The Meaning of Mr. Wells's New Religion

THREE men — an attorney, a sculptor, and a priest — sat together in a Chicago club. They had each recently read Mr. H. G. Wells’s latest book, God the Invisible King. They had each ordered it eagerly, sharing the desire to hear further of the spiritual experience which had made memorable Mr. Britling. All of them were admittedly disappointed.

‘ I suppose,’ said the lawyer, ‘ that we all forget that no theology can be as interesting as the spiritual experiences back of it. It was a glimpse at reality which thrilled us in Mr. Britling. This book is a skeleton, and it grins like one.’

‘However that may be,’ rejoined the artist, ‘ the book makes me do anything but grin. The Wells of to-day is really pathetic. For years he has been a prophet, a seer, a voice in the wilderness. A prophet is a noble figure as long as he is rejected by his hearers. Look at Cassandra, John the Baptist, Jeremiah. But woe betide the prophet who finds the world coming his way! Ten years ago Wells was alone, or nearly so — a socialist voice in an individualistic world. Now every one is tumbling over every other one into collectivism. Poor Wells is bewildered. He is rushing, ever faster, to keep ahead of the world — and dashing off two or three books a year, each repudiating an old position, much as Siberian travelers cast off their weaker companions to the wolves. Demos is rushing him, but he must keep ahead. Down the whirling road of time he dashes, eyes bulging, hair — if he has any — on end, coat-tails flying, quite unaware that he is, that he can be, no longer the prophet; unwilling that the voice further down the road should in his stead be crying, “Here lies truth”; oblivious of his real function, which is now just to be one of the mob as that mob advances out of individualism and materialism into collectivism and religion.’

‘I still maintain,’ insisted the lawyer, ‘that the book is humorous. Is it not amusing to see his naïve delight at having discovered the personality of God? For one knows not how many millennia, people have known that personality very well. The few who have disallowed it, Pagan or Christian, have been admittedly eccentrics who denied the validity of common religious experience.

‘ You would think that a man who had discovered that the minority was wrong and that he with it had been mistaken would be humble. But listen to this, on page 55: “God is a Person. Upon this point those who are beginning to profess modern religion are very insistent.” Of course this means that Mr. Wells is insistent upon it. Is that not delicious? “I insist that the world for æons has been right, absolutely right. I insist on it.” A humorist like that will be shouting soon that matrimony is respectable.’

Here the sculptor turned to the priest.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that the book shocks you, dominie?’

‘No, it does not do that,’ he responded, ‘nor does it amuse me. Neither does it appear to me pathetic. Some of it is rather amusing — for example, in that passage about the personality of God, the author’s assumption that Catholic theology teaches that God, to be a Person, or Persons, must have a physical body, or bodies. Some of it shocks me, too. I am a bit ruffled, for example, that Mr. Wells should give a history of Nicene times, done in the style of an ill-tempered atheistic penny pamphlet; and, more than that, that he should so have misread history as not to have perceived that, in the controversies of the fourth century, the emperors and the privileged classes were almost invariably Arian partisans and enemies of the orthodox, and that the Nicene creed emerged despite imperial opposition, not with imperial approbation. And, I must confess, that it is to me more than a little pathetic to find one who normally is as big a man as Mr. Wells inveighing against Nicene theology because of the bugaboo tales about God which emanated from a nursemaid who, in all probability, had been nurtured in a middleclass Calvinism of the Milton-Bunyan style.

However, I for one can see neither fun nor profit in tilting against this book. It was meant as an honest expression of religion. It has made me do some serious thinking — not, as Mr. Wells doubtless intended it should, in an endeavor to justify the Catholic faith, but in an attempt to understand Mr. Wells. Now that I have talked with you, gentlemen, I intend to write out those thoughts of mine for my own satisfaction.’

Thereupon, he retired to the library of the club and there he devoted the next two hours to writing what here follows: —

There are three different concepts of God held by human beings: not two only, as Mr. Wells would have us believe. The first of the three he presents clearly enough under the name of the Veiled Being, or the Creator. He is the Maker and Governor of all creation, a God of Law, a Deity of inflexible justice, to be feared and adored if he is to be worshiped at all.¹ The second and third concepts Mr. Wells confuses. The former of these is that of God as the Leader of Battles. Mr. Wells has beautifully uttered this concept in a number of places, and especially in these words: ‘He is our king, to whom we must be loyal; He is our captain, and to know Him is to have direction in our lives.’ To Him is to be given that tremendous affection which the poilu feels for Papa Joffre, which the small boy feels intensely for the ‘leader of the gang.’ The third concept, confused in Mr. Wells’s mind with this second one, is that of God as the sustaining, comforting, enveloping Strength.

Each of these concepts has been proved valid by innumerable spiritual experiences throughout the ages. The early Christian Church, during a long process of careful thinking, dominated — as Mr. Wells truly says — by those trained in the Alexandrian school, who were — as Mr. Wells does not say — the most careful and accurate philosophers that this world has ever known, a process which culminated in the publication and oecumenical acceptance of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed came to the conclusion that all three were true concepts. Each expressed a deep spiritual reality. Although contradictions did seem to exist between them, man must nevertheless accept them, contradictions and all — in pragmatic fashion believing each because each satisfies some of the human hunger for spiritual reality, and leaving reconciliation of the three to a state of intelligence greater than mortal man has yet been privileged to possess. The Nicene creed is therefore a statement of three truths and one unsolvable problem.

Central of the three was the concept of God as the Leader, the Christ, the Anointed One. That Jesus of Galilee was the Christ; that the Invisible King had become visible in the Nazarene Peasant; that the kingdom was a realm where He ruled and led and where such as He alone could be perfectly citizens; that it was a kingdom not of the world, although in it; and that its central law was ‘salvation through self-abnegation’ — these made up in Nicene times, and still make up, the central core of Christianity.

But Jesus had taught his disciples that He was one with another Person, whom He called his Father and bade them regard as their Father, the Great Unseen, the Almighty One. So, then, the Creator about whom men had ever speculated and would ever speculate, whom men had ever feared, was really in essence kind and loving. ‘Whoso hath seen Me hath seen the Father,’ Jesus had told Philip. This meant two things to the early Church — two very practical things. First, Jesus was no futile, struggling, errant Leader. His battles were blest of the Eternal. His armies might rejoice in certain victory, even as they fought heartrending battles and endured untold persecution. Second, the Creator was removed from the realm of the unknown and, since he was like the Beloved Carpenter, was to be loved as well as adored.

Jesus had also said that He would send to them another Strengthener or Comforter. This Person was also to be their Guide into truth. That fitted perfectly with the mystical concept of God, according to which He is thought of as immanent within each soul. Mr. Wells voices the ancient belief in this concept when he says, ‘If you but lift up your head for a moment, out of the stormy chaos of madness, and cry to Him, God is there, God will not fail you.’

These three concepts Nicene theology includes under the Persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Father is the source of all things, material and immaterial. At his fiat created things emerged. From Him flows the Christ. The nearest figure applicable to the relationship of the two seemed that of filiation. And from Him too, through the Christ, comes the great, sustaining, enveloping, peacegiving Holy Spirit to comfort, strengthen, and teach those who serve the Son and thus obey the Fat her. The nearest human figure for this eternal process seemed that of spiration.

During the long centuries when Christendom was a unit and Nicene theology was everywhere accepted, these three concepts, held in balance, complemented one another. When the Church’s authority was undermined and the Church’s body riven, and men in individualistic pride imagined that each person was religiously a guide sufficient unto himself, unneedful of the correcting influence of the rest of the human family, living or dead, these concepts began to be held out of balance. From that moment Christianity began to lose its hold on man; for unbalanced religion is like the image seen in the crooked mirrors at county-fair side-shows: it is both repulsive and amusing.

The first mistake was an over-emphasis of God the Father. The stern, law-making aspect of Deity was so stressed as to hide those aspects which balance his sternness. The tribal regulations promulgated by Jehovah to the Jews were given cosmic force. As the old Jews understood Jehovah, he was not nearly so terrible as he was in the Calvinistic theology. Mr. Wells seems to think that this old Jewish god is somehow the germ from which developed directly the Christian doctrine of God the Father. It would be much more true to say that from the Mosaic theology developed our doctrine of God the Son. The old Jewish god was not cosmological at all, as we who have a knowledge of Old Testament criticism know very well.

Calvin’s god was not the God of Moses. He was, rather, a combination of the cosmological Deity brought by the later Jews from Babylon with the fierce tribal partisan who lived on Sinai. Those of Babylon would have failed to understand his nomadic barbarities. Those of Moses, who seem to have been interested as little as Mr. Wells himself in life after death, would have stood aghast at their tribal king from the mountains, transformed into an eternal lord of heaven and hell. Calvin’s god, in short, was the sort of god one gets by reading our present composite Old Testament apart from Catholic theology. It was monstrous, horrible, the most warped caricature of God known to man. God the Son was degraded to the position of a mere victim of unnatural spiritual wrath. God the Holy Spirit was wellnigh forgotten.

Against this sort of religion, the kind that was unfortunately immortalized by John Milton, the kind that is still preached by tent evangelists, the kind used by his nursemaid to scare him with in infancy, Mr. Wells reacts violently in this book. It is good that he should, but unnecessary. The monstrous figure persists to-day only as a part of the folk-religion of the ignorant. The leaders of every communion of Christians, even Scotch Presbyterians, not merely have ceased to teach it, but actively combat it. Occasionally in his book Mr. Wells shows that he knows better than to lay this dour warping of religion to the charge of Catholic dogma. Nevertheless, he seems to be under the impression most of the time that in beating this theological monstrosity to a pulp he is somehow attacking Nicene theology.

As we have said, the Christian world has ceased long ere this to admire Calvinism. The Catholic world, tied to its Nicene balance, recovered from its slight trend in this direction, exhibited in the fifteenth century, without much difficulty. The non-Catholic world, having made one mistake with disastrous result, now made another equally grievous one. As the eighteenth century saw the triumph and decay of Calvinism, so the nineteenth century saw the triumph, and the twentieth century has seen much of the decay, of what for a better name we may call neo-Protestantism or Liberalism.

The name covers a number of differing religious opinions, all of them alike in an over-emphasis on God the Holy Spirit. First the Friends, then the Unitarians,—who ascribed to God the Father nearly all the orthodox attributes of God the Holy Spirit and deprived Him of most of his ancient characteristics, — the American Transcend entalists, and finally, those who embraced the religion of Mary Baker Eddy, have been its most out-and-out manifestations. What little theology is now taught in the formerly Calvinistic Protestant churches is also mostly of this sort. God is thought of as good, patient, present, an enveloping aura, a protection and strength, semi-personal or impersonal, a sufficient guide unto truth and for salvation to each individual soul, and therefore as well to all souls in the aggregate. ‘God’s in His Heaven. All’s right with the world.’ This is all a part of Catholic theology, to be sure; only there the comforting, resting strength of the Holy Spirit is reserved for those who obey the Son and thereby show devotion to the Father. In Liberalism it is thought to be universally available. The Father’s fatherhood and the Son’s leadership are in the mean time milk-and-watered out of all resemblance to their original appearance.

All this is quite as lopsided as was ever the theology of Calvin and Knox. As the latter made God a brute of steel, so the former makes God a feather-bed. As the Calvinist was apt to be lean and dreadfully morose, so the devotee of this modern theology is inclined to become fat and abominably cheerful. As of old, thinking men said, ‘I reject your God: He is too horrid,’ so now they begin to say, ‘I reject your God: He is too good-natured.’ As Calvin’s Deity seemed not to allow for life’s amenities, so this new God fails to fit in with life’s severities.

Between the two these respective warpings have well-nigh ruined popular respect for Christianity, especially in Protestant countries. The revolt has been a quiet one. Multitudes have simply stopped being religious and have sought inspiration in materialism. The scientific achievements of the last century have been intensely romantic. Until the war came, testing us, the pursuit of material knowledge was far more attractive to the young than the worship of what was really a caricature of God. Dashing along happily in the scientific company went many of us, Mr. Wells included. The Calvinism of his youth had disgusted him. The platitudes and complacencies of neoProtestantism left him cold. In materialism he found the easiest and greatest stimulation for his soul.

Then the war came. Materialism as a philosophy failed. Mr. Wells ‘saw it through,’ like his own Mr. Britling, and lighted, in a ‘mystical moment,’ on a concept of God different from either of the two he had previously known. He thought his concept was new. It was not. It is not. Mr. Wells has simply found the long-neglected ‘Son’ of Nicene theology. In other words, he has gone back to found his spiritual lifeon that same basic concept of God as Leader and King around which the fathers of old built up, for its protection and safeguarding, the orthodox faith.

What is to be the goal of Mr. Wells and his developing religion, no one can say. He has rejected Calvinism. He has refused to heed the call of liberalism. Will he be willing, as he further thinks out his religion, to accept the truth contained in those concepts which he has rejected when they were unduly stressed?

Will he recognize that spiritual power and comfort come from the Deity only to those who obey the King? He seems already to have glimpsed it. ‘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 one’s self in Him.’

Will he eventually see that the King and the Veiled Being are at unity and that the former reveals the latter, else forever unknowable, to man? Will he find the joy that comes from knowing that he who fights in the King’s army, battles not against the Great Unknown, but with Him and his hosts of angels ?

Or, fanatically grasping the Christ concept as his fathers grasped the Spirit concept and his grandfathers the Creator concept, will he dash on to the formation of a neo-Mahometanism? No one of course can possibly venture a prediction.

One thing, at all events, may be said in conclusion. At least for the present it is probably true that, despite a certain natural indignation at Mr. Wells’s misunderstanding of the power of the crucifix and the Crucified, his superficial impatience with that sacramental idea which all religions have found fitted to human needs, his vitriolic hatred of priesthood and his soap-boxlike denunciation of the Nicene fathers, Mr. Wells will probably find that those who say the Nicene creed with heart and mind and soul really understand him better and appreciate him more than the other folks who read his book. They, too, have a theology, a liturgy, and a spiritual life built upon that which is so dear to him, the concept of God the Invisible King as the central truth of true religion.