

God The Invisible King



by H. G. Wells  [Herbert George Wells]




GOD THE INVISIBLE KING



by H. G. Wells







CONTENTS





PREFACE



1.  THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION



2.  HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT



3.  THE LIKENESS OF GOD



4.  THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS



5.  THE INVISIBLE KING



6.  MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION



7.  THE IDEA OF A CHURCH



THE ENVOY









PREFACE





This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious 

belief of the writer.  That belief is not orthodox Christianity; it 

is not, indeed, Christianity at all; its core nevertheless is a 

profound belief in a personal and intimate God.  There is nothing in 

its statements that need shock or offend anyone who is prepared for 

the expression of a faith different from and perhaps in several 

particulars opposed to his own.  The writer will be found to be 

sympathetic with all sincere religious feeling.  Nevertheless it is 

well to prepare the prospective reader for statements that may jar 

harshly against deeply rooted mental habits.  It is well to warn him 

at the outset that the departure from accepted beliefs is here no 

vague scepticism, but a quite sharply defined objection to dogmas 

very widely revered.  Let the writer state the most probable 

occasion of trouble forthwith.  An issue upon which this book will 

be found particularly uncompromising is the dogma of the Trinity.  

The writer is of opinion that the Council of Nicaea, which forcibly 

crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the 

creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was 

one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all 

religious gatherings, and he holds that the Alexandrine speculations 

which were then conclusively imposed upon Christianity merit only 

disrespectful attention at the present time.  There you have a chief 

possibility of offence.  He is quite unable to pretend any awe for 

what he considers the spiritual monstrosities established by that 

undignified gathering.  He makes no attempt to be obscure or 

propitiatory in this connection.  He criticises the creeds 

explicitly and frankly, because he believes it is particularly 

necessary to clear them out of the way of those who are seeking 

religious consolation at this present time of exceptional religious 

need.  He does little to conceal his indignation at the role played 

by these dogmas in obscuring, perverting, and preventing the 

religious life of mankind.  After this warning such readers from 

among the various Christian churches and sects as are accessible to 

storms of theological fear or passion to whom the Trinity is an 

ineffable mystery and the name of God almost unspeakably awful, read 

on at their own risk.  This is a religious book written by a 

believer, but so far as their beliefs and religion go it may seem to 

them more sceptical and more antagonistic than blank atheism.  That 

the writer cannot tell.  He is not simply denying their God.  He is 

declaring that there is a living God, different altogether from that 

Triune God and nearer to the heart of man.  The spirit of this book 

is like that of a missionary who would only too gladly overthrow and 

smash some Polynesian divinity of shark's teeth and painted wood and 

mother-of-pearl.  To the writer such elaborations as "begotten of 

the Father before all worlds" are no better than intellectual 

shark's teeth and oyster shells.  His purpose, like the purpose of 

that missionary, is not primarily to shock and insult; but he is 

zealous to liberate, and he is impatient with a reverence that 

stands between man and God.  He gives this fair warning and proceeds 

with his matter.



His matter is modern religion as he sees it.  It is only 

incidentally and because it is unavoidable that he attacks doctrinal 

Christianity.



In a previous book, "First and Last Things" (Constable and Co.), he 

has stated his convictions upon certain general ideas of life and 

thought as clearly as he could.  All of philosophy, all of 

metaphysics that is, seems to him to be a discussion of the 

relations of class and individual.  The antagonism of the Nominalist 

and the Realist, the opposition of the One and the Many, the 

contrast of the Ideal and the Actual, all these oppositions express 

a certain structural and essential duality in the activity of the 

human mind.  From an imperfect recognition of that duality ensue 

great masses of misconception.  That was the substance of "First and 

Last Things."  In this present book there is no further attack on 

philosophical or metaphysical questions.  Here we work at a less 

fundamental level and deal with religious feeling and religious 

ideas.  But just as the writer was inclined to attribute a whole 

world of disputation and inexactitudes to confused thinking about 

the exact value of classes and terms, so here he is disposed to 

think that interminable controversies and conflicts arise out of a 

confusion of intention due to a double meaning of the word "God"; 

that the word "God" conveys not one idea or set of ideas, but 

several essentially different ideas, incompatible one with another, 

and falling mainly into one or other of two divergent groups; and 

that people slip carelessly from one to the other of these groups of 

ideas and so get into ultimately inextricable confusions.



The writer believes that the centuries of fluid religious thought 

that preceded the violent ultimate crystallisation of Nicaea, was 

essentially a struggle--obscured, of course, by many complexities--

to reconcile and get into a relationship these two separate main 

series of God-ideas.



Putting the leading id a part against evil.



The writer believes that these dogmas of relationship are not merely 

extraneous to religion, but an impediment to religion.  His aim in 

this book is to give a statement of religion which is no longer 

entangled in such speculations and disputes.





Let him add only one other note of explanation in this preface, and 

that is to remark that except for one incidental passage (in Chapter 

IV., 1), nowhere does he discuss the question of personal 

immortality.  [It is discussed in "First and Last Things," Book IV, 

4.]  He omits this question because he does not consider that it has 

any more bearing upon the essentials of religion, than have the 

theories we may hold about the relation of God and the moral law to 

the starry universe.  The latter is a question for the theologian, 

the former for the psychologist.  Whether we are mortal or immortaea of this book very roughly, these two 

antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by 

speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the 

other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer.  One is the great Outward 

God; the other is the Inmost God.  The first idea was perhaps 

developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza.  It is a 

conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a 

comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a 

conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness.  The second 

idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God 

of the human heart.  The writer would suggest that the great outline 

of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world 

unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful 

attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus.  It 

was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of 

the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love 

and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers and the 

dignity of inexorable justice.  There could be no finer metaphor for 

such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship.  But the trouble is 

that it seems impossible to most people to continue to regard the 

relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical 

metaphor.  Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment 

of intellectual carelessness back to the idea of sexual filiation.



And it may further be suggested that the extreme aloofness and 

inhumanity, which is logically necessary in the idea of a Creator 

God, of an Infinite God, was the reason, so to speak, for the 

invention of a Holy Spirit, as something proceeding from him, as 

something bridging the great gulf, a Comforter, a mediator 

descending into the sphere of the human understanding.  That, and 

the suggestive influence of the Egyptian Trinity that was then being 

worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had saturated the thought of 

Alexandria with the conception of a trinity in unity, are probably 

the realities that account for the Third Person of the Christian 

Trinity.  At any rate the present writer believes that the 

discussions that shaped the Christian theology we know were 

dominated by such natural and fundamental thoughts.  These 

discussions were, of course, complicated from the outset; and 

particularly were they complicated by the identification of the man 

Jesus with the theological Christ, by materialistic expectations of 

his second coming, by materialistic inventions about his 

"miraculous" begetting, and by the morbid speculations about 

virginity and the like that arose out of such grossness.  They were 

still further complicated by the idea of the textual inspiration of 

the scriptures, which presently swamped thought in textual 

interpretation.  That swamping came very early in the development of 

Christianity.  The writer of St. John's gospel appears still to be 

thinking with a considerable freedom, but Origen is already 

hopelessly in the net of the texts.  The writer of St. John's gospel 

was a free man, but Origen was a superstitious man.  He was 

emasculated mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry.  He 

quotes; his predecessor thinks.



But the writer throws out these guesses at the probable intentions 

of early Christian thought in passing.  His business here is the 

definition of a position.  The writer's position here in this book 

is, firstly, complete Agnosticism in the matter of God the Creator, 

and secondly, entire faith in the matter of God the Redeemer.  That, 

so to speak, is the key of his book.  He cannot bring the two ideas 

under the same term God.  He uses the word God therefore for the God 

in our hearts only, and he uses the term the Veiled Being for the 

ultimate mysteries of the universe, and he declares that we do not 

know and perhaps cannot know in any comprehensible terms the 

relation of the Veiled Being to that living reality in our lives who 

is, in his terminology, the true God.  Speaking from the point of 

view of practical religion, he is restricting and defining the word 

God, as meaning only the personal God of mankind, he is restricting 

it so as to exclude all cosmogony and ideas of providence from our 

religious thought and leave nothing but the essentials of the 

religious life.



Many people, whom one would class as rather liberal Christians of an 

Arian or Arminian complexion, may find the larger part of this book 

acceptable to them if they will read "the Christ God" where the 

writer has written "God."  They will then differ from him upon 

little more than the question whether there is an essential identity 

in aim and quality between the Christ God and the Veiled Being, who 

answer to their Creator God.  This the orthodox post Nicaean 

Christians assert, and many pre-Nicaeans and many heretics (as the 

Cathars) contradicted with its exact contrary.  The Cathars, 

Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held, with the Manichaeans, that 

the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil.  The Christ God was his 

antagonist.  This was the idea of the poet Shelley.  And passing 

beyond Christian theology altogether a clue can still be found to 

many problems in comparative theology in this distinction between 

the Being of Nature (cf.  Kant's "starry vault above") and the God 

of the heart (Kant's "moral law within").  The idea of an antagonism 

seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the 

Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism.  So, too, Buddhism seems to 

be "antagonistic."  On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and 

modern Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God 

the creator is altogether and without distinction also God the King 

of Mankind.  Christianity stands somewhere between such complete 

identification and complete antagonism.  It admits a difference in 

attitude between Father and Son in its distinction between the Old 

Dispensation (of the Old Testament) and the New.  Every possible 

change is rung in the great religions of the world between 

identification, complete separation, equality, and disproportion of 

these Beings; but it will be found that these two ideas are, so to 

speak, the basal elements of all theology in the world.  The writer 

is chary of assertion or denial in these matters.  He believes that 

they are speculations not at all necessary to salvation.  He 

believes that men may differ profoundly in their opinions upon these 

points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials of 

religion.  The reality of religion he believes deals wholly and 

exclusively with the God of the Heart.  He declares as his own 

opinion, and as the opinion which seems most expressive of modern 

thought, that there is no reason to suppose the Veiled Being either 

benevolent or malignant towards men.  But if the reader believes 

that God is Almighty and in every way Infinite the practical outcome 

is not very different.  For the purposes of human relationship it is 

impossible to deny that God PRESENTS HIMSELF AS FINITE, as 

struggling and takingl, 

whether the God in our hearts is the Son of or a rebel against the 

Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of salvation, is still 

our self-identification with God, irrespective of consequences, and 

the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and in the world.  

Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect 

righteousness.  Many people seem to find the prospect of a final 

personal death unendurable.  This impresses me as egotism.  I have 

no such appetite for a separate immortality.  God is my immortality; 

what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not is of no 

more permanent value than the snows of yester-year.



H. G. W.



Dunmow,

May, 1917.









GOD THE INVISIBLE KING





CHAPTER THE FIRST



THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION





1. MODERN RELIGION HAS NO FOUNDER





Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be 

an exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world.  A little 

while ago and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found 

in existence, and already in a state of diffusion.  People have 

begun to hear of the new belief first here and then there.  It is 

interesting, for example, to trace how Christianity drifted into the 

consciousness of the Roman world.  But when a religion has been 

interrogated it has always had hitherto a tale of beginnings, the 

name and story of a founder.  The renascent religion that is now 

taking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points to no origins.  It 

is the Truth, its believers declare; it has always been here; it has 

always been visible to those who had eyes to see.  It is perhaps 

plainer than it was and to more people--that is all.



It is as if it still did not realise its own difference.  Many of 

those who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of 

Christianity.  Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley's, speak of it 

as Christianity without Theology.  They do not know the creed they 

are carrying.  It has, as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle 

theology, flatly opposed to any belief that could, except by great 

stretching of charity and the imagination, be called Christianity.  

One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the system ascribed to 

some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather 

than a sympathetic coincidence.  Of that the reader shall presently 

have an opportunity of judging.



This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only 

the opening phase of the new faith.  Christianity also began with an 

extreme neglect of definition.  It was not at first anything more 

than a sect of Judaism.  It was only after three centuries, amidst 

the uproar and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more 

enthusiastic Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in 

affected horror at the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal 

mystery of the Trinity was established as the essential fact of 

Christianity.  Throughout those three centuries, the centuries of 

its greatest achievements and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had 

not defined its God.  And even to-day it has to be noted that a 

large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds 

have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood, 

that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the 

statements to which they subscribe.  They will speak and think of 

both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of 

the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all 

the churches rests.  They will show themselves as frankly Arians as 

though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the world 

forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood.  But 

whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be, 

there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to 

give Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement 

possible.  Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its 

maturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the 

confusions of its decay.  The renascent religion that one finds now, 

a thing active and sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come 

to self-consciousness.  But it is so coming, and this present book 

is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to 

compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the 

various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic 

cults amidst which it has appeared.



The writer's sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that 

he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist 

nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian.  He will make no 

pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment.  He will do his 

best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the 

reader must reckon with this bias.  He has found this faith growing 

up in himself; he has found it, or something very difficult to 

distinguish from it, growing independently in the minds of men and 

women he has met.  They have been people of very various origins; 

English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French, people brought up in 

a "Catholic atmosphere," Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans.  

Their diversity of source is as remarkable as their convergence of 

tendency.  A miscellany of minds thinking upon parallel lines has 

come out to the same light.  The new teaching is also traceable in 

many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be heard 

from Christian pulpits.  The phase of definition is manifestly at 

hand.







2. MODERN RELIGION HAS A FINITE GOD





Perhaps the most fundamental difference between this new faith and 

any recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or 

unknowingly, it worships A FINITE GOD.  Directly the believer is 

fairly confronted with the plain questions of the case, the vague 

identifications that are still carelessly made with one or all of 

the persons of the Trinity dissolve away.  He will admit that his 

God is neither all-wise, nor all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he 

is neither the maker of heaven nor earth, and that he has little to 

identify him with that hereditary God of the Jews who became the 

"Father" in the Christian system.  On the other hand he will assert 

that his God is a god of salvation, that he is a spirit, a person, a 

strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and 

lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human soul.  He 

will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a close 

resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian) 

"Christ." . . .



The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of 

universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon 

any God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that 

sense of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence 

of the religious experience, it was the True God that answered them.  

For the True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very 

antithesis of that bickering monopolist who "will have none other 

gods but Me"; and when a human heart cries out--to what name it 

matters not--for a larger spirit and a stronger help than the 

visible things of life can give, straightway the nameless Helper is 

with it and the God of Man answers to the call.  The True God has no 

scorn nor hate for those who have accepted the many-handed symbols 

of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China.  Where there is faith, 

where there is need, there is the True God ready to clasp the hands 

that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness behind the ivory 

and gold.



The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think 

clearly among the new believers are very insistent.  He is, above 

everything else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have 

characteristics, to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being, 

not us but dealing with us and through us, he has an aim and that 

means he has a past and future; he is within time and not outside 

it.  And they point out that this is really what everyone who prays 

sincerely to God or gets help from God, feels and believes.  Our 

practice with God is better than our theory.  None of us really pray 

to that fantastic, unqualified danse a trois, the Trinity, which the 

wranglings and disputes of the worthies of Alexandria and Syria 

declared to be God.  We pray to one single understanding person.  

But so far the tactics of those Trinitarians at Nicaea, who stuck 

their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in this world; this was 

no matter for discussion, they declared, it was a Holy Mystery full 

of magical terror, and few religious people have thought it worth 

while to revive these terrors by a definite contradiction.  The 

truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the 

comparative sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to 

the scoffing Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the 

official creed.  But one magnificent protest against this 

theological fantasy must have been the work of a sincerely religious 

man, the cold superb humour of that burlesque creed, ascribed, at 

first no doubt facetiously and then quite seriously, to Saint 

Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond its original 

intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the church.



The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing 

to its end.  It is when men most urgently need God that they become 

least patient with foolish presentations and dogmas.  The new 

believers are very definitely set upon a thorough analysis of the 

nature and growth of the Christian creeds and ideas.  There has 

grown up a practice of assuming that, when God is spoken of, the 

Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea is meant.  But that God trails with 

him a thousand misconceptions and bad associations; his alleged 

infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange preferences, his 

vindictive Old Testament past.  These things do not even make a 

caricature of the True God; they compose an altogether different and 

antagonistic figure.



It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has 

led the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite 

qualities for their deity.  One has to remember the poorness of the 

mental and moral quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and 

fifth centuries who saddled Christendom with its characteristic 

dogmas, and the extreme poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas 

within which they thought.  Many of these makers of Christianity, 

like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who had even to be baptised after his 

election to his bishopric), had been pitchforked into the church 

from civil life; they lived in a time of pitiless factions and 

personal feuds; they had to conduct their disputations amidst the 

struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs and favourites swayed 

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.  He is by our poor scales of 

measurement boundless love, boundless courage, boundless generosity.  

He is thought and a steadfast will.  He is our friend and brother 

and the light of the world.  That briefly is the belief of the 

modern mind with regard to God.  There is no very novel idea about 

this God, unless it be the idea that he had a beginning.  This is 

the God that men have sought and found in all ages, as God or as the 

Messiah or the Saviour.  The finding of him is salvation from the 

purposelessness of life.  The new religion has but disentangled the 

idea of him from the absolutes and infinities and mysteries of the 

Christian theologians; from mythological virgin births and the 

cosmogonies and intellectual pretentiousness of a vanished age.



Modern religion appeals to no revelation, no authoritative teaching, 

no mystery.  The statement it makes is, it declares, a mere 

statement of what we may all perceive and experience.  We all live 

in the storm of life, we all find our understandings limited by the 

Veiled Being; if we seek salvation and search within for God, 

presently we find him.  All this is in the nature of things.  If 

every one who perceives and states it were to be instantly killed 

and blotted out, presently other people would find their way to the 

same conclusions; and so on again and again.  To this all true 

religion, casting aside its hulls of misconception, must ultimately 

come.  To it indeed much religion is already coming.  Christian 

thought struggles towards it, with the millstones of Syrian theology 

and an outrageous mythology of incarnation and resurrection about 

its neck.  When at last our present bench of bishops join the early 

fathers of the church in heaven there will be, I fear, a note of 

reproach in their greeting of the ingenious person who saddled them 

with OMNIPOTENS.  Still more disastrous for them has been the virgin 

birth, with the terrible fascination of its detail for unpoetic 

minds.  How rich is the literature of authoritative Christianity 

with decisions upon the continuing virginity of Mary and the 

virginity of Joseph--ideas that first arose in Arabia as a Moslem 

gloss upon Christianity--and how little have these peepings and 

pryings to do with the needs of the heart and the finding of God!



Within the last few years there have been a score or so of such 

volumes as that recently compiled by Dr. Foakes Jackson, entitled 

"The Faith and the War," a volume in which the curious reader may 

contemplate deans and canons, divines and church dignitaries, men 

intelligent and enquiring and religiously disposed, all lying like 

overladen camels, panting under this load of obsolete theological 

responsibility, groaning great articles, outside the needle's eye 

that leads to God.







6. THE COMING OF GOD





Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God 

entirely upon experience.  It has encountered God.  It does not 

argue about God; it relates.  It relates without any of those 

wrappings of awe and reverence that fold so necessarily about 

imposture, it relates as one tells of a friend and his assistance, 

of a happy adventure, of a beautiful thing found and picked up by 

the wayside.



So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal 

salvation tallies very closely with the account of "conversion" as 

it is given by other religions.  It has little to tell that is not 

already familiar to the reader of William James's "Varieties of 

Religious Experience."  It describes an initial state of distress 

with the aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with 

the futility of the individual life, a state of helpless self-

disgust, of inability to form any satisfactory plan of living.  This 

is the common prelude known to many sorts of Christian as 

"conviction of sin"; it is, at any rate, a conviction of hopeless 

confusion. . . .  Then in some way the idea of God comes into the 

distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without substance or 

belief.  It is read about or it is remembered; it is expounded by 

some teacher or some happy convert.  In the case of all those of the 

new faith with whose personal experience I have any intimacy, the 

idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea floating 

about in a mind still dissatisfied.  God is not believed in, but it 

is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the 

needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit 

together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take 

the sting from death.  Under this realisation the idea is pursued 

and elaborated.  For a time there is a curious resistance to the 

suggestion that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by 

such phrases as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness, 

as the Collective Mind.



I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the 

idea of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous 

prejudice against divine personality created by the absurdities of 

the Christian teaching and the habitual monopoly of the Christian 

idea.  The picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself 

before minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are lambs.  The 

cross in the twilight bars the way.  It is a novelty and an enormous 

relief to such people to realise that one may think of God without 

being committed to think of either the Father, the Son, or the Holy 

Ghost, or of all of them at once.  That freedom had not seemed 

possible to them.  They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea 

that the Christian God is the only thinkable God.  They had heard so 

much about that God and so little of any other.  With that release 

their minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of 

God.



Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes.  This 

cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God.  It is 

the attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in 

oneself.  It is as if one was touched at every point by a being akin 

to oneself, sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in 

aim.  It is completer and more intimate, but it is like standing 

side by side with and touching someone that we love very dearly and 

trust completely.  It is as if this being bridged a thousand 

misunderstandings and brought us into fellowship with a great 

multitude of other people. . . .



"Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."



The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the 

stars, or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit 

and muse.  It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the 

battle.  There is no saying when it may not come to us. . . .  But 

after it has come our lives are changed, God is with us and there is 

no more doubt of God.  Thereafter one goes about the world like one 

who was lonely and has found a lover, like one who was perplexed and 

has found a solution.  One is assured that there is a Power that 

fights with us against the confusion and evil within us and without.  

There comes into the heart an essential and enduring happiness and 

courage.



There is but one God, there is but one true religious experience, 

but under a multitude of names, under veils and darknesses, God has 

in this manner come into countless lives.  There is scarcely a 

faith, however mean and preposterous, that has not been a way to 

holiness.  God who is himself finite, who himself struggles in his 

great effort from strength to strength, has no spite against error.  

Far beyond halfway he hastens to meet the purblind.  But God is 

against the darkness in their eyes.  The faith which is returning to 

men girds at veils and shadows, and would see God plainly.  It has 

little respect for mysteries.  It rends the veil of the temple in 

rags and tatters.  It has no superstitious fear of this huge 

friendliness, of this great brother and leader of our little beings.  

To find God is but the beginning of wisdom, because then for all our 

days we have to learn his purpose with us and to live our lives with 

him.







CHAPTER THE SECOND



HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT





1. HERESIES ARE MISCONCEPTIONS OF GOD





Religion is not a plant that has grown from one seed; it is like a 

lake that has been fed by countless springs.  It is a great pool of 

living water, mingled from many sources and tainted with much 

impurity.  It is synthetic in its nature; it becomes simpler from 

original complexities; the sediment subsides.



A life perfectly adjusted to its surroundings is a life without 

mentality; no judgment is called for, no inhibition, no disturbance 

of the instinctive flow of perfect reactions.  Such a life is bliss, 

or nirvana.  It is unconsciousness below dreaming.  Consciousness is 

discord evoking the will to adjust; it is inseparable from need.  At 

every need consciousness breaks into being.  Imperfect adjustments, 

needs, are the rents and tatters in the smooth dark veil of being 

through which the light of consciousness shines--the light of 

consciousness and will of which God is the sun.



So that every need of human life, every disappointment and 

dissatisfaction and call for help and effort, is a means whereby men 

may and do come to the realisation of God.



There is no cardinal need, there is no sort of experience in human 

life from which there does not come or has not come a contribution 

to men's religious ideas.  At every challenge men have to put forth 

effort, feel doubt of adequacy, be thwarted, perceive the chill 

shadow of their mortality.  At every challenge comes the possibility 

of help from without, the idea of eluding frustration, the 

aspiration towards immortality.  It is possible to classify the 

appeals men make for God under the headings of their chief system of 

effort, their efforts to understand, their fear and their struggles 

for safety and happiness, the craving of their restlessness for 

peace, their angers against disorder and their desire for the 

avenger; their sexual passions and perplexities. . . .



Each of these great systems of needs and efforts brings its own sort 

of sediment into religion.  Each, that is to say, has its own kind 

of heresy, its distinctive misapprehension of God.  It is only in 

the synthesis and mutual correction of many divergent ideas that the 

idea of God grows clear.  The effort to understand completely, for 

example, leads to the endless Heresies of Theory.  Men trip over the 

inherent infirmities of the human mind.  But in these days one does 

not argue greatly about dogma.  Almost every conceivable error about 

unity, about personality, about time and quantity and genus and 

species, about begetting and beginning and limitation and similarity 

and every kink in the difficult mind of man, has been thrust forward 

in some form of dogma.  Beside the errors of thought are the errors 

of emotion.  Fear and feebleness go straight to the Heresies that 

God is Magic or that God is Providence; restless egotism at leisure 

and unchallenged by urgent elementary realities breeds the Heresies 

of Mysticism, anger and hate call for God's Judgments, and the 

stormy emotions of sex gave mankind the Phallic God.  Those who find 

themselves possessed by the new spirit in religion, realise very 

speedily the necessity of clearing the mind of all these 

exaggerations, transferences, and overflows of feeling.  The search 

for divine truth is like gold washing; nothing is of any value until 

most has been swept away.







2. HERESIES OF SPECULATION





One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest.  It is infinitely 

the most various sort.  It includes all those heresies which result 

from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those 

which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the 

heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse.  The 

former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in 

comparison natural, simple confusions.  The former are the errors of 

the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside, 

or are brought down to us in our social structure out of a barbaric 

past.



To the heresies of thought and speculation belong the elaborate 

doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about God's absolute qualities, such 

odd deductions as the accepted Christian teachings about the 

virginity of Mary and Joseph, and the like.  All these things are 

parts of orthodox Christianity.  Yet none of them did Christ, even 

by the Christian account, expound or recommend.  He treated them as 

negligible.  It was left for the Alexandrians, for Alexander, for 

little, red-haired, busy, wire-pulling Athanasius to find out 

exactly what their Master was driving at, three centuries after 

their Master was dead. . . .



Men still sit at little desks remote from God or life, and rack 

their inadequate brains to meet fancied difficulties and state 

unnecessary perfections.  They seek God by logic, ignoring the 

marginal error that creeps into every syllogism.  Their conceit 

blinds them to the limitations upon their thinking.  They weave 

spider-like webs of muddle and disputation across the path by which 

men come to God.  It would not matter very much if it were not that 

simpler souls are caught in these webs.  Every great religious 

system in the world is choked by such webs; each system has its own.  

Of all the blood-stained tangled heresies which make up doctrinal 

Christianity and imprison the mind of the western world to-day, not 

one seems to have been known to the nominal founder of Christianity.  

Jesus Christ never certainly claimed to be the Messiah; never spoke 

clearly of the Trinity; was vague upon the scheme of salvation and 

the significance of his martyrdom.  We are asked to suppose that he 

left his apostles without instructions, that were necessary to their 

eternal happiness, that he could give them the Lord's Prayer but 

leave them to guess at the all-important Creed,* and that the Church 

staggered along blindly, putting its foot in and out of damnation, 

until the "experts" of Nicaea, that "garland of priests," marshalled 

by Constantine's officials, came to its rescue. . . .  From the 

conversion of Paul onward, the heresies of the intellect multiplied 

about Christ's memory and hid him from the sight of men.  We are no 

longer clear about the doctrine he taught nor about the things he 

said and did. . . .



* Even the "Apostles' Creed" is not traceable earlier than the 

fourth century.  It is manifestly an old, patched formulary.  

Rutinius explains that it was not written down for a long time, but 

transmitted orally, kept secret, and used as a sort of password 

among the elect.



We are all so weary of this theology of the Christians, we are all 

at heart so sceptical about their Triune God, that it is needless 

here to spend any time or space upon the twenty thousand different 

formulae in which the orthodox have attempted to believe in 

something of the sort.  There are several useful encyclopaedias of 

sects and heresies, compact, but still bulky, to which the curious 

may go.  There are ten thousand different expositions of orthodoxy.  

No one who really seeks God thinks of the Trinity, either the 

Trinity of the Trinitarian or the Trinity of the Sabellian or the 

Trinity of the Arian, any more than one thinks of those theories 

made stone, those gods with three heads and seven hands, who sit on 

lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what not, in the temples of 

India.  Let us leave, therefore, these morbid elaborations of the 

human intelligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the natural 

heresies that spring from fundamental weaknesses of the human 

character, and which are common to all religions.  Against these it 

is necessary to keep constant watch.  They return very insidiously.







3. GOD IS NOT MAGIC





One of the most universal of these natural misconceptions of God is 

to consider him as something magic serving the ends of men.



It is not easy for us to grasp at first the full meaning of giving 

our souls to God.  The missionary and teacher of any creed is all 

too apt to hawk God for what he will fetch; he is greedy for the 

poor triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about that many people 

who have been led to believe themselves religious, are in reality 

still keeping back their own souls and trying to use God for their 

own purposes.  God is nothing more for them as yet than a 

magnificent Fetish.  They did not really want him, but they have 

heard that he is potent stuff; their unripe souls think to make use 

of him.  They call upon his name, they do certain things that are 

supposed to be peculiarly influential with him, such as saying 

prayers and repeating gross praises of him, or reading in a blind, 

industrious way that strange miscellany of Jewish and early 

Christian literature, the Bible, and suchlike mental mortification, 

or making the Sabbath dull and uncomfortable.  In return for these 

fetishistic propitiations God is supposed to interfere with the 

normal course of causation in their favour.  He becomes a celestial 

log-roller.  He remedies unfavourable accidents, cures petty 

ailments, contrives unexpected gifts of medicine, money, or the 

like, he averts bankruptcies, arranges profitable transactions, and 

does a thousand such services for his little clique of faithful 

people.  The pious are represented as being constantly delighted by 

these little surprises, these bouquets and chocolate boxes from the 

divinity.  Or contrawise he contrives spiteful turns for those who 

fail in their religious attentions.  He murders Sabbath-breaking 

children, or disorganises the careful business schemes of the 

ungodly.  He is represented as going Sabbath-breakering on Sunday 

morning as a Staffordshire worker goes ratting.  Ordinary everyday 

Christianity is saturated with this fetishistic conception of God.  

It may be disowned in THE HIBBERT JOURNAL, but it is unblushingly 

advocated in the parish magazine.  It is an idea taken over by 

Christianity with the rest of the qualities of the Hebrew God.  It 

is natural enough in minds so self-centred that their recognition of 

weakness and need brings with it no real self-surrender, but it is 

entirely inconsistent with the modern conception of the true God.



There has dropped upon the table as I write a modest periodical 

called THE NORTHERN BRITISH ISRAEL REVIEW, illustrated with 

portraits of various clergymen of the Church of England, and of 

ladies and gentlemen who belong to the little school of thought 

which this magazine represents; it is, I should judge, a sub-sect 

entirely within the Established Church of England, that is to say 

within the Anglican communion of the Trinitarian Christians.  It 

contains among other papers a very entertaining summary by a 

gentleman entitled--I cite the unusual title-page of the periodical--

"Landseer Mackenzie, Esq.," of the views of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and 

Obadiah upon the Kaiser William.  They are distinctly hostile views.  

Mr. Landseer Mackenzie discourses not only upon these anticipatory 

condemnations but also upon the relations of the weather to this 

war.  He is convinced quite simply and honestly that God has been 

persistently rigging the weather against the Germans.  He points out 

that the absence of mist on the North Sea was of great help to the 

British in the autumn of 1914, and declares that it was the wet 

state of the country that really held up the Germans in Flanders in 

the winter of 1914-15.  He ignores the part played by the weather in 

delaying the relief of Kut-el-Amara, and he has not thought of the 

difficult question why the Deity, having once decided upon 

intervention, did not, instead of this comparatively trivial 

meteorological assistance, adopt the more effective course of, for 

example, exploding or spoiling the German stores of ammunition by 

some simple atomic miracle, or misdirecting their gunfire by a 

sudden local modification of the laws of refraction or gravitation.



Since these views of God come from Anglican vicarages I can only 

conclude that this kind of belief is quite orthodox and permissible 

in the established church, and that I am charging orthodox 

Christianity here with nothing that has ever been officially 

repudiated.  I find indeed the essential assumptions of Mr. Landseer 

Mackenzie repeated in endless official Christian utterances on the 

part of German and British and Russian divines.  The Bishop of 

Chelmsford, for example, has recently ascribed our difficulties in 

the war to our impatience with long sermons--among other similar 

causes.  Such Christians are manifestly convinced that God can be 

invoked by ritual--for example by special days of national prayer or 

an increased observance of Sunday--or made malignant by neglect or 

levity.  It is almost fundamental in their idea of him.  The 

ordinary Mohammedan seems as confident of this magic pettiness of 

God, and the belief of China in the magic propitiations and 

resentments of "Heaven" is at least equally strong.



But the true God as those of the new religion know him is no such 

God of luck and intervention.  He is not to serve men's ends or the 

ends of nations or associations of men; he is careless of our 

ceremonies and invocations.  He does not lose his temper with our 

follies and weaknesses.  It is for us to serve Him.  He captains us, 

he does not coddle us.  He has his own ends for which he needs 

us. . . .







4. GOD IS NOT PROVIDENCE





Closely related to this heresy that God is magic, is the heresy that 

calls him Providence, that declares the apparent adequacy of cause 

and effect to be a sham, and that all the time, incalculably, he is 

pulling about the order of events for our personal advantages.



The idea of Providence was very gaily travested by Daudet in 

"Tartarin in the Alps."  You will remember how Tartarin's friend 

assured him that all Switzerland was one great Trust, intent upon 

attracting tourists and far too wise and kind to permit them to 

venture into real danger, that all the precipices were netted 

invisibly, and all the loose rocks guarded against falling, that 

avalanches were prearranged spectacles and the crevasses at their 

worst slippery ways down into kindly catchment bags.  If the 

mountaineer tried to get into real danger he was turned back by 

specious excuses.  Inspired by this persuasion Tartarin behaved with 

incredible daring. . . .  That is exactly the Providence theory of 

the whole world.  There can be no doubt that it does enable many a 

timid soul to get through life with a certain recklessness.  And 

provided there is no slip into a crevasse, the Providence theory 

works well.  It would work altogether well if there were no 

crevasses.



Tartarin was reckless because of his faith in Providence, and 

escaped.  But what would have happened to him if he had fallen into 

a crevasse?



There exists a very touching and remarkable book by Sir Francis 

Younghusband called "Within." [Williams and Norgate, 1912.]  It is 

the confession of a man who lived with a complete confidence in 

Providence until he was already well advanced in years.  He went 

through battles and campaigns, he filled positions of great honour 

and responsibility, he saw much of the life of men, without 

altogether losing his faith.  The loss of a child, an Indian famine, 

could shake it but not overthrow it.  Then coming back one day from 

some races in France, he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt 

very cruelly.  He suffered terribly in body and mind.  His 

sufferings caused much suffering to others.  He did his utmost to 

see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and 

the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a 

fine essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he 

could not do so.  His confidence in the benevolent intervention of 

God was altogether destroyed.  His book tells of this shattering, 

and how labouriously he reconstructed his religion upon less 

confident lines.  It is a book typical of an age and of a very 

English sort of mind, a book well worth reading.



That he came to a full sense of the true God cannot be asserted, but 

how near he came to God, let one quotation witness.





"The existence of an outside Providence," he writes, "who created 

us, who watches over us, and who guides our lives like a Merciful 

Father, we have found impossible longer to believe in.  But of the 

existence of a Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate 

beings, and finding its fullest expression, in man in love, and in 

the flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of anything in the 

world.  This fiery spiritual impulsion at the centre and the source 

of things, ever burning in us, is the supremely important factor in 

our existence.  It does not always attain to light.  In many 

directions it fails; the conditions are too hard and it is utterly 

blocked.  In others it only partially succeeds.  But in a few it 

bursts forth into radiant light.  There are few who in some heavenly 

moment of their lives have not been conscious of its presence.  We 

may not be able to give it outward expression, but we know that it 

is there." . . .





God does not guide our feet.  He is no sedulous governess 

restraining and correcting the wayward steps of men.  If you would 

fly into the air, there is no God to bank your aeroplane correctly 

for you or keep an ill-tended engine going; if you would cross a 

glacier, no God nor angel guides your steps amidst the slippery 

places.  He will not even mind your innocent children for you if you 

leave them before an unguarded fire.  Cherish no delusions; for 

yourself and others you challenge danger and chance on your own 

strength; no talisman, no God, can help you or those you care for.  

Nothing of such things will God do; it is an idle dream.  But God 

will be with you nevertheless.  In the reeling aeroplane or the dark 

ice-cave God will be your courage.  Though you suffer or are killed, 

it is not an end.  He will be with you as you face death; he will 

die with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave 

deaths.  He will come so close to you that at the last you will not 

know whether it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be 

swallowed up in his victory.





5. THE HERESY OF QUIETISM





God comes to us within and takes us for his own.  He releases us 

from ourselves; he incorporates us with his own undying experience 

and adventure; he receives us and gives himself.  He is a stimulant; 

he makes us live immortally and more abundantly.  I have compared 

him to the sensation of a dear, strong friend who comes and stands 

quietly beside one, shoulder to shoulder.



The finding of God is the beginning of service.  It is not an escape 

from life and action; it is the release of life and action from the 

prison of the mortal self.  Not to realise that, is the heresy of 

Quietism, of many mystics.  Commonly such people are people of some 

wealth, able to command services for all their everyday needs.  They 

make religion a method of indolence.  They turn their backs on the 

toil and stresses of existence and give themselves up to a delicious 

reverie in which they flirt with the divinity.  They will recount 

their privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and wonderfully 

God has tried and proved them.  But indeed the true God was not the 

lover of Madame Guyon.  The true God is not a spiritual troubadour 

wooing the hearts of men and women to no purpose.  The true God goes 

through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for 

recruits along the street.  We must go out to him.  We must accept 

his discipline and fight his battle.  The peace of God comes not by 

thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him.







6. GOD DOES NOT PUNISH





Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for 

moral indignation.  Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear.  

They were more often "wrath" than not.  Such was the temperament of 

the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps 

under the influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian 

Trinity and who became also the Moslem God.*  The natural hatred of 

unregenerate men against everything that is unlike themselves, 

against strange people and cheerful people, against unfamiliar 

usages and things they do not understand, embodied itself in this 

conception of a malignant and partisan Deity, perpetually "upset" by 

the little things people did, and contriving murder and vengeance.  

Now this God would be drowning everybody in the world, now he would 

be burning Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting his 

congenial Israelites to the most terrific pogroms.  This divine 

"frightfulness" is of course the natural human dislike and distrust 

for queer practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike 

reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape in us, liberating the 

latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it an excuse and pressing 

permission upon it, handing the thing hated and feared over to its 

secular arm. . . .



* It is not so generally understood as it should be among English 

and American readers that a very large proportion of early 

Christians before the creeds established and regularised the 

doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely that Jehovah was God; 

they regarded Christ as a rebel against Jehovah and a rescuer of 

humanity from him, just as Prometheus was a rebel against Jove.  

These beliefs survived for a thousand years tbroughout Christendom: 

they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the 

Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians.  The catholic 

church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old 

Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of 

the Cathars against the Hebrew God.  But in this book, be it noted, 

the word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to 

indicate only the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.



It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct 

for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish 

sweet familiar things, that these things of the True God should so 

readily liberate cruelty and tyranny.  It is like a woman going with 

a light to tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the 

house on fire.  None the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of 

God the Revengeful, God the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion.  

It is only in quite recent years that the growing gentleness of 

everyday life has begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less 

tolerant and gentle than themselves.  The recent literature of the 

Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this trouble.



Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for 

denying the irascibility of his God and teaching "the Kaffirs of 

Natal" the dangerous heresy that God is all mercy.  "We cannot allow 

it to be said," the Dean of Cape Town insisted, "that God was not 

angry and was not appeased by punishment." He was angry "on account 

of Sin, which is a great evil and a great insult to His Majesty."  

The case of the Rev. Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a 

second assertion of the Church's insistence upon the fierceness of 

her God.  This case is not to be found in the ordinary church 

histories nor is it even mentioned in the latest edition of the 

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it appears to have been a 

very illuminating case.  It is doubtful if the church would 

prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey to-day.







7. GOD AND THE NURSERY-MAID





Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger, is that kind of 

miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the 

overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal.  You stab your children with 

such a God and he poisons all their lives.  For many of us the word 

"God" first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational 

restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye.  

God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to 

leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while 

she goes off upon her own aims.  But indeed, the teaching of God 

Bogey is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less dreadful 

than an indecent assault.  The reason rebels and is crushed under 

this horrible and pursuing suggestion.  Many minds never rise again 

from their injury.  They remain for the rest of life spiritually 

crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion 

of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.



I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered.  He and his 

Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still 

believed in him, and who could help but hate?  I thought of him as a 

fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening, 

perpetually waiting to condemn and to "strike me dead"; his flames 

as ready as a grill-room fire.  He was over me and about my 

feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would 

be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic.  When I was still only a 

child of thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this 

Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that God 

himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to 

me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.



I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mental cripples with 

this bogey God of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges, 

still living like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place 

where God should be.  They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not 

be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish 

observances; they dare not look at the causes of things.  They are 

afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of 

science, lest that old watching spider take offence.  The voice of 

the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing, 

but they avert themselves, fear-driven.  For the true God has no 

lash of fear.  And how the foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven 

face, his greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his 

bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest of fear the 

ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown for him!  How he loves 

the importance of denunciation, and, himself a malignant cripple, to 

rally the company of these crippled souls to persecute and destroy 

the happy children of God! . . .



Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children.  There is a 

real wickedness of the priest that is different from other 

wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and 

strange perversions of instinct affect it.  Let a former Archbishop 

of Canterbury speak for me.  This that follows is the account given 

by Archbishop Tait in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation 

(July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a certain SOCIETY OF 

THE HOLY CROSS:





"I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the 

instruction of very young children.  I find, in one of the pages of 

it, the statement that between the ages of six and six and a half 

years would be the proper time for the inculcation of the teaching 

which is to be found in the book.  Now, six to six and a half is 

certainly a very tender age, and to these children I find these 

statements addressed in the book:





"'It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must 

acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him.'





"I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many 

there were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that 

they did not mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to 

God direct; that it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six, 

to its mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse to 

the priest.  But the words, to say the least of them, are rash.  

Then comes the very obvious question:





"'Do you know why?  It is because God, when he was on earth, gave to 

his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men 

their sins.  It was to priests alone that Jesus said: "Receive ye 

the Holy Ghost." . . .  Those who will not confess will not be 

cured.  Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.'





"That is addressed to a child six years of age.





"'I have known,' the book continues, 'poor children who concealed 

their sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were 

tormented with remorse, and if they had died in that state they 

would certainly have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.'" . . .





Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen 

time after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in 

their preaching.  It is a distinct lust.  Much nobility and devotion 

there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of 

real worship, lives no man may better; this that I write is not of 

all, perhaps not of many priests.  But there has been in all ages 

that have known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest; 

priestcraft and priestly power release an aggressive and narrow 

disposition to a recklessness of suffering and a hatred of liberty 

that surely exceeds the badness of any other sort of men.







8. THE CHILDREN'S GOD





Children do not naturally love God.  They have no great capacity for 

an idea so subtle and mature as the idea of God.  While they are 

still children in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy 

for them to feel any great need of God.  All things are still 

something God-like. . . .



The true God, our modern minds insist upon believing, can have no 

appetite for unnatural praise and adoration.  He does not clamour 

for the attention of children.  He is not like one of those senile 

uncles who dream of glory in the nursery, who love to hear it said, 

"The children adore him."  If children are loved and trained to 

truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the 

true God as their needs bring them within his scope.  They should be 

left to their innocence, and to their trust in the innocence of the 

world, as long as they can be.  They should be told only of God as a 

Great Friend whom some day they will need more and understand and 

know better.  That is as much as most children need.  The phrases of 

religion put too early into their mouths may become a cant, 

something worse than blasphemy.



Yet children are sometimes very near to God.  Creative passion stirs 

in their play.  At times they display a divine simplicity.  But it 

does not follow that therefore they should be afflicted with 

theological formulae or inducted into ceremonies and rites that they 

may dislike or misinterpret.  If by any accident, by the death of a 

friend or a distressing story, the thought of death afflicts a 

child, then he may begin to hear of God, who takes those that serve 

him out of their slain bodies into his shining immortality.  Or if 

by some menial treachery, through some prowling priest, the whisper 

of Old Bogey reaches our children, then we may set their minds at 

ease by the assurance of his limitless charity. . . .



With adolescence comes the desire for God and to know more of God, 

and that is the most suitable time for religious talk and teaching.







9. GOD IS NOT SEXUAL





In the last two or three hundred years there has been a very 

considerable disentanglement of the idea of God from the complex of 

sexual thought and feeling.  But in the early days of religion the 

two things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew 

prophets, for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary 

"wrath" of their God at this or that little dirtiness or 

irregularity or breach of the sexual tabus.  The ceremony of 

circumcision is clearly indicative of the original nature of the 

Semitic deity who developed into the Trinitarian God.  So far as 

Christianity dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed the 

old associations.  But to this day the representative Christian 

churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with 

some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of 

celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the mischievousness and 

maliciousness that so often ensue.  Nearly every Christian church 

inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can contrive upon the 

illegitimate child.  They do not treat illegitimate children as 

unfortunate children, but as children with a mystical and an 

incurable taint of SIN.  Kindly easy-going Christians may resent 

this statement because it does not tally with their own attitudes, 

but let them consult their orthodox authorities.



One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred 

or sinful in itself and what is held to be one's duty or a nation's 

duty because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best 

thing to do.  By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or 

all of our institutions regulating the relations of the sexes may be 

justifiable.  But my case is not whether they can be justified by 

these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged 

even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world.  

It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies 

that I would criticise.  These sexual questions are guarded by a 

holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made--with a 

sense of complete righteousness--to prohibit their discussion.  That 

fury about sexual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis 

that the Christian God remains a sex God in the minds of great 

numbers of his exponents.  His disentanglement from that plexus is 

incomplete.  Sexual things are still to the orthodox Christian, 

sacred things.



Now the God whom those of the new faith are finding is only 

mediately concerned with the relations of men and women.  He is no 

more sexual essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hygienic.  

The God of Leviticus was all these things.  He is represented as 

prescribing the most petty and intimate of observances--many of 

which are now habitually disregarded by the Christians who profess 

him. . . .  It is part of the evolution of the idea of God that we 

have now so largely disentangled our conception of him from the 

dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual rules that were once 

inseparably bound up with his majesty.  Christ himself was one of 

the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is the clearest 

evidence in several instances of his disregard of the rule and his 

insistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit underlying 

and often masked by the rule.  His Church, being made of baser 

matter, has followed him as reluctantly as possible and no further 

than it was obliged.  But it has followed him far enough to admit 

his principle that in all these matters there is no need for 

superstitious fear, that the interpretation of the divine purpose is 

left to the unembarrassed intelligence of men.  The church has 

followed him far enough to make the harsh threatenings of priests 

and ecclesiastics against what they are pleased to consider impurity 

or sexual impiety, a profound inconsistency.  One seems to hear 

their distant protests when one reads of Christ and the Magdalen, or 

of Christ eating with publicans and sinners.  The clergy of our own 

days play the part of the New Testament Pharisees with the utmost 

exactness and complete unconsciousness.  One cannot imagine a modern 

ecclesiastic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary 

civility, unless she was in a very high social position indeed, or 

blending with disreputable characters without a dramatic sense of 

condescension and much explanatory by-play.  Those who profess 

modern religion do but follow in these matters a course entirely 

compatible with what has survived of the authentic teachings of 

Christ, when they declare that God is not sexual, and that religious 

passion and insult and persecution upon the score of sexual things 

are a barbaric inheritance.



But lest anyone should fling off here with some hasty assumption 

that those who profess the religion of the true God are sexually 

anarchistic, let stress be laid at once upon the opening sentence of 

the preceding paragraph, and let me a little anticipate a section 

which follows.  We would free men and women from exact and 

superstitious rules and observances, not to make them less the 

instruments of God but more wholly his.  The claim of modern 

religion is that one should give oneself unreservedly to God, that 

there is no other salvation.  The believer owes all his being and 

every moment of his life to God, to keep mind and body as clean, 

fine, wholesome, active and completely at God's service as he can.  

There is no scope for indulgence or dissipation in such a 

consecrated life.  It is a matter between the individual and his 

conscience or his doctor or his social understanding what exactly he 

may do or not do, what he may eat or drink or so forth, upon any 

occasion.  Nothing can exonerate him from doing his utmost to 

determine and perform the right act.  Nothing can excuse his failure 

to do so.  But what is here being insisted upon is that none of 

these things has immediately to do with God or religious emotion, 

except only the general will to do right in God's service.  The 

detailed interpretation of that "right" is for the dispassionate 

consideration of the human intelligence.



All this is set down here as distinctly as possible.  Because of the 

emotional reservoirs of sex, sexual dogmas are among the most 

obstinately recurrent of all heresies, and sexual excitement is 

always tending to leak back into religious feeling.  Amongst the 

sex-tormented priesthood of the Roman communion in particular, 

ignorant of the extreme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic 

cult and suchlike predecessors of Christianity, there seems to be an 

extraordinary belief that chastity was not invented until 

Christianity came, and that the religious life is largely the 

propitiation of God by feats of sexual abstinence.  But a 

superstitious abstinence that scars and embitters the mind, distorts 

the imagination, makes the body gross and keeps it unclean, is just 

as offensive to God as any positive depravity.







CHAPTER THE THIRD



THE LIKENESS OF GOD





1. GOD IS COURAGE



Now having set down what those who profess the new religion regard 

as the chief misconceptions of God, having put these systems of 

ideas aside from our explanations, the path is cleared for the 

statement of what God is.  Since language springs entirely from 

material, spatial things, there is always an element of metaphor in 

theological statement.  So that I have not called this chapter the 

Nature of God, but the Likeness of God.



And firstly, GOD IS COURAGE.







2. GOD IS A PERSON





And next GOD IS A PERSON.



Upon this point those who are beginning to profess modern religion 

are very insistent.  It is, they declare, the central article, the 

axis, of their religion.  God is a person who can be known as one 

knows a friend, who can be served and who receives service, who 

partakes of our nature; who is, like us, a being in conflict with 

the unknown and the limitless and the forces of death; who values 

much that we value and is against much that we are pitted against.  

He is our king to whom we must be loyal; he is our captain, and to 

know him is to have a direction in our lives.  He feels us and knows 

us; he is helped and gladdened by us.  He hopes and attempts. . . .  

God is no abstraction nor trick of words, no Infinite.  He is as 

real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace.



Now this is where those who have left the old creeds and come asking 

about the new realisations find their chief difficulty.  They say, 

Show us this person; let us hear him.  (If they listen to the 

silences within, presently they will hear him.)  But when one 

argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient 

controversies between species and individual, between the one and 

the many, which arise out of the necessarily imperfect methods of 

the human mind.  Upon these matters there has been much pregnant 

writing during the last half century.  Such ideas as this writer has 

to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, "First 

and Last Things," in which, writing as one without authority or 

specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly 

interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to 

elucidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours, this mind, 

by which we must seek and explain and reach up to God.  Suffice it 

here to say that theological discussion may very easily become like 

the vision of a man with cataract, a mere projection of inherent 

imperfections.  If we do not use our phraseology with a certain 

courage, and take that of those who are trying to convey their ideas 

to us with a certain politeness and charity, there is no end 

possible to any discussion in so subtle and intimate a matter as 

theology but assertions, denials, and wranglings.  And about this 

word "person" it is necessary to be as clear and explicit as 

possible, though perfect clearness, a definition of mathematical 

sharpness, is by the very nature of the case impossible.



Now when we speak of a person or an individual we think typically of 

a man, and we forget that he was once an embryo and will presently 

decay; we forget that he came of two people and may beget many, that 

he has forgotten much and will forget more, that he can be confused, 

divided against himself, delirious, drunken, drugged, or asleep.  On 

the contrary we are, in our hasty way of thinking of him, apt to 

suppose him continuous, definite, acting consistently and never 

forgetting.  But only abstract and theoretical persons are like 

that.  We couple with him the idea of a body.  Indeed, in the common 

use of the word "person" there is more thought of body than of mind.  

We speak of a lover possessing the person of his mistress.  We speak 

of offences against the person as opposed to insults, libels, or 

offences against property.  And the gods of primitive men and the 

earlier civilisations were quite of that quality of person.  They 

were thought of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting 

consistently.  If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was 

because they were aloof or because their "persons" were too splendid 

for weak human eyes.  Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the 

person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted 

upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was 

utterly consumed.  The early Islamic conception of God, like the 

conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in 

spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic 

personality away somewhere in Heaven.  The personal appearance of 

the Christian God is described in The Revelation, and however much 

that description may be explained away by commentators as 

symbolical, it is certainly taken by most straightforward believers 

as a statement of concrete reality.  Now if we are going to insist 

upon this primary meaning of person and individual, then certainly 

God as he is now conceived is not a person and not an individual.  

The true God will never promenade an Eden or a Heaven, nor sit upon 


a throne.



But current Christianity, modern developments of Islam, much Indian 

theological thought--that, for instance, which has found such 

delicate and attractive expression in the devotional poetry of 

Rabindranath Tagore--has long since abandoned this anthropomorphic 

insistence upon a body.  From the earliest ages man's mind has found 

little or no difficulty in the idea of something essential to the 

personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing apart from the 

body and continuing after the destruction of the body, and being 

still a person and an individual.  From this it is a small step to 

the thought of a person existing independently of any existing or 

pre-existing body.  That is the idea of theological Christianity, as 

distinguished from the Christianity of simple faith.  The Triune 

Persons--omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent--exist for all 

time, superior to and independent of matter.  They are supremely 

disembodied.  One became incarnate--as a wind eddy might take up a 

whirl of dust. . . .  Those who profess modern religion conceive 

that this is an excessive abstraction of the idea of spirituality, a 

disembodiment of the idea of personality beyond the limits of the 

conceivable; nevertheless they accept the conception that a person, 

a spiritual individual, may be without an ordinary mortal body. . . .  

They declare that God is without any specific body, that he is 

immaterial, that he can affect the material universe--and that means 

that he can only reach our sight, our hearing, our touch--through 

the bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.



His nature is of the nature of thought and will.  Not only has he, 

in his essence, nothing to do with matter, but nothing to do with 

space.  He is not of matter nor of space.  He comes into them.  

Since the period when all the great theologies that prevail to-day 

were developed, there have been great changes in the ideas of men 

towards the dimensions of time and space.  We owe to Kant the 

release from the rule of these ideas as essential ideas.  Our modern 

psychology is alive to the possibility of Being that has no 

extension in space at all, even as our speculative geometry can 

entertain the possibility of dimensions--fourth, fifth, Nth 

dimensions--outside the three-dimensional universe of our 

experience.  And God being non-spatial is not thereby banished to an 

infinite remoteness, but brought nearer to us; he is everywhere 

immediately at hand, even as a fourth dimension would be everywhere 

immediately at hand.  He is a Being of the minds and in the minds of 

men.  He is in immediate contact with all who apprehend him. . . .



But modern religion declares that though he does not exist in matter 

or space, he exists in time just as a current of thought may do; 

that he changes and becomes more even as a man's purpose gathers 

itself together; that somewhere in the dawning of mankind he had a 

beginning, an awakening, and that as mankind grows he grows.  With 

our eyes he looks out upon the universe he invades; with our hands, 

he lays hands upon it.  All our truth, all our intentions and 

achievements, he gathers to himself.  He is the undying human 

memory, the increasing human will.



But this, you may object, is no more than saying that God is the 

collective mind and purpose of the human race.  You may declare that 

this is no God, but merely the sum of mankind.  But those who 

believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that.  God is, they 

say, not an aggregate but a synthesis.  He is not merely the best of 

all of us, but a Being in himself, composed of that but more than 

that, as a temple is more than a gathering of stones, or a regiment 

is more than an accumulation of men.  They point out that a man is 

made up of a great multitude of cells, each equivalent to a 

unicellular organism.  Not one of those cells is he, nor is he 

simply just the addition of all of them.  He is more than all of 

them.  You can take away these and these and these, and he still 

remains.  And he can detach part of himself and treat it as if it 

were not himself, just as a man may beat his breast or, as Cranmer 

the martyr did, thrust his hand into the flames.  A man is none the 

less himself because his hair is cut or his appendix removed or his 

leg amputated.



And take another image. . . .  Who bears affection for this or that 

spadeful of mud in my garden?  Who cares a throb of the heart for 

all the tons of chalk in Kent or all the lumps of limestone in 

Yorkshire?  But men love England, which is made up of such things.



And so we think of God as a synthetic reality, though he has neither 

body nor material parts.  And so too we may obey him and listen to 

him, though we think but lightly of the men whose hands or voices he 

sometimes uses.  And we may think of him as having moods and 

aspects--as a man has--and a consistency we call his character.



These are theorisings about God.  These are statements to convey 

this modern idea of God.  This, we say, is the nature of the person 

whose will and thoughts we serve.  No one, however, who understands 

the religious life seeks conversion by argument.  First one must 

feel the need of God, then one must form or receive an acceptable 

idea of God.  That much is no more than turning one's face to the 

east to see the coming of the sun.  One may still doubt if that 

direction is the east or whether the sun will rise.  The real coming 

of God is not that.  It is a change, an irradiation of the mind.  

Everything is there as it was before, only now it is aflame.  

Suddenly the light fills one's eyes, and one knows that God has 

risen and that doubt has fled for ever.





3. GOD IS YOUTH





The third thing to be told of the true God is that GOD IS YOUTH.



God, we hold, began and is always beginning.  He looks forever into 

the future.



Most of the old religions derive from a patriarchal phase.  God is 

in those systems the Ancient of Days.  I know of no Christian 

attempt to represent or symbolise God the Father which is not a 

bearded, aged man.  White hair, beard, bearing, wrinkles, a hundred 

such symptoms of senile decay are there.  These marks of senility do 

not astonish our modern minds in the picture of God, only because 

tradition and usage have blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a 

time-worn immortal.  Jove too and Wotan are figures far past the 

prime of their vigour.  These are gods after the ancient habit of 

the human mind, that turned perpetually backward for causes and 

reasons and saw all things to come as no more than the working out 

of Fate,--



     "Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit

      Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

      Brought death into the world and all our woe."



But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks not to our past but 

our future, and if a figure may represent him it must be the figure 

of a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his 

strength.  He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time, 

eager to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that 

was still but a promise; he should bear a sword, that clean, 

discriminating weapon, his eyes should be as bright as swords; his 

lips should fall apart with eagerness for the great adventure before 

him, and he should be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting 

the rising sun.  Death should still hang like mists and cloud banks 

and shadows in the valleys of the wide landscape about him.  There 

should be dew upon the threads of gossamer and little leaves and 

blades of the turf at his feet. . . .







4. WHEN WE SAY GOD IS LOVE





One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most 

trite and most sacred, is that God is Love.  This is a saying that 

deserves careful examination.  Love is a word very loosely used; 

there are people who will say they love new potatoes; there are a 

multitude of loves of different colours and values.  There is the 

love of a mother for her child, there is the love of brothers, there 

is the love of youth and maiden, and the love of husband and wife, 

there is illicit love and the love one bears one's home or one's 

country, there are dog-lovers and the loves of the Olympians, and 

love which is a passion of jealousy.  Love is frequently a mere 

blend of appetite and preference; it may be almost pure greed; it 

may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit self-forgetful nor 

generous.  It is possible so to phrase things that the furtive 

craving of a man for another man's wife may be made out to be a 

light from God.  Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts 

of love that people will call "true love," there is something of 

that same exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential 

quality of the knowledge of God.



Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the 

exaltation of religious passion comes to remain.  Lovers are the 

windows by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is 

the open door by which we freely go.  And God never dies, nor 

disappoints, nor betrays.



The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its 

earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much 

possessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced 

trust, and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love 

of God.  The former is a dramatic relationship that drifts to a 

climax, and then again seeks presently a climax, and that may be 

satiated or fatigued.  But the latter is far more like the love of 

comrades, or like the love of a man and a woman who have loved and 

been through much trouble together, who have hurt one another and 

forgiven, and come to a complete and generous fellowship.  There is 

a strange and beautiful love that men tell of that will spring up on 

battlefields between sorely wounded men, and often they are men who 

have fought together, so that they will do almost incredibly brave 

and tender things for one another, though but recently they have 

been trying to kill each other.  There is often a pure exaltation of 

feeling between those who stand side by side manfully in any great 

stress.  These are the forms of love that perhaps come nearest to 

what we mean when we speak of the love of God.



That is man's love of God, but there is also something else; there 

is the love God bears for man in the individual believer.  Now this 

is not an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love 

of a woman for her baby.  It is the love of the captain for his men; 

God must love his followers as a great captain loves his men, who 

are so foolish, so helpless in themselves, so confiding, and yet 

whose faith alone makes him possible.  It is an austere love.  The 

spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and bodily 

death. . . .



And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach 

him.  He has need of us as we of him.  He desires us and desires to 

make himself known to us.  When at last the individual breaks 

through the limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that 

moment, the smile and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man.  He 

has won us from his enemy.  We come staggering through into the 

golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth, 

until at last we are altogether taken up into his being.







CHAPTER THE FOURTH



THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS







1. THE SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST





It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to 

drape about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God, 

the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth 

bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness.  

It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme 

instability of absolute negation.



Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who 

was a very typical antagonist of all religion.  He died only the 

other day.  He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man 

almost of the rank and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin.  A 

decade or more ago he wrote a book called "The Nature of Man," in 

which he set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts about 

life.  They are facts so illuminating that presently, in our 

discussion of sin, they will be referred to again.  But it is not 

Professor Metchnikoff's intention to provide material for a 

religious discussion.  He sets out his facts in order to overthrow 

theology as he conceives it.  The remarkable thing about his book, 

the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no 

inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive 

theology as he conceives it.  The development of his science has 

destroyed that right.



He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our 

ideas of individuality and species, and how the import of theology 

is modified through these changes.  When he comes from his own world 

of modern biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time.  

He attacks religion as he understood it when first he fell out with 

it fifty years or more ago.



Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes 

that biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the 

general scheme and method of our thinking.



The influence of biology upon thought in general consists 

essentially in diminishing the importance of the individual and 

developing the realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of 

super-individual, a modifying and immortal super-individual, 

maintaining itself against the outer universe by the birth and death 

of its constituent individuals.  Natural History, which began by 

putting individuals into species as if the latter were mere 

classificatory divisions, has come to see that the species has its 

adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding in interest and 

importance the individual adventure.  "The Origin of Species" was 

for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.



The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be 

stated plainly and compactly as follows.  A little while ago we 

current individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us 

distributed between two parents, then between four grandparents, and 

so on backward, we are temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an 

ancestral diffusion; we stand our trial, and presently our 

individuality is dispersed and mixed again with other 

individualities in an uncertain multitude of descendants.  But the 

species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to 

newness, remaining still a unity.  The drama of the individual life 

is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing 

adventure of the species.  And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble 

of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is 

still very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions 

under which it lives.  The conflict of life is a continual pursuit 

of adjustment, and the "ills of life," of the individual life that 

is, are due to its "disharmonies."  Man, acutely aware of himself as 

an individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species, 

finds life jangling and distressful, finds death frustration.  He 

fails and falls as a person in what may be the success and triumph 

of his kind.  He does not apprehend the struggle or the nature of 

victory, but only his own gravitation to death and personal 

extinction.



Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-

religious because to him as to so many Europeans religion is 

confused with priest-craft and dogmas, is associated with 

disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and 

misguidance.  How completely he misconceives the quality of 

religion, how completely he sees it as an individual's affair, his 

own words may witness:





"Religion is still occupied with the problem of death.  The 

solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as 

satisfactory.  A future life has no single argument to support it, 

and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the 

whole range of human knowledge.  On the other hand, resignation as 

preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a 

longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the 

inevitability of death."





Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death, 

and by a future life the prolongation of individuality.  But 

Buddhism does not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with 

that, and modern religious developments are certainly not under that 

preoccupation with the narrower self.  Buddhism indeed so far from 

"preaching resignation" to death, seeks as its greater good a death 

so complete as to be absolute release from the individual's burthen 

of KARMA.  Buddhism seeks an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY.  

The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it 

approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and 

over-individuation, and the more it diverges from Professor 

Metchnikoff's assertion of its aims.  Salvation is indeed to lose 

one's self.  But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied that 

this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the 

religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if 

they were the antithesis of the religious life.  His book, when it 

is analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape 

from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is 

the ultimate of religion.



At times, indeed, he seems almost wilfully blind to the true 

solution round and about which his writing goes.  He suggests as his 

most hopeful satisfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such 

a scientific prolongation of life that the instinct for self-

preservation will be at last extinct.  If that is not the very 

"resignation" he imputes to the Buddhist I do not know what it is.  

He believes that an individual which has lived fully and completely 

may at last welcome death with the same instinctive readiness as, in 

the days of its strength, it shows for the embraces of its mate.  We 

are to be glutted by living to six score and ten.  We are to rise 

from the table at last as gladly as we sat down.  We shall go to 

death as unresistingly as tired children go to bed.  Men are to have 

a life far beyond the range of what is now considered their prime, 

and their last period (won by scientific self-control) will be a 

period of ripe wisdom (from seventy to eighty to a hundred and 

twenty or thereabouts) and public service!



(But why, one asks, public service?  Why not book-collecting or the 

simple pleasure of reminiscence so dear to aged egotists?  

Metchnikoff never faces that question.  And again, what of the man 

who is challenged to die for right at the age of thirty?  What does 

the prolongation of life do for him?  And where are the consolations 

for accidental misfortune, for the tormenting disease or the lost 

limb?)



But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff lapses into pure 

religiosity.  The prolongation of life gives place to sheer self-

sacrifice as the fundamental "remedy."  And indeed what other remedy 

has ever been conceived for the general evil of life?





"On the other hand," he writes, "the knowledge that the goal of 

human life can be attained only by the development of a high degree 

of solidarity amongst men will restrain actual egotism.  The mere 

fact that the enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon 

(Ecelesiastes ix. 7-10)* is opposed to the goal of human life, will 

lessen luxury and the evil that comes from luxury.  Conviction that 

science alone is able to redress the disharmonies of the human 

constitution will lead directly to the improvement of education and 

to the solidarity of mankind.



* Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a 

merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.  Let thy garments be 

always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.  Live joyfully with 

the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, 

which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity 

for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou 

takest under the sun.  whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with 

thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor 

wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.



"In progress towards the goal, nature will have to be consulted 

continuously.  Already, in the case of the ephemerids, nature has 

produced a complete cycle of normal life ending in natural death.  

In the problem of his own fate, man must not be content with the 

gifts of nature; he must direct them by his own efforts.  Just as he 

has been able to modify the nature of animals and plants, man must 

attempt to modify his own constitution, so as to readjust its 

disharmonies. . . .



"To modify the human constitution, it will be necessary first, to 

frame the ideal, and thereafter to set to work with all the 

resources of science.



"If there can be formed an ideal able to unite men in a kind of 

religion of the future, this ideal must be founded on scientific 

principles.  And if it be true, as has been asserted so often, that 

man can live by faith alone, the faith must be in the power of 

science."





Now this, after all the flat repudiations that have preceded it of 

"religion" and "philosophy" as remedies for human ills, is nothing 

less than the fundamental proposition of the religious life 

translated into terms of materialistic science, the proposition that 

damnation is really over-individuation and that salvahon is escape 

from self into the larger being of life. . . .



What can this "religion of the future" be but that devotion to the 

racial adventure under the captaincy of God which we have already 

found, like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed 

away the confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion?  By an 

inquiry setting out from a purely religious starting-point we have 

already reached conclusions identical with this ultimate refuge of 

an extreme materialist.



This altar to the Future of his, we can claim as an altar to our 

God--an altar rather indistinctly inscribed.







2. SACRIFICE IMPLIES GOD





Almost all Agnostic and Atheistical writings that show any fineness 

and generosity of spirit, have this tendency to become as it were 

the statement of an anonymous God.  Everything is said that a 

religious writer would say--except that God is not named.  Religious 

metaphors abound.  It is as if they accepted the living body of 

religion but denied the bones that held it together--as they might 

deny the bones of a friend.  It is true, they would admit, the body 

moves in a way that implies bones in its every movement, but --WE 

HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE BONES.



The disputes in theory--I do not say the difference in reality--

between the modern believer and the atheist or agnostic--becomes at 

times almost as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear to 

students of physics, whether the scientific "ether" is real or a 

formula.  Every material phenomenon is consonant with and helps to 

define this ether, which permeates and sustains and is all things, 

which nevertheless is perceptible to no sense, which is reached only 

by an intellectual process.  Most minds are disposed to treat this 

ether as a reality.  But the acutely critical mind insists that what 

is only so attainable by inference is not real; it is no more than 

"a formula that satisfies all phenomena."



But if it comes to that, am I anything more than the formula that 

satisfies all my forms of consciousness?



Intellectually there is hardly anything more than a certain will to 

believe, to divide the religious man who knows God to be utterly 

real, from the man who says that God is merely a formula to satisfy 

moral and spiritual phenomena.  The former has encountered him, the 

other has as yet felt only unassigned impulses.  One says God's will 

is so; the other that Right is so.  One says God moves me to do this 

or that; the other the Good Will in me which I share with you and 

all well-disposed men, moves me to do this or that.  But the former 

makes an exterior reference and escapes a risk of self-

righteousness.



I have recently been reading a book by Mr. Joseph McCabe called "The 

Tyranny of Shams," in which he displays very typically this curious 

tendency to a sort of religion with God "blacked out."  His is an 

extremely interesting case.  He is a writer who was formerly a Roman 

Catholic priest, and in his reaction from Catholicism he displays a 

resolution even sterner than Professor Metchnikoff's, to deny that 

anything religious or divine can exist, that there can be any aim in 

life except happiness, or any guide but "science."  But--and here 

immediately he turns east again--he is careful not to say 

"individual happiness."  And he says "Pleasure is, as Epicureans 

insisted, only a part of a large ideal of happiness."  So he lets 

the happiness of devotion and sacrifice creep in.  So he opens 

indefinite possibilities of getting away from any merely 

materialistic rule of life.  And he writes:





"In every civilised nation the mass of the people are inert and 

indifferent.  Some even make a pretence of justifying their 

inertness.  Why, they ask, should we stir at all?  Is there such a 

thing as a duty to improve the earth?  What is the meaning or 

purpose of life?  Or has it a purpose?



"One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece 

of controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness.  People 

tell you that the conflict of science and religion--it would be 

better to say, the conflict of modern culture and ancient 

traditions--has robbed life of its plain significance.  The men who, 

like Tolstoi, seriously urge this point fail to appreciate the 

modern outlook on life.  Certainly modern culture--science, history, 

philosophy, and art--finds no purpose in life: that is to say, no 

purpose eternally fixed and to be discovered by man.  A great 

chemist said a few years ago that he could imagine 'a series of 

lucky accidents'--the chance blowing by the wind of certain 

chemicals into pools on the primitive earth--accounting for the 

first appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the 

influences which have lifted those early germs to the level of 

conscious beings as a similar series of lucky accidents.



"But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us.  If 

there is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the 

development of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose 

its own purpose and set up its own goal; and the most elementary 

sense of order will teach us that this choice must be social, not 

merely individual.  In whatever measure ill-controlled individuals 

may yield to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race 

must be a collective aim.  I do not mean an austere demand of self-

sacrifice from the individual, but an adjustment--as genial and 

generous as possible--of individual variations for common good.  

Otherwise life becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste 

react on each individual.  So we raise again, in the twentieth 

century, the old question of 'the greatest good,' which men 

discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the suburban groves of Athens, in 

the cool atria of patrician mansions on the Palatine and the 

Pincian, in the Museum at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar 

Khayyam frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages 

and the opulent chambers of Cosimo dei Medici."





And again:





"The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve life, to bring 

happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach, shines above 

all the mists of the day.  Through the ruins of creeds and 

philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our 

steps toward that height--just as the Athenians did two thousand 

years ago.  It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no 

disputable tradition--nothing that scepticism can corrode or 

advancing knowledge undermine.  Its foundations are the fundamental 

and unchanging impulses of our nature."





And again:





"The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our 

time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome 

of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the 

general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor 

altruistic.  It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an 

inspiration in the finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow 

which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a 

happier earth.  It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and 

assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of 

social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy 

which is linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges 

all to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation 

of happiness.  The advance guard of the race, the men and women in 

whom mental alertness is associated with fine feeling, cry that they 

have reached Pisgah's slope and in increasing numbers men and women 

are pressing on to see if it be really the Promised Land."





"Pisgah--the Promised Land!"  Mr.  McCabe in that passage sounds as 

if he were half-way to "Oh! Beulah Land!" and the tambourine.



That "larger spirit," we maintain, is God; those "impulses" are the 

power of God, and Mr. McCabe serves a Master he denies.  He has but 

to realise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the 

Catholic Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be 

lured back to that altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from 

that preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to realise the 

presence of Divinity.







3. GOD IS AN EXTERNAL REALITY





It may be argued that if atheists and agnostics when they set 

themselves to express the good will that is in them, do shape out 

God, that if their conception of right living falls in so completely 

with the conception of God's service as to be broadly identical, 

then indeed God, like the ether of scientific speculation, is no 

more than a theory, no more than an imaginative externalisation of 

man's inherent good will.  Why trouble about God then?  Is not the 

declaration of a good disposition a sufficient evidence of 

salvation?  What is the difference between such benevolent 

unbelievers as Professor Metchnikoff or Mr. McCabe and those who 

have found God?



The difference is this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone 

upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, 

trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral 

strength.  A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs 

like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs 

beneath his feet.  He has not really given himself or got away from 

himself.  He has no one to whom he can give himself.  He is still a 

masterless man.  His exaltation is self-centred, is priggishness, 

his fall is unrestrained by any exterior obligation.  His devotion 

is only the good will in himself, a disposition; it is a mood that 

may change.  At any moment it may change.  He may have pledged 

himself to his own pride and honour, but who will hold him to his 

bargain?  He has no source of strength beyond his own amiable 

sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported voice, and no 

one watches while he sleeps.  He cannot pray; he can but ejaculate.  

He has no real and living link with other men of good will.



And those whose acquiescence in the idea of God is merely 

intellectual are in no better case than those who deny God 

altogether.  They may have all the forms of truth and not divinity.  

The religion of the atheist with a God-shaped blank at its heart and 

the persuasion of the unconverted theologian, are both like lamps 

unlit.  The lit lamp has no difference in form from the lamp unlit.  

But the lit lamp is alive and the lamp unlit is asleep or dead.



The difference between the unconverted and the unbeliever and the 

servant of the true God is this; it is that the latter has 

experienced a complete turning away from self.  This only difference 

is all the difference in the world.  It is the realisation that this 

goodness that I thought was within me and of myself and upon which I 

rather prided myself, is without me and above myself, and infinitely 

greater and stronger than I.  It is the immortal and I am mortal.  

It is invincible and steadfast in its purpose, and I am weak and 

insecure.  It is no longer that I, out of my inherent and remarkable 

goodness, out of the excellence of my quality and the benevolence of 

my heart, give a considerable amount of time and attention to the 

happiness and welfare of others--because I choose to do so.  On the 

contrary I have come under a divine imperative, I am obeying an 

irresistible call, I am a humble and willing servant of the 

righteousness of God.  That altruism which Professor Metchnikoff and 

Mr. McCabe would have us regard as the goal and refuge of a broad 

and free intelligence, is really the first simple commandment in the 

religious life.







4. ANOTHER RELIGIOUS MATERIALIST





Now here is a passage from a book, "Evolution and the War," by 

Professor Metchnikoff's translator, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, which 

comes even closer to our conception of God as an immortal being 

arising out of man, and external to the individual man.  He has been 

discussing that well-known passage of Kant's: "Two things fill my 

mind with ever-renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I 

dwell on them--the starry vault above me, and the moral law within 

me."



From that discussion, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell presently comes to this 

most definite and interesting statement:





"Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the 

scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as 

one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not 

shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a 

secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert 

as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external 

to man as the starry vault.  It has no secure seat in any single man 

or in any single nation.  It is the work of the blood and tears of 

long generations of men.  It is not in man, inborn or innate, but is 

enshrined in his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and 

his religion.  Its creation and sustenance are the crowning glory of 

man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a high place above the 

animal world.  Men live and die; nations rise and fall, but the 

struggle of individual lives and of individual nations must be 

measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the 

debasement or perfection of man's great achievement."





This is the same reality.  This is the same Link and Captain that 

this book asserts.  It seems to me a secondary matter whether we 

call Him "Man's Great Achievement" or "The Son of Man" or the "God 

of Mankind" or "God."  So far as the practical and moral ends of 

life are concerned, it does not matter how we explain or refuse to 

explain His presence in our lives.



There is but one possible gap left between the position of Dr. 

Chalmers Mitchell and the position of this book.  In this book it is 

asserted that GOD RESPONDS, that he GIVES courage and the power of 

self-suppression to our weakness.







5. A NOTE ON A LECTURE BY PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY





Let me now quote and discuss a very beautiful passage from a lecture 

upon Stoicism by Professor Gilbert Murray, which also displays the 

same characteristic of an involuntary shaping out of God in the 

forms of denial.  It is a passage remarkable for its conscientious 

and resolute Agnosticism.  And it is remarkable too for its 

blindness to the possibility of separating quite completely the idea 

of the Infinite Being from the idea of God.  It is another striking 

instance of that obsession of modern minds by merely Christian 

theology of which I have already complained.  Professor Murray has 

quoted Mr. Bevan's phrase for God, "the Friend behind phenomena," 

and he does not seem to realise that that phrase carries with it no 

obligation whatever to believe that this Friend is in control of the 

phenomena.  He assumes that he is supposed to be in control as if it 

were a matter of course:





"We do seem to find," Professor Murray writes, "not only in all 

religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man 

is not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours 

towards the good by some external help or sympathy.  We find it 

everywhere in the unsophisticated man.  We find it in the unguarded 

self-revelations of the most severe and conscientious Atheists.  

Now, the Stoics, like many other schools of thought, drew an 

argument from this consensus of all mankind.  It was not an absolute 

proof of the existence of the Gods or Providence, but it was a 

strong indication.  The existence of a common instinctive belief in 

the mind of man gives at least a presumption that there must be a 

good cause for that belief.



"This is a reasonable position.  There must be some such cause.  But 

it does not follow that the only valid cause is the truth of the 

content of the belief.  I cannot help suspecting that this is 

precisely one of those points on which Stoicism, in company with 

almost all philosophy up to the present time, has gone astray 

through not sufficiently realising its dependence on the human mind 

as a natural biological product.  For it is very important in this 

matter to realise that the so-called belief is not really an 

intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature.



"It is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to 

realise the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is 

normally unconscious.  We cannot escape as easily as these brave men 

dreamed from the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold.  

Indeed, as I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this 

unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I 

myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from 

making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we 

are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct.  We are 

gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages.  

We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we 

see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship.  Students of animals 

under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious 

creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details 

by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there--the pack 

which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out 

walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens.  It is 

a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious 

animal for the herd of friends who are not there.  And it may be, it 

may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind 

phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable 

instinctive conviction, since they are certainly not founded on 

either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-

souled gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the 

great spaces between the stars.



"At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of."





There the passage and the lecture end.



I would urge that here again is an inadvertent witness to the 

reality of God.



Professor Murray writes of gregarious animals as though there 

existed solitary animals that are not gregarious, pure 

individualists, "atheists" so to speak, and as though this appeal to 

a life beyond one's own was not the universal disposition of living 

things.  His classical training disposes him to a realistic 

exaggeration of individual difference.  But nearly every animal, and 

certainly every mentally considerable animal, begins under parental 

care, in a nest or a litter, mates to breed, and is associated for 

much of its life.  Even the great carnivores do not go alone except 

when they are old and have done with the most of life.  Every pack, 

every herd, begins at some point in a couple, it is the equivalent 

of the tiger's litter if that were to remain undispersed.  And it is 

within the memory of men still living that in many districts the 

African lion has with a change of game and conditions lapsed from a 

"solitary" to a gregarious, that is to say a prolonged family habit 

of life.



Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher 

apes, is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less.  He has 

passed within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to 

a nearly cosmopolitan tolerance.  And he has his tribe about him.  

He is not, as Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST 

gregarious beast.  Why should his desire for God be regarded as the 

overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when he has home, 

town, society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at 

hand to glut it?  Why should gregariousness drive a man to God 

rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house?  Why 

should gregariousness drive men out of crowded Egyptian cities into 

the cells of the Thebaid?  Schopenhauer in a memorable passage 

(about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is flatly opposed to 

Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when he declares that 

the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious.  The parallel with 

the dog is not a valid one.



Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the 

Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation?  Is not 

the real deception, our belief that we are completely 

individualised, and is it not possible that this that Professor 

Murray calls "instinct" is really not a vestige but a new thing 

arising out of our increasing understanding, an intellectual 

penetration to that greater being of the species, that vine, of 

which we are the branches?  Why should not the soul of the species, 

many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul like our own?



Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff, and in many other 

cases of atheism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate 

understanding of individuation bars the way to at least the 

intellectual recognition of the true God.







6. RELIGION AS ETHICS





And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent 

interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston's.  You will note that 

while in this book we use the word "God" to indicate the God of the 

Heart, Sir Harry uses "God" for that idea of God-of-the-Universe, 

which we have spoken of as the Infinite Being.  This use of the word 

"God" is of late theological origin; the original identity of the 

words "good" and "god" and all the stories of the gods are against 

him.  But Sir Harry takes up God only to define him away into 

incomprehensible necessity.  Thus:





"We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force we call God; and, 

assuming such an intelligent ruling force to be in existence, 

permeating this universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of 

millions of planets, we do not know under what conditions and 

limitations It works.  We are quite entitled to assume that the end 

of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness 

and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled 

to identify the reactionary forces of brute Nature with the 

anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of darkness 

resisting the power of light.  But in these conjectures we must 

surely come to the conclusion that the theoretical potency we call 

'God' makes endless experiments, and scrap-heaps the failures.  

Think of the Dinosaurs and the expenditure of creative energy that 

went to their differentiation and their wellnigh incredible physical 

development. . . .



"To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and 

perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may 

seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out, 

the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should 

feel as little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and fragments 

as must the Creative Force of the immeasurably vast universe feel 

for the DISJECTA MEMBRA of perfected life on this planet. . . ."





But thence he goes on to a curiously imperfect treatment of the God 

of man as if he consisted in nothing more than some vague sort of 

humanitarianism.  Sir Harry's ideas are much less thoroughly thought 

out than those of any other of these sceptical writers I have 

quoted.  On that account they are perhaps more typical.  He speaks 

as though Christ were simply an eminent but illreported and 

abominably served teacher of ethics--and yet of the only right ideal 

and ethics.  He speaks as though religions were nothing more than 

ethical movements, and as though Christianity were merely someone 

remarking with a bright impulsiveness that everything was simply 

horrid, and so, "Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal axiom.   

He ignores altogether the fundamental essential of religion, which 

is THE DEVELOPMENT AND SYNTHESIS OF THE DIVERGENT AND CONFLICTING 

MOTIVES OF THE UNCONVERTED LIFE, AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE 

INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITH THE IMMORTAL PURPOSE OF GOD.  He presents a 

conception of religion relieved of its "nonsense" as the cheerful 

self-determination of a number of bright little individuals (much 

stirred but by no means overcome by Cosmic Pity) to the Service of 

Man.  As he seems to present it, it is as outward a thing, it goes 

as little into the intimacy of their lives, as though they had after 

proper consideration agreed to send a subscription to a Red Cross 

Ambulance or take part in a public demonstration against the 

Armenian Massacres, or do any other rather nice-spirited exterior 

thing.  This is what he says:





"I hope that the religion of the future will devote itself wholly to 

the Service of Man.  It can do so without departing from the 

Christian ideal and Christian ethics.  It need only drop all that is 

silly and disputable, and 'mattering not neither here nor there,' of 

Christian theology--a theology virtually absent from the direct 

teaching of Christ--and all of Judaistic literature or prescriptions 

not made immortal in their application by unassailable truth and by 

the confirmation of science.  An excellent remedy for the nonsense 

which still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter 

Monson's 'Service of Man,' which was published as long ago as 1887, 

and has since been re-issued by the Rationalist Press Association in 

its well-known sixpenny series, and J. Allanson Picton's 'Man and 

the Bible.'  Similarly, those who wish to acquire a sane view of the 

relations between man and God would do well to read Winwood Reade's 

'Martyrdom of Man.'"





Sir Harry in fact clears the ground for God very ably, and then 

makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space.  There is no help 

nor strength in his gesture unless God is there.  Without God, the 

"Service of Man" is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an 

hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison of the mortal life.







CHAPTER THE FIFTH



THE INVISIBLE KING





1. MODERN RELIGION A POLITICAL RELIGION





The conception of a young and energetic God, an Invisible Prince 

growing in strength and wisdom, who calls men and women to his 

service and who gives salvation from self and mortality only through 

self-abandonment to his service, necessarily involves a demand for a 

complete revision and fresh orientation of the life of the convert.



God faces the blackness of the Unknown and the blind joys and 

confusions and cruelties of Life, as one who leads mankind through a 

dark jungle to a great conquest.  He brings mankind not rest but a 

sword.  It is plain that he can admit no divided control of the 

world he claims.  He concedes nothing to Caesar.  In our philosophy 

there are no human things that are God's and others that are 

Caesar's.  Those of the new thought cannot render unto God the 

things that are God's, and to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.  

Whatever claim Caesar may make to rule men's lives and direct their 

destinies outside the will of God, is a usurpation.  No king nor 

Caesar has any right to tax or to service or to tolerance, except he 

claim as one who holds for and under God.  And he must make good his 

claim.  The steps of the altar of the God of Youth are no safe place 

for the sacrilegious figure of a king.  Who claims "divine right" 

plays with the lightning.



The new conceptions do not tolerate either kings or aristocracies or 

democracies.  Its implicit command to all its adherents is to make 

plain the way to the world theocracy.  Its rule of life is the 

discovery and service of the will of God, which dwells in the hearts 

of men, and the performance of that will, not only in the private 

life of the believer but in the acts and order of the state and 

nation of which he is a part.  I give myself to God not only because 

I am so and so but because I am mankind.  I become in a measure 

responsible for every evil in the world of men.  I become a knight 

in God's service.  I become my brother's keeper.  I become a 

responsible minister of my King.  I take sides against injustice, 

disorder, and against all those temporal kings, emperors, princes, 

landlords, and owners, who set themselves up against God's rule and 

worship.  Kings, owners, and all who claim rule and decisions in the 

world's affairs, must either show themselves clearly the fellow-

servants of the believer or become the objects of his steadfast 

antagonism.







2. THE WILL OF GOD





It is here that those who explain this modern religiosity will seem 

most arbitrary to the inquirer.  For they relate of God, as men will 

relate of a close friend, his dispositions, his apparent intentions, 

the aims of his kingship.  And just as they advance no proof 

whatever of the existence of God but their realisation of him, so 

with regard to these qualities and dispositions they have little 

argument but profound conviction.  What they say is this; that if 

you do not feel God then there is no persuading you of him; we 

cannot win over the incredulous.  And what they say of his qualities 

is this; that if you feel God then you will know, you will realise 

more and more clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method 

and intention.



It comes as no great shock to those who have grasped the full 

implications of the statement that God is Finite, to hear it 

asserted that the first purpose of God is the attainment of clear 

knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of 

knowledge as a means to power.  For that he must use human eyes and 

hands and brains.



And as God gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only 

beginning to apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as 

time goes on.  But it is possible to define the broad outlines of 

the attainment he seeks.  It is the conquest of death.



It is the conquest of death; first the overcoming of death in the 

individual by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an 

undying purpose, and then the defeat of that death that seems to 

threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun.  

God fights against death in every form, against the great death of 

the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, 

baseness, misconception, and perversion.  He it is and no other who 

can deliver us "from the body of this death."  This is the battle 

that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of 

the animal's round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and 

laughing and weeping, fearing and failing, and presently of wearying 

and dying, which is the whole life that living without God 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 co-ordinated 

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, 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 co-operation 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 

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 is to do as much as one can of God's work.







9. THE PRIEST AND THE CREED





It may be doubted if this line of reasoning regarding the official 

and his oath can be extended to excuse the priest or pledged 

minister of religion who finds that faith in the true God has ousted 

his formal beliefs.



This has been a frequent and subtle moral problem in the 

intellectual life of the last hundred years.  It has been 

increasingly difficult for any class of reading, talking, and 

discussing people such as are the bulk of the priesthoods of the 

Christian churches to escape hearing and reading the accumulated 

criticism of the Trinitarian theology and of the popularly accepted 

story of man's fall and salvation.  Some have no doubt defeated this 

universal and insidious critical attack entirely, and honestly 

established themselves in a right-down acceptance of the articles 

and disciplines to which they have subscribed and of the creeds they 

profess and repeat.  Some have recanted and abandoned their 

positions in the priesthood.  But a great number have neither 

resisted the bacillus of criticism nor left the churches to which 

they are attached.  They have adopted compromises, they have 

qualified their creeds with modifying footnotes of essential 

repudiation; they have decided that plain statements are metaphors 

and have undercut, transposed, and inverted the most vital points of 

the vulgarly accepted beliefs.  One may find within the Anglican 

communion, Arians, Unitarians, Atheists, disbelievers in 

immortality, attenuators of miracles; there is scarcely a doubt or a 

cavil that has not found a lodgment within the ample charity of the 

English Establishment.  I have been interested to hear one 

distinguished Canon deplore that "they" did not identify the Logos 

with the third instead of the second Person of the Trinity, and 

another distinguished Catholic apologist declare his indifference to 

the "historical Jesus."  Within most of the Christian communions one 

may believe anything or nothing, provided only that one does not 

call too public an attention to one's eccentricity.  The late Rev. 

Charles Voysey, for example, preached plainly in his church at 

Healaugh against the divinity of Christ, unhindered.  It was only 

when he published his sermons under the provocative title of "The 

Sling and the Stone," and caused an outcry beyond the limits of his 

congregation, that he was indicted and deprived.



Now the reasons why these men do not leave the ministry or 

priesthood in which they find themselves are often very plausible.  

It is probable that in very few cases is the retention of stipend or 

incumbency a conscious dishonesty.  At the worst it is mitigated by 

thought for wife or child.  It has only been during very exceptional 

phases of religious development and controversy that beliefs have 

been really sharp.  A creed, like a coin, it may be argued, loses 

little in practical value because it is worn, or bears the image of 

a vanished king.  The religious life is a reality that has clothed 

itself in many garments, and the concern of the priest or minister 

is with the religious life and not with the poor symbols that may 

indeed pretend to express, but do as a matter of fact no more than 

indicate, its direction.  It is quite possible to maintain that the 

church and not the creed is the real and valuable instrument of 

religion, that the religious life is sustained not by its 

propositions but by its routines.  Anyone who seeks the intimate 

discussion of spiritual things with professional divines, will find 

this is the substance of the case for the ecclesiastical sceptic.  

His church, he will admit, mumbles its statement of truth, but where 

else is truth?  What better formulae are to be found for ineffable 

things?  And meanwhile--he does good.



That may be a valid defence before a man finds God.  But we who 

profess the worship and fellowship of the living God deny that 

religion is a matter of ineffable things.  The way of God is plain 

and simple and easy to understand.



Therewith the whole position of the conforming sceptic is changed.  

If a professional religious has any justification at all for his 

professionalism it is surely that he proclaims the nearness and 

greatness of God.  And these creeds and articles and orthodoxies are 

not proclamations but curtains, they are a darkening and confusion 

of what should be crystal clear.  What compensatory good can a 

priest pretend to do when his primary business is the truth and his 

method a lie?  The oaths and incidental conformities of men who wish 

to serve God in the state are on a different footing altogether from 

the falsehood and mischief of one who knows the true God and yet 

recites to a trustful congregation, foists upon a trustful 

congregation, a misleading and ill-phrased Levantine creed.



Such is the line of thought which will impose the renunciation of 

his temporalities and a complete cessation of services upon every 

ordained priest and minister as his first act of faith.  Once that 

he has truly realised God, it becomes impossible for him ever to 

repeat his creed again.  His course seems plain and clear.  It 

becomes him to stand up before the flock he has led in error, and to 

proclaim the being and nature of the one true God.  He must be 

explicit to the utmost of his powers.  Then he may await his 

expulsion.  It may be doubted whether it is sufficient for him to go 

away silently, making false excuses or none at all for his retreat.  

He has to atone for the implicit acquiescences of his conforming 

years.







10. THE UNIVERSALISM OF GOD





Are any sorts of people shut off as if by inherent necessity from 

God?



This is, so to speak, one of the standing questions of theology; it 

reappears with slight changes of form at every period of religious 

interest, it is for example the chief issue between the Arminian and 

the Calvinist.  From its very opening proposition modern religion 

sweeps past and far ahead of the old Arminian teachings of Wesleyans 

and Methodists, in its insistence upon the entirely finite nature of 

God.  Arminians seem merely to have insisted that God has 

conditioned himself, and by his own free act left men free to accept 

or reject salvation.  To the realist type of mind--here as always I 

use "realist" in its proper sense as the opposite of nominalist--to 

the old-fashioned, over-exact and over-accentuating type of mind, 

such ways of thinking seem vague and unsatisfying.  Just as it 

distresses the more downright kind of intelligence with a feeling of 

disloyalty to admit that God is not Almighty, so it troubles the 

same sort of intelligence to hear that there is no clear line to be 

drawn between the saved and the lost.  Realists like an exclusive 

flavour in their faith.  Moreover, it is a natural weakness of 

humanity to be forced into extreme positions by argument.  It is 

probable, as I have already suggested, that the absolute attributes 

of God were forced upon Christianity under the stresses of 

propaganda, and it is probable that the theory of a super-human 

obstinancy beyond salvation arose out of the irritations natural to 

theological debate.  It is but a step from the realisation that 

there are people absolutely unable or absolutely unwilling to see 

God as we see him, to the conviction that they are therefore shut 

off from God by an invincible soul blindness.



It is very easy to believe that other people are essentially damned.



Beyond the little world of our sympathies and comprehension there 

are those who seem inaccessible to God by any means within our 

experience.  They are people answering to the "hard-hearted," to the 

"stiff-necked generation" of the Hebrew prophets.  They betray and 

even confess to standards that seem hopelessly base to us.  They 

show themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty 

or truth or goodness.  They are altogether remote from intelligent 

sacrifice.  To every test they betray vileness of texture; they are 

mean, cold, wicked.  There are people who seem to cheat with a 

private self-approval, who are ever ready to do harsh and cruel 

things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and 


for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize 

upon religion and turn it into persecution, and upon beauty to 

torment it on the altars of some joyless vice.  We cannot do with 

such souls; we have no use for them, and it is very easy indeed to 

step from that persuasion to the belief that God has no use for 

them.



And besides these base people there are the stupid people and the 

people with minds so poor in texture that they cannot even grasp the 

few broad and simple ideas that seem necessary to the salvation we 

experience, who lapse helplessly into fetishistic and fearful 

conceptions of God, and are apparently quite incapable of 

distinguishing between what is practically and what is spiritually 

good.



It is an easy thing to conclude that the only way to God is our way 

to God, that he is the privilege of a finer and better sort to which 

we of course belong; that he is no more the God of the card-sharper 

or the pickpocket or the "smart" woman or the loan-monger or the 

village oaf than he is of the swine in the sty.  But are we 

justified in thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and 

intellectual understandings?  Because some people seem to me 

steadfastly and consistently base or hopelessly and incurably dull 

and confused, does it follow that there are not phases, albeit I 

have never chanced to see them, of exaltation in the one case and 

illumination in the other?  And may I not be a little restricting my 

perception of Good?  While I have been ready enough to pronounce 

this or that person as being, so far as I was concerned, thoroughly 

damnable or utterly dull, I find a curious reluctance to admit the 

general proposition which is necessary for these instances.  It is 

possible that the difference between Arminian and Calvinist is a 

difference of essential intellectual temperament rather than of 

theoretical conviction.  I am temperamentally Arminian as I am 

temperamentally Nominalist.  I feel that it must be in the nature of 

God to attempt all souls.  There must be accessibilities I can only 

suspect, and accessibilities of which I know nothing.



Yet here is a consideration pointing rather the other way.  If you 

think, as you must think, that you yourself can be lost to God and 

damned, then I cannot see how you can avoid thinking that other 

people can be damned.  But that is not to believe that there are 

people damned at the outset by their moral and intellectual 

insufficiency; that is not to make out that there is a class of 

essential and incurable spiritual defectives.  The religious life 

preceded clear religious understanding and extends far beyond its 

range.



In my own case I perceive that in spite of the value I attach to 

true belief, the reality of religion is not an intellectual thing.  

The essential religious fact is in another than the mental sphere.  

I am passionately anxious to have the idea of God clear in my own 

mind, and to make my beliefs plain and clear to other people, and 

particularly to other people who may seem to be feeling with me; I 

do perceive that error is evil if only because a faith based on 

confused conceptions and partial understandings may suffer 

irreparable injury through the collapse of its substratum of ideas.  

I doubt if faith can be complete and enduring if it is not secured 

by the definite knowledge of the true God.  Yet I have also to admit 

that I find the form of my own religious emotion paralleled by 

people with whom I have no intellectual sympathy and no agreement in 

phrase or formula at all.



There is for example this practical identity of religious feeling 

and this discrepancy of interpretation between such an inquirer as 

myself and a convert of the Salvation Army.  Here, clothing itself 

in phrases and images of barbaric sacrifice, of slaughtered lambs 

and fountains of precious blood, a most repulsive and 

incomprehensible idiom to me, and expressing itself by shouts, 

clangour, trumpeting, gesticulations, and rhythmic pacings that stun 

and dismay my nerves, I find, the same object sought, release from 

self, and the same end, the end of identification with the immortal, 

successfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved.  I see God 

indubitably present in these excitements, and I see personalities I 

could easily have misjudged as too base or too dense for spiritual 

understandings, lit by the manifest reflection of divinity.  One may 

be led into the absurdest underestimates of religious possibilities 

if one estimates people only coldly and in the light of everyday 

life.  There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very 

conceivably, when its utmost range can be examined, excludes nothing 

human from religious cooperation, which will use any words to its 

tune, which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world about it, 

as it takes the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its 

inner point in the directest contact with God.  Religion may suffer 

from aphasia and still be religion; it may utter misleading or 

nonsensical words and yet intend and convey the truth.  The methods 

of the Salvation Army are older than doctrinal Christianity, and may 

long survive it.  Men and women may still chant of Beulah Land and 

cry out in the ecstasy of salvation; the tambourine, that modern 

revival of the thrilling Alexandrine sistrum, may still stir dull 

nerves to a first apprehension of powers and a call beyond the 

immediate material compulsion of life, when the creeds of 

Christianity are as dead as the lore of the Druids.



The emancipation of mankind from obsolete theories and formularies 

may be accompanied by great tides of moral and emotional release 

among types and strata that by the standards of a trained and 

explicit intellectual, may seem spiritually hopeless.  It is not 

necessary to imagine the whole world critical and lucid in order to 

imagine the whole world unified in religious sentiment, 

comprehending the same phrases and coming together regardless of 

class and race and quality, in the worship and service of the true 

God.  The coming kingship of God if it is to be more than hieratic 

tyranny must have this universality of appeal.  As the head grows 

clear the body will turn in the right direction.  To the mass of men 

modern religion says, "This is the God it has always been in your 

nature to apprehend."







11. GOD AND THE LOVE AND STATUS OF WOMEN





Now that we are discussing the general question of individual 

conduct, it will be convenient to take up again and restate in that 

relationship, propositions already made very plainly in the second 

and third chapters.  Here there are several excellent reasons for a 

certain amount of deliberate repetition. . . .



All the mystical relations of chastity, virginity, and the like with 

religion, those questions of physical status that play so large a 

part in most contemporary religions, have disappeared from modern 

faith.  Let us be as clear as possible upon this.  God is concerned 

by the health and fitness and vigour of his servants; we owe him our 

best and utmost; but he has no special concern and no special 

preferences or commandments regarding sexual things.



Christ, it is manifest, was of the modern faith in these matters, he 

welcomed the Magdalen, neither would he condemn the woman taken in 

adultery.  Manifestly corruption and disease were not to stand 

between him and those who sought God in him.  But the Christianity 

of the creeds, in this as in so many respects, does not rise to the 

level of its founder, and it is as necessary to repeat to-day as 

though the name of Christ had not been ascendant for nineteen 

centuries, that sex is a secondary thing to religion, and sexual 

status of no account in the presence of God.  It follows quite 

logically that God does not discriminate between man and woman in 

any essential things.  We leave our individuality behind us when we 

come into the presence of God.  Sex is not disavowed but forgotten.  

Just as one's last meal is forgotten--which also is a difference 

between the religious moment of modern faith and certain Christian 

sacraments.  You are a believer and God is at hand to you; heed not 

your state; reach out to him and he is there.  In the moment of 

religion you are human; it matters not what else you are, male or 

female, clean or unclean, Hebrew or Gentile, bond or free.  It is 

AFTER the moment of religion that we become concerned about our 

state and the manner in which we use ourselves.



We have to follow our reason as our sole guide in our individual 

treatment of all such things as food and health and sex.  God is the 

king of the whole world, he is the owner of our souls and bodies and 

all things.  He is not particularly concerned about any aspect, 

because he is concerned about every aspect.  We have to make the 

best use of ourselves for his kingdom; that is our rule of life.  

That rule means neither painful nor frantic abstinences nor any 

forced way of living.  Purity, cleanliness, health, none of these 

things are for themselves, they are for use; none are magic, all are 

means.  The sword must be sharp and clean.  That does not mean that 

we are perpetually to sharpen and clean it--which would weaken and 

waste the blade.  The sword must neither be drawn constantly nor 

always rusting in its sheath.  Those who have had the wits and soul 

to come to God, will have the wits and soul to find out and know 

what is waste, what is vanity, what is the happiness that begets 

strength of body and spirit, what is error, where vice begins, and 

to avoid and repent and recoil from all those things that degrade.  

These are matters not of the rule of life but of the application of 

life.  They must neither be neglected nor made disproportionally 

important.



To the believer, relationship with God is the supreme relationship.  

It is difficult to imagine how the association of lovers and friends 

can be very fine and close and good unless the two who love are each 

also linked to God, so that through their moods and fluctuations and 

the changes of years they can be held steadfast by his undying 

steadfastness.  But it has been felt by many deep-feeling people 

that there is so much kindred between the love and trust of husband 

and wife and the feeling we have for God, that it is reasonable to 

consider the former also as a sacred thing.  They do so value that 

close love of mated man and woman, they are so intent upon its 

permanence and completeness and to lift the dear relationship out of 

the ruck of casual and transitory things, that they want to bring 

it, as it were, into the very presence and assent of God.  There are 

many who dream and desire that they are as deeply and completely 

mated as this, many more who would fain be so, and some who are.  

And from this comes the earnest desire to make marriage sacramental 

and the attempt to impose upon all the world the outward appearance, 

the restrictions, the pretence at least of such a sacramental union.



There may be such a quasi-sacramental union in many cases, but only 

after years can one be sure of it; it is not to be brought about by 

vows and promises but by an essential kindred and cleaving of body 

and spirit; and it concerns only the two who can dare to say they 

have it, and God.  And the divine thing in marriage, the thing that 

is most like the love of God, is, even then, not the relationship of 

the man and woman as man and woman but the comradeship and trust and 

mutual help and pity that joins them.  No doubt that from the mutual 

necessities of bodily love and the common adventure, the necessary 

honesties and helps of a joint life, there springs the stoutest, 

nearest, most enduring and best of human companionship; perhaps only 

upon that root can the best of mortal comradeship be got; but it 

does not follow that the mere ordinary coming together and pairing 

off of men and women is in itself divine or sacramental or anything 

of the sort.  Being in love is a condition that may have its moments 

of sublime exaltation, but it is for the most part an experience far 

down the scale below divine experience; it is often love only in so 

far as it shares the name with better things; it is greed, it is 

admiration, it is desire, it is the itch for excitement, it is the 

instinct for competition, it is lust, it is curiosity, it is 

adventure, it is jealousy, it is hate.  On a hundred scores 'lovers' 

meet and part.  Thereby some few find true love and the spirit of 

God in themselves or others.



Lovers may love God in one another; I do not deny it.  That is no 

reason why the imitation and outward form of this great happiness 

should be made an obligation upon all men and women who are 

attracted by one another, nor why it should be woven into the 

essentials of religion.  For women much more than for men is this 

confusion dangerous, lest a personal love should shape and dominate 

their lives instead of God.  "He for God only; she for God in him," 

phrases the idea of Milton and of ancient Islam; it is the formula 

of sexual infatuation, a formula quite easily inverted, as the end 

of Goethe's Faust ("The woman soul leadeth us upward and on") may 

witness.  The whole drift of modern religious feeling is against 

this exaggeration of sexual feeling, these moods of sexual 

slavishness, in spiritual things.  Between the healthy love of 

ordinary mortal lovers in love and the love of God, there is an 

essential contrast and opposition in this, that preference, 

exclusiveness, and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the 

former and are absolutely incompatible with the latter.  The former 

is the intensest realisation of which our individualities are 

capable; the latter is the way of escape from the limitations of 

individuality.  It may be true that a few men and more women do 

achieve the completest unselfishness and self-abandonment in earthly 

love.  So the poets and romancers tell us.  If so, it is that by an 

imaginative perversion they have given to some attractive person a 

worship that should be reserved for God and a devotion that is 

normally evoked only by little children in their mother's heart.  It 

is not the way between most of the men and women one meets in this 

world.



But between God and the believer there is no other way, there is 

nothing else, but self-surrender and the ending of self.







CHAPTER THE SIXTH



MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION







1. THE BIOLOGICAL EQUIVALENT OF SIN





If the reader who is unfamiliar with scientific things will obtain 

and read Metchnikoff's "Nature of Man," he will find there an 

interesting summary of the biological facts that bear upon and 

destroy the delusion that there is such a thing as individual 

perfection, that there is even ideal perfection for humanity.  With 

an abundance of convincing instances Professor Metchnikoff 

demonstrates that life is a system of "disharmonies," capable of no 

perfect way, that there is no "perfect" dieting, no "perfect" sexual 

life, no "perfect" happiness, no "perfect" conduct.  He releases one 

from the arbitrary but all too easy assumption that there is even an 

ideal "perfection" in organic life.  He sweeps out of the mind with 

all the confidence and conviction of a physiological specialist, any 

idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man.  It 

is in the nature of every man to fall short at every point from 

perfection.  From the biological point of view we are as individuals 

a series of involuntary "tries" on the part of an imperfect species 

towards an unknown end.



Our spiritual nature follows our bodily as a glove follows a hand.  

We are disharmonious beings and salvation no more makes an end to 

the defects of our souls than it makes an end to the decay of our 

teeth or to those vestigial structures of our body that endanger our 

physical welfare.  Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds 

not an inch to our spiritual and moral stature.







2. WHAT IS DAMNATION?





Let us now take up the question of what is Sin? and what we mean by 

the term "damnation," in the light of this view of human reality.  

Most of the great world religions are as clear as Professor 

Metchnikoff that life in the world is a tangle of disharmonies, and 

in most cases they supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they 

declare that evil is one side of the conflict between Ahriman and 

Ormazd, or that it is the punishment of an act of disobedience, of 

the fall of man and world alike from a state of harmony.  Their 

case, like his, is that THIS world is damned.



We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this 

world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after 

death, so nearly universal.  The endless punishments of hell appear 

to be an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even 

in the Christian system; the same common tendency to superlatives 

and absolutes that makes men ashamed to admit that God is finite, 

makes them seek to enhance the merits of their Saviour by the device 

of everlasting fire.  Conquest over the sorrow of life and the fear 

of death do not seem to them sufficient for Christ's glory.



Now the turning round of the modern mind from a conception of the 

universe as something derived deductively from the past to a 

conception of it as something gathering itself adventurously towards 

the future, involves a release from the supposed necessity to tell a 

story and explain why.  Instead comes the inquiry, "To what end?"  

We can say without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are here, 

this damnation is here--inexplicably.  We can, without any 

distressful inquiry into ultimate origins, bring our minds to the 

conception of a spontaneous and developing God arising out of those 

stresses in our hearts and in the universe, and arising to overcome 

them.  Salvation for the individual is escape from the individual 

distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the 

Kingdom of God.  And damnation can be nothing more and nothing less 

than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape.



Something of that idea of damnation as a lack of the will for 

salvation has crept at a number of points into contemporary 

religious thought.  It was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the 

damned go to their own hells of their own accord.  It underlies a 

queer poem, "Simpson," by that interesting essayist upon modern 

Christianity, Mr. Clutton Brock, which I have recently read.  

Simpson dies and goes to hell--it is rather like the Cromwell Road--

and approves of it very highly, and then and then only is he 

completely damned.  Not to realise that one can be damned is 

certainly to be damned; such is Mr. Brock's idea.  It is his 

definition of damnation.  Satisfaction with existing things is 

damnation.  It is surrender to limitation; it is acquiescence in 

"disharmony"; it is making peace with that enemy against whom God 

fights for ever.



(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who acquiesce always and for 

ever remains for me, as I have already confessed in the previous 

chapter, a quite open question.  My Arminian temperament turns me 

from the Calvinistic conclusion of Mr. Brock's satire.)







3. SIN IS NOT DAMNATION





Now the question of sin will hardly concern those damned and lost by 

nature, if such there be.  Sin is not the same thing as damnation, 

as we have just defined damnation.  Damnation is a state, but sin is 

an incident.  One is an essential and the other an incidental 

separation from God.  It is possible to sin without being damned; 

and to be damned is to be in a state when sin scarcely matters, like 

ink upon a blackamoor.  You cannot have questions of more or less 

among absolute things.



It is the amazing and distressful discovery of every believer so 

soon as the first exaltation of belief is past, that one does not 

remain always in touch with God.  At first it seems incredible that 

one should ever have any motive again that is not also God's motive.  

Then one finds oneself caught unawares by a base impulse.  We 

discover that discontinuousness of our apparently homogeneous 

selves, the unincorporated and warring elements that seemed at first 

altogether absent from the synthesis of conversion.  We are tripped 

up by forgetfulness, by distraction, by old habits, by tricks of 

appearance.  There come dull patches of existence; those mysterious 

obliterations of one's finer sense that are due at times to the 

little minor poisons one eats or drinks, to phases of fatigue, ill-

health and bodily disorder, or one is betrayed by some unanticipated 

storm of emotion, brewed deep in the animal being and released by 

any trifling accident, such as personal jealousy or lust, or one is 

relaxed by contentment into vanity.  All these rebel forces of our 

ill-coordinated selves, all these "disharmonies," of the inner 

being, snatch us away from our devotion to God's service, carry us 

off to follies, offences, unkindness, waste, and leave us 

compromised, involved, and regretful, perplexed by a hundred 

difficulties we have put in our own way back to God.



This is the personal problem of Sin.  Here prayer avails; here God 

can help us.  From God comes the strength to repent and make such 

reparation as we can, to begin the battle again further back and 

lower down.  From God comes the power to anticipate the struggle 

with one's rebel self, and to resist and prevail over it.







4. THE SINS OF THE INSANE





An extreme case is very serviceable in such a discussion as this.



It happens that the author carries on a correspondence with several 

lunatics in asylums.  There is a considerable freedom of notepaper 

in these institutions; the outgoing letters are no doubt censored or 

selected in some way, but a proportion at any rate are allowed to go 

out to their addresses.  As a journalist who signs his articles and 

as the author of various books of fiction, as a frequent NAME, that 

is, to any one much forced back upon reading, the writer is 

particularly accessible to this type of correspondent.  The letters 

come, some manifesting a hopeless disorder that permits of no reply, 

but some being the expression of minds overlaid not at all 

offensively by a web of fantasy, and some (and these are the more 

touching ones and the ones that most concern us now) as sanely 

conceived and expressed as any letters could be.  They are written 

by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called 

"sane," except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a 

lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or 

melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take 

abnormal forms.  They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the 

safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of 

drugs, or in dreams and rare moments of controllable extravagance.  

Then the insane become "glorious," or they become murderous, or they 

become suicidal.  All these letter-writers in confinement have 

convinced their fellow-creatures by some extravagance that they are 

a danger to themselves or others.



The letters that come from such types written during their sane 

intervals, are entirely sane.  Some, who are probably unaware--I 

think they should know--of the offences or possibilities that 

justify their incarceration, write with a certain resentment at 

their position; others are entirely acquiescent, but one or two 

complain of the neglect of friends and relations.  But all are as 

manifestly capable of religion and of the religious life as any 

other intelligent persons during the lucid interludes that make up 

nine-tenths perhaps of their lives. . . .  Suppose now one of these 

cases, and suppose that the infirmity takes the form of some cruel, 

disgusting, or destructive disposition that may become at times 

overwhelming, and you have our universal trouble with sinful 

tendency, as it were magnified for examination.  It is clear that 

the mania which defines his position must be the primary if not the 

cardinal business in the life of a lunatic, but his problem with 

that is different not in kind but merely in degree from the problem 

of lusts, vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal lives.  It 

is an unconquered tract, a great rebel province in his being, which 

refuses to serve God and tries to prevent him serving God, and 

succeeds at times in wresting his capital out of his control.  But 

his relationship to that is the same relationship as ours to the 

backward and insubordinate parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly 

houses in our own private texture.



It is clear that the believer who is a lunatic is, as it were, only 

the better part of himself.  He serves God with this unconquered 

disposition in him, like a man who, whatever else he is and does, is 

obliged to be the keeper of an untrustworthy and wicked animal.  His 

beast gets loose.  His only resort is to warn those about him when 

he feels that jangling or excitement of the nerves which precedes 

its escapes, to limit its range, to place weapons beyond its reach.  

And there are plenty of human beings very much in his case, whose 

beasts have never got loose or have got caught back before their 

essential insanity was apparent.  And there are those uncertifiable 

lunatics we call men and women of "impulse" and "strong passions."  

If perhaps they have more self-control than the really mad, yet it 

happens oftener with them that the whole intelligent being falls 

under the dominion of evil.  The passion scarcely less than the 

obsession may darken the whole moral sky.  Repentance and atonement; 

nothing less will avail them after the storm has passed, and the 

sedulous preparation of defences and palliatives against the return 

of the storm.



This discussion of the lunatic's case gives us indeed, usefully 

coarse and large, the lines for the treatment of every human 

weakness by the servants of God.  A "weakness," just like the 

lunatic's mania, becomes a particular charge under God, a special 

duty for the person it affects.  He has to minimise it, to isolate 

it, to keep it out of mischief.  If he can he must adopt preventive 

measures. . . .



These passions and weaknesses that get control of us hamper our 

usefulness to God, they are an incessant anxiety and distress to us, 

they wound our self-respect and make us incomprehensible to many who 

would trust us, they discredit the faith we profess.  If they break 

through and break through again it is natural and proper that men 

and women should cease to believe in our faith, cease to work with 

us or to meet us frankly. . . .  Our sins do everything evil to us 

and through us except separate us from God.



Yet let there be no mistake about one thing.  Here prayer is a 

power.  Here God can indeed work miracles.  A man with the light of 

God in his heart can defeat vicious habits, rise again combative and 

undaunted after a hundred falls, escape from the grip of lusts and 

revenges, make head against despair, thrust back the very onset of 

madness.  He is still the same man he was before he came to God, 

still with his libidinous, vindictive, boastful, or indolent vein; 

but now his will to prevail over those qualities can refer to an 

exterior standard and an external interest, he can draw upon a 

strength, almost boundless, beyond his own.







5. BELIEVE, AND YOU ARE SAVED





But be a sin great or small, it cannot damn a man once he has found 

God.  You may kill and hang for it, you may rob or rape; the moment 

you truly repent and set yourself to such atonement and reparation 

as is possible there remains no barrier between you and God.  

Directly you cease to hide or deny or escape, and turn manfully 

towards the consequences and the setting of things right, you take 

hold again of the hand of God.  Though you sin seventy times seven 

times, God will still forgive the poor rest of you.  Nothing but 

utter blindness of the spirit can shut a man off from God.



There is nothing one can suffer, no situation so unfortunate, that 

it can shut off one who has the thought of God, from God.  If you 

but lift up your head for a moment out of a stormy chaos of madness 

and cry to him, God is there, God will not fail you.  A convicted 

criminal, frankly penitent, and neither obdurate nor abject, 

whatever the evil of his yesterdays, may still die well and bravely 

on the gallows to the glory of God.  He may step straight from that 

death into the immortal being of God.



This persuasion is the very essence of the religion of the true God.  

There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented of, can 

stand between God and man.







CHAPTER THE SEVENTH



THE IDEA OF A CHURCH







1. THE WORLD DAWN





As yet those who may be counted as belonging definitely to the new 

religion are few and scattered and unconfessed, their realisations 

are still uncertain and incomplete.  But that is no augury for the 

continuance of this state of affairs even for the next few decades.  

There are many signs that the revival is coming very swiftly, it may 

be coming as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical night.  

It may seem at present as though nothing very much were happening, 

except for the fact that the old familiar constellations of theology 

have become a little pallid and lost something of their multitude of 

points.  But nothing fades of itself.  The deep stillness of the 

late night is broken by a stirring, and the morning star of 

creedless faith, the last and brightest of the stars, the star that 

owes its light to the coming sun is in the sky.



There is a stirring and a movement.  There is a stir, like the stir 

before a breeze.  Men are beginning to speak of religion without the 

bluster of the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak of God 

without any reference to Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence.  

The Deists and Theists of an older generation, be it noted, never 

did that.  Their "Supreme Being" repudiated nothing.  He was merely 

the whittled stump of the Trinity.  It is in the last few decades 

that the western mind has slipped loose from this absolutist 

conception of God that has dominated the intelligence of Christendom 

at least, for many centuries.  Almost unconsciously the new thought 

is taking a course that will lead it far away from the moorings of 

Omnipotence.  It is like a ship that has slipped its anchors and 

drifts, still sleeping, under the pale and vanishing stars, out to 

the open sea. . . .







2. CONVERGENT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS





In quite a little while the whole world may be alive with this 

renascent faith.



For emancipation from the Trinitarian formularies and from a belief 

in an infinite God means not merely a great revivification of minds 

trained under the decadence of orthodox Christianity, minds which 

have hitherto been hopelessly embarrassed by the choice between 

pseudo-Christian religion or denial, but also it opens the way 

towards the completest understanding and sympathy and participation 

with the kindred movements for release and for an intensification of 

the religious life, that are going on outside the sphere of the 

Christian tradition and influence altogether.  Allusion has already 

been made to the sympathetic devotional poetry of Rabindranath 

Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism parallel with and 

assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.



It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is 

entirely towards other-worldness, to a treatment of this life as an 

evil entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing.  It is 

too easily assumed that Eastern teaching is wholly concerned with 

renunciation, not merely of self but of being, with the escape from 

all effort of any sort into an exalted vacuity.  This is indeed 

neither the spirit of China nor of Islam nor of the every-day life 

of any people in the world.  It is not the spirit of the Sikh nor of 

these newer developments of Hindu thought.  It has never been the 

spirit of Japan.  To-day less than ever does Asia seem disposed to 

give up life and the effort of life.  Just as readily as Europeans, 

do the Asiatics reach out their arms to that fuller life we can 

live, that greater intensity of existence, to which we can attain by 

escaping from ourselves.  All mankind is seeking God.  There is not 

a nation nor a city in the globe where men are not being urged at 

this moment by the spirit of God in them towards the discovery of 

God.  This is not an age of despair but an age of hope in Asia as in 

all the world besides.



Islam is undergoing a process of revision closely parallel to that 

which ransacks Christianity.  Tradition and mediaeval doctrines are 

being thrust aside in a similar way.  There is much probing into the 

spirit and intention of the Founder.  The time is almost ripe for a 

heart-searching Dialogue of the Dead, "How we settled our religions 

for ever and ever," between, let us say, Eusebius of Caesarea and 

one of Nizam-al-Mulk's tame theologians.  They would be drawn 

together by the same tribulations; they would be in the closest 

sympathy against the temerity of the moderns; they would have a 

common courtliness.  The Quran is but little read by Europeans; it 

is ignorantly supposed to contain many things that it does not 

contain; there is much confusion in people's minds between its text 

and the ancient Semitic traditions and usages retained by its 

followers; in places it may seem formless and barbaric; but what it 

has chiefly to tell of is the leadership of one individualised 

militant God who claims the rule of the whole world, who favours 

neither rank nor race, who would lead men to righteousness.  It is 

much more free from sacramentalism, from vestiges of the ancient 

blood sacrifice, and its associated sacerdotalism, than 

Christianity.  The religion that will presently sway mankind can be 

reached more easily from that starting-point than from the confused 

mysteries of Trinitarian theology.  Islam was never saddled with a 

creed.  With the very name "Islam" (submission to God) there is no 

quarrel for those who hold the new faith. . . .



All the world over there is this stirring in the dry bones of the 

old beliefs.  There is scarcely a religion that has not its Bahaism, 

its Modernists, its Brahmo Somaj, its "religion without theology," 

its attempts to escape from old forms and hampering associations to 

that living and world-wide spiritual reality upon which the human 

mind almost instinctively insists. . . .



It is the same God we all seek; he becomes more and more plainly the 

same God.



So that all this religious stir, which seems so multifold and 

incidental and disconnected and confused and entirely ineffective 

to-day, may be and most probably will be, in quite a few years a 

great flood of religious unanimity pouring over and changing all 

human affairs, sweeping away the old priesthoods and tabernacles and 

symbols and shrines, the last crumb of the Orphic victim and the 

last rag of the Serapeum, and turning all men about into one 

direction, as the ships and houseboats swing round together in some 

great river with the uprush of the tide. . . .







3. CAN THERE BE A TRUE CHURCH?





Among those who are beginning to realise the differences and 

identities of the revived religion that has returned to them, 

certain questions of organisation and assembly are being discussed.  

Every new religious development is haunted by the precedents of the 

religion it replaces, and it was only to be expected that among 

those who have recovered their faith there should be a search for 

apostles and disciples, an attempt to determine sources and to form 

original congregations, especially among people with European 

traditions.



These dispositions mark a relapse from understanding.  They are 

imitative.  This time there has been no revelation here or there; 

there is no claim to a revelation but simply that God has become 

visible.  Men have thought and sought until insensibly the fog of 

obsolete theology has cleared away.  There seems no need therefore 

for special teachers or a special propaganda, or any ritual or 

observances that will seem to insist upon differences.  The 

Christian precedent of a church is particularly misleading.  The 

church with its sacraments and its sacerdotalism is the disease of 

Christianity.  Save for a few doubtful interpolations there is no 

evidence that Christ tolerated either blood sacrifices or the 

mysteries of priesthood.  All these antique grossnesses were 

superadded after his martyrdom.  He preached not a cult but a 

gospel; he sent out not medicine men but apostles.



No doubt all who believe owe an apostolic service to God.  They 

become naturally apostolic.  As men perceive and realise God, each 

will be disposed in his own fashion to call his neighbour's 

attention to what he sees.  The necessary elements of religion could 

be written on a post card; this book, small as it is, bulks large 

not by what it tells positively but because it deals with 

misconceptions.  We may (little doubt have I that we do) need 

special propagandas and organisations to discuss errors and keep 

back the jungle of false ideas, to maintain free speech and restrain 

the enterprise of the persecutor, but we do not want a church to 

keep our faith for us.  We want our faith spread, but for that there 

is no need for orthodoxies and controlling organisations of 

statement.  It is for each man to follow his own impulse, and to 

speak to his like in his own fashion.



Whatever religious congregations men may form henceforth in the name 

of the true God must be for their own sakes and not to take charge 

of religion.



The history of Christianity, with its encrustation and suffocation 

in dogmas and usages, its dire persecutions of the faithful by the 

unfaithful, its desiccation and its unlovely decay, its invasion by 

robes and rites and all the tricks and vices of the Pharisees whom 

Christ detested and denounced, is full of warning against the 

dangers of a church.  Organisation is an excellent thing for the 

material needs of men, for the draining of towns, the marshalling of 

traffic, the collecting of eggs, 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.









