divine poetry, divine maxims,

religious thought finely expressed, may be heard, rehearsed,

collected, published, and distributed by associations. The desire

for expression implies a sort of assembly, a hearer at least as well

as a speaker. And expression has many forms. People with a strong

artistic impulse will necessarily want to express themselves by art

when religion touches them, and many arts, architecture and the

drama for example, are collective undertakings. I do not see why

there should not be, under God, associations for building cathedrals

and suchlike great still places urgent with beauty, into which men

and women may go to rest from the clamour of the day’s confusions; I

do not see why men should not make great shrines and pictures

expressing their sense of divine things, and why they should not

combine in such enterprises rather than work to fill heterogeneous

and chaotic art galleries. A wave of religious revival and

religious clarification, such as I foresee, will most certainly

bring with it a great revival of art, religious art, music, songs,

and writings of all sorts, drama, the making of shrines, praying

places, tempies and retreats, the creation of pictures and

sculptures. It is not necessary to have priestcraft and an

organised church for such ends. Such enrichments of feeling and

thought are part of the service of God.

 

And again, under God, there may be associations and fraternities for

research in pure science; associations for the teaching and

simplification of languages; associations for promoting and watching

education; associations for the discussion of political problems and

the determination of right policies. In all these ways men may

multiply their use by union. Only when associations seek to control

things of belief, to dictate formulae, restrict religious activities

or the freedom of religious thought and teaching, when they tend to

subdivide those who believe and to set up jealousies or exclusions,

do they become antagonistic to the spirit of modern religion.

 

5. THE STATE IS GOD’S INSTRUMENT

 

Because religion cannot be organised, because God is everywhere and

immediately accessible to every human being, it does not follow that

religion cannot organise every other human affair. It is indeed

essential to the idea that God is the Invisible King of this round

world and all mankind, that we should see in every government, great

and small, from the council of the world-state that is presently

coming, down to the village assembly, the instrument of God’s

practical control. Religion which is free, speaking freely through

whom it will, subject to a perpetual unlimited criticism, will be

the life and driving power of the whole organised world. So that if

you prefer not to say that there will be no church, if you choose

rather to declare that the world-state is God’s church, you may have

it so if you will. Provided that you leave conscience and speech

and writing and teaching about divine things absolutely free, and

that you try to set no nets about God.

 

The world is God’s and he takes it. But he himself remains freedom,

and we find our freedom in him.

 

THE ENVOY

 

So I end this compact statement of the renascent religion which I

believe to be crystallising out of the intellectual, social, and

spiritual confusions of this time. It is an account rendered. It

is a statement and record; not a theory. There is nothing in all

this that has been invented or constructed by the writer; I have

been but scribe to the spirit of my generation; I have at most

assembled and put together things and thoughts that I have come

upon, have transferred the statements of “science” into religious

terminology, rejected obsolescent definitions, and re-coordinated

propositions that had drifted into opposition. Thus, I see, ideas

are developing, and thus have I written them down. It is a

secondary matter that I am convinced that this trend of intelligent

opinion is a discovery of truth. The reader is told of my own

belief merely to avoid an affectation of impartiality and aloofness.

 

The theogony here set forth is ancient; one can trace it appearing

and disappearing and recurring in the mutilated records of many

different schools of speculation; the conception of God as finite is

one that has been discussed very illuminatingly in recent years in

the work of one I am happy to write of as my friend and master, that

very great American, the late William James. It was an idea that

became increasingly important to him towards the end of his life.

And it is the most releasing idea in the system.

 

Only in the most general terms can I trace the other origins of

these present views. I do not think modern religion owes much to

what is called Deism or Theism. The rather abstract and futile

Deism of the eighteenth century, of “votre Etre supreme” who bored

the friends of Robespierre, was a sterile thing, it has little

relation to these modern developments, it conceived of God as an

infinite Being of no particular character whereas God is a finite

being of a very especial character. On the other hand men and women

who have set themselves, with unavoidable theological

preconceptions, it is true, to speculate upon the actual teachings

and quality of Christ, have produced interpretations that have

interwoven insensibly with thoughts more apparently new. There is a

curious modernity about very many of Christ’s recorded sayings.

Revived religion has also, no doubt, been the receiver of many

religious bankruptcies, of Positivism for example, which failed

through its bleak abstraction and an unspiritual texture. Religion,

thus restated, must, I think, presently incorporate great sections

of thought that are still attached to formal Christianity. The time

is at hand when many of the organised Christian churches will be

forced to define their positions, either in terms that will identify

them with this renascence, or that will lead to the release of their

more liberal adherents. Its probable obligations to Eastern thought

are less readily estimated by a European writer.

 

Modern religion has no revelation and no founder; it is the

privilege and possession of no coterie of disciples or exponents; it

is appearing simultaneously round and about the world exactly as a

crystallising substance appears here and there in a super-saturated

solution. It is a process of truth, guided by the divinity in men.

It needs no other guidance, and no protection. It needs nothing but

freedom, free speech, and honest statement. Out of the most mixed

and impure solutions a growing crystal is infallibly able to select

its substance. The diamond arises bright, definite, and pure out of

a dark matrix of structureless confusion.

 

This metaphor of crystallisation is perhaps the best symbol of the

advent and growth of the new understanding. It has no church, no

authorities, no teachers, no orthodoxy. It does not even thrust and

struggle among the other things; simply it grows clear. There will

be no putting an end to it. It arrives inevitably, and it will

continue to separate itself out from confusing ideas. It becomes,

as it were the Koh-i-noor; it is a Mountain of Light, growing and

increasing. It is an all-pervading lucidity, a brightness and

clearness. It has no head to smite, no body you can destroy; it

overleaps all barriers; it breaks out in despite of every enclosure.

It will compel all things to orient themselves to it.

 

It comes as the dawn comes, through whatever clouds and mists may be

here or whatever smoke and curtains may be there. It comes as the

day comes to the ships that put to sea.

 

It is the Kingdom of God at hand.

 

End of Project Gutenberg’s Etext of God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells