GOD THE INVISIBLE KING.*
Ma. IL G. WELLS has always had the courage of his principles and the desire to share thorn with his countrymen; and the frequent changes he has seen cause to make in them have given his country. men more confidence in his sincerity, and sympathetic attraction to fresh ideals,than in any special faculty in him for analytic thought. His present book shows him to have embarked on the most interest. ing of all voyages, that in search of a religion and theology, and ho reports his discoveries with enthusiasm and a vivid impression' of reality. But his book is not all written in this fine vein of the God-intoxicated neophyte. He has felt obliged to devote the greater part of his space to an attack upon other explorers in the same region; and here defect of knowledge and defect of sympathy . has e resulted in much unintentional false-witness and many de- plorable lapses into bad taste. This we regret, becauso what Mr. , Wells has to say about his own religious experience might reach and profit many persons who are prejudiced against the writings of professional divines; but such people instinctively floe from theological hatred. Mr. Wells compares himself to a missionary smashing " some Polynesian divinity of sharks' teeth and oyster shells." But a missionary who knows his business loaves the destruction of such a divinity to its own converted worshippers. On the other hand, Mr. Wells pleads that his own ideas may be received " with a certain politeness and charity " ; it does not occur to him to do to others as he would have them do to him.
Let us begin by quoting a foe' passages from Mr. Wells when he is speaking about his true subject, " God the Invisible King " ;— " The true God is not a spiritual troubadour-wooing the hearts of
• Cod the InviiiUe Mag. Dy If, ti: Wells. Loudon : Cassell and Co. (es. nets
men and women to no purpose. The true God goes through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for recruits along the streets. We must go out to him. We must accept his discipline and fight his battle. The peace of Ged comes net by thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him."
"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 airn. It is completer and more intimate, but it is like standing side by side withand touching someone that we love very dearly and trust completely. It is as if this being bridged a thousand mis- understandings and brought us into fellowship with a great multitude of other people. . . . Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.' " "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. . . • lie is as real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace."
Any Christian hearing these and similar passages road from Mr. Wells's book would welcome him as a brother, because he would recognize in them the Christian. Spirit ; he :could point to parallels
in the writings of many Christian poople from New Testament times onward. St. Paul, for example, appeals to the witness of tho Spirit in a man's heart, and calls upon him to " co-operate with God " ; also he represents life as a battlefield in which the Christian must wearthe Divine armour, and the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of " the Captain of our Salvation." It would come then as a shock to such a person on turning to. the book itself to find that it is Christianity which Mr. Wells regards as the enemy of true religion, the fetish that must be crushed. The explanation scorns to lie in some unfortunate experiences of Mr.W.elles.own childhood at the hand of a nursery-maid who painted God to him as a bogy; so that we may almost say to him, as he says to the late Professor Metehnikoff, that " he attacks religion as he understood it when first he fell out with it fifty years or more ago." For undoubtedly the bitterness cornea from his past sufferings, though he has.now extended his attack to other Christian. doctrines, which ho misconceives almost as grotesquely as his nursemaid misconceived the character of God. His specialbugbears are the doctrine of the Trinity, which he speaks of as-" that fantastic, unqualified dense a Iro," and the Council of Nicaea, which he charges with inventing this "stuffed scarecrow." But if Mr. Wells had devoted half as much time to the Now Testa- ment as he has apparently 'spent upon the history of Christian.dog,ma, his pages would have lost some of their picturesque allusions to the Alexandrian Serapetuns the Cathars, Paidicians, and Manichaeaus, the fist of Nicolas of Myra and the red hair of Athanasius, but he would have discovered that the doctrine of the Trinity was merely a formalizing of the two chiof Christian doctrines; that in Christ was " all the fulness of the Godhead bodily," and that the Spirit of God, which is the Spirit of Christ, is also vouchsafed to all believers. Such statements Mr. Wells might object to as untrue, but ho could not regard them as ludicrous. It is only by mis- understanding the scholastic term " three persons " that he could speak of the Christian Trinity as a dense a [roil. As a matter of fact, Mr. Wells holds that the Spirit of God is imparted to believers, but the God of his belief is not the Creator. Of the character of the Creator he knows nothing. Ito has never revealed Himself, About his own God he makes many statements, which he professes to derive from experience, as that he is- courageous, invincible, steadfast in purpose, even immortal ; but it does not appear whether he has any exiatonce apart from men, or is merely the soul of the species, for he also tells us that he is only " gradually gathering knowledge and power for a purpose which he is only beginning to apprehend." Consequently Mr. Wells escapes Trinitarianism only at the expense of agnosticism on the most important, questions of theology. Meanwhile the universe exists, and in recognition of it Mr. Wells postulates. two other beings besides his God, a " veiled being," the Creator, end a " lessor being," the life-force who "-pro- ceeds " from this infinite being. When therefore the theologians of Mr. Wells's new religion formulate their creed, it will not be so simple as that of Nimes ; and if his Church lasts for four centuries,. and the creed is attacked by a minority bent on simplifying, its new Quicunquc telt will be not less sonorous than that of the Orthodox Church, though its terms will be mainly negative.
We are quite sure that before a year has passed Mr. Wells will have become aware of many; of the inconsistencies in his new system. He will see, for example, that there is no sense at all in which an immortal God can take mortal beings to Himself, and that no God worth the namo would have a final purpose in which men could not share ; and he may realize that St. Paul was a better theologian when he spoke of the " consummation " in Christ of believers, as of a life with Christ. Ho may also be induced by more experience to revise his cipinion of the Christian clergy, and to believe that the sermon with which he concludes his book on the duties of men in the Kingdom of God is not unlike in its spirit to hundreds of sermons preached every, year in the Church Of Etiglancl and either Christian Churches since Maurice and Kingsley, before Mr. Wells was born, raised the banner of "Christian Socialism." But it is specially to be belled that before the next book comes out, Mr. Wells will make himself acquainted with the view of the Old Testament held to-day in the Christian Church. It may help his controversial purpose to pretend that Christians still worship a " jealous God," or, as Mr. Wells prefers to call him, " a bickering monopolist," and that they believe that he goes " Sabbath-breakering on Sunday morning as a Staffordshire worker goes ratting." But these things are not so. It was imprudent of the Reformers, no doubt, to introduce the Decalogue into the Liturgy, but the sense in which the Church of England, at least, regards the Jewish Commandments is made plain in its Catechism, which omits all mention of the Divine " jealousy " and also of the Sabbath, and converts all the negative Command- ments into their positive counterparts.
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