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