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

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their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their decisions. There

was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian world than

there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience of

educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal,

either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population

of Constantinople. To these conditions we owe the claim that the

Christian God is a magic god, very great medicine in battle, “in hoc

signo vinces,” and the argument so natural to the minds of those

days and so absurd to ours, that since he had ALL power, all

knowledge, and existed for ever and ever, it was no use whatever to

set up any other god against him… .

 

By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as its fundamental

belief, without which everyone was to be “damned everlastingly,” a

conception of God and of Christ’s relation to God, of which even by

the Christian account of his teaching, Jesus was either totally

unaware or so negligent and careless of the future comfort of his

disciples as scarcely to make mention. The doctrine of the Trinity,

so far as the relationship of the Third Person goes, hangs almost

entirely upon one ambiguous and disputed utterance in St. John’s

gospel (XV. 26). Most of the teachings of Christian orthodoxy

resolve themselves to the attentive student into assertions of the

nature of contradiction and repartee. Someone floats an opinion in

some matter that has been hitherto vague, in regard, for example, to

the sonship of Christ or to the method of his birth. The new

opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds unaccustomed to so

definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil they fly to a

contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit that they

worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the

divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be

polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction

from the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced

into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary

assertions, and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to

save it from a reductio ad absurdam. The entire history of the

growth of the Christian doctrine in those disordered early centuries

is a history of theology by committee; a history of furious

wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still more hasty attempts to

clinch matters by anathema. When the muddle was at its very worst,

the church was confronted by enormous political opportunities. In

order that it should seize these one chief thing appeared

imperative: doctrinal uniformity. The emperor himself, albeit

unbaptised and very ignorant of Greek, came and seated himself in

the midst of Christian thought upon a golden throne. At the end of

it all Eusebius, that supreme Trimmer, was prepared to damn

everlastingly all those who doubted that consubstantiality he

himself had doubted at the beginning of the conference. It is quite

clear that Constantine did not care who was damned or for what

period, so long as the Christians ceased to wrangle among

themselves. The practical unanimity of Nicaea was secured by

threats, and then, turning upon the victors, he sought by threats to

restore Arius to communion. The imperial aim was a common faith to

unite the empire. The crushing out of the Arians and of the

Paulicians and suchlike heretics, and more particularly the

systematic destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings,

had about it none of that quality of honest conviction which comes

to those who have a real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of

dissensions that, left to work themselves out, would have spoilt

good business; it was the fist of Nicolas of Myra over again, except

that after the days of Ambrose the sword of the executioner and the

fires of the book-burner were added to the weapon of the human

voice. Priscillian was the first human sacrifice formally offered

up under these improved conditions to the greater glory of the

reinforced Trinity. Thereafter the blood of the heretics was the

cement of Christian unity.

 

It is with these things in mind that those who profess the new faith

are becoming so markedly anxious to distinguish God from the

Trinitarian’s deity. At present if anyone who has left the

Christian communion declares himself a believer in God, priest and

parson swell with self-complacency. There is no reason why they

should do so. That many of us have gone from them and found God is

no concern of theirs. It is not that we who went out into the

wilderness which we thought to be a desert, away from their creeds

and dogmas, have turned back and are returning. It is that we have

gone on still further, and are beyond that desolation. Never more

shall we return to those who gather under the cross. By faith we

disbelieved and denied. By faith we said of that stuffed scarecrow

of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antique theological

notions, the Nicene deity, “This is certainly no God.” And by faith

we have found God… .

 

3. THE INFINITE BEING IS NOT GOD

 

There has always been a demand upon the theological teacher that he

should supply a cosmogony. It has always been an effective

propagandist thing to say: “OUR God made the whole universe. Don’t

you think that it would be wise to abandon YOUR deity, who did not,

as you admit, do anything of the sort?”

 

The attentive reader of the lives of the Saints will find that this

style of argument did in the past bring many tribes and nations into

the Christian fold. It was second only to the claim of magic

advantages, demonstrated by a free use of miracles. Only one great

religious system, the Buddhist, seems to have resisted the

temptation to secure for its divinity the honour and title of

Creator. Modern religion is like Buddhism in that respect. It

offers no theory whatever about the origin of the universe. It does

not reach behind the appearances of space and time. It sees only a

featureless presumption in that playing with superlatives which has

entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the

delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or the

Unconditioned, can assert anything at all. At the back of all known

things there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence

is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or

good or ill. Of that Being, whether it is simple or complex or

divine, we know nothing; to us it is no more than the limit of

understanding, the unknown beyond. It may be of practically

limitless intricacy and possibility. The new religion does not

pretend that the God of its life is that Being, or that he has any

relation of control or association with that Being. It does not

even assert that God knows all or much more than we do about that

ultimate Being.

 

For us life is a matter of our personalities in space and time.

Human analysis probing with philosophy and science towards the

Veiled Being reveals nothing of God, reveals space and time only as

necessary forms of consciousness, glimpses a dance of atoms, of

whirls in the ether. Some day in the endless future there may be a

knowledge, an understanding of relationship, a power and courage

that will pierce into those black wrappings. To that it may be our

God, the Captain of Mankind will take us.

 

That now is a mere speculation. The veil of the unknown is set with

the stars; its outer texture is ether and atom and crystal. The

Veiled Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods over the

mirror upon which the busy shapes of life are moving. It is as if

it waited in a great stillness. Our lives do not deal with it, and

cannot deal with it. It may be that they may never be able to deal

with it.

 

4. THE LIFE FORCE IS NOT GOD

 

So it is that comprehensive setting of the universe presents itself

to the modern mind. It is altogether outside good and evil and love

and hate. It is outside God, who is love and goodness. And coming

out of this veiled being, proceeding out of it in a manner

altogether inconceivable, is another lesser being, an impulse

thrusting through matter and clothing itself in continually changing

material forms, the maker of our world, Life, the Will to Be. It

comes out of that inscrutable being as a wave comes rolling to us

from beyond the horizon. It is as it were a great wave rushing

through matter and possessed by a spirit. It is a breeding,

fighting thing; it pants through the jungle track as the tiger and

lifts itself towards heaven as the tree; it is the rabbit bolting

for its life and the dove calling to her mate; it crawls, it flies,

it dives, it lusts and devours, it pursues and eats itself in order

to live still more eagerly and hastily; it is every living thing, of

it are our passions and desires and fears. And it is aware of

itself not as a whole, but dispersedly as individual self-consciousness, starting out dispersedly from every one of the

sentient creatures it has called into being. They look out for

their little moments, red-eyed and fierce, full of greed, full of

the passions of acquisition and assimilation and reproduction,

submitting only to brief fellowships of defence or aggression. They

are beings of strain and conflict and competition. They are living

substance still mingled painfully with the dust. The forms in which

this being clothes itself bear thorns and fangs and claws, are

soaked with poison and bright with threats or allurements, prey

slyly or openly on one another, hold their own for a little while,

breed savagely and resentfully, and pass… .

 

This second Being men have called the Life Force, the Will to Live,

the Struggle for Existence. They have figured it too as Mother

Nature. We may speculate whether it is not what the wiser among the

Gnostics meant by the Demiurge, but since the Christians destroyed

all the Gnostic books that must remain a mere curious guess. We may

speculate whether this heat and haste and wrath of life about us is

the Dark God of the Manichees, the evil spirit of the sun

worshippers. But in contemporary thought there is no conviction

apparent that this Demiurge is either good or evil; it is conceived

of as both good and evil. If it gives all the pain and conflict of

life, it gives also the joy of the sunshine, the delight and hope of

youth, the pleasures. If it has elaborated a hundred thousand sorts

of parasite, it has also moulded the beautiful limbs of man and

woman; it has shaped the slug and the flower. And in it, as part of

it, taking its rewards, responding to its goads, struggling against

the final abandonment to death, do we all live, as the beasts live,

glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted,

forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood after mood

but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence within

us, until we find God. And God comes to us neither out of the stars

nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice within.

 

5. GOD IS WITHIN

 

God comes we know not whence, into the conflict of life. He works

in men and through men. He is a spirit, a single spirit and a

single person; he has begun and he will never end. He is the

immortal part and leader of mankind. He has motives, he has

characteristics, he has an aim.