CHAPTER IV

MR. WELLS AND GOD

“_Utrum Deus Sit._” “Whether God be.” That is the title of the second question in the Summa of St. Thomas (2nd article); and it is, out of all comparison, the most important question which man can put to his own mind.

There is another question on that same overwhelming subject, put centuries ago in the tersest form: “_Is Religion from God or from Man_”?

Upon the right answer to these questions the whole meaning of the Universe and of our own lives depends. If we get it wrong, all is wrong, down to the least details. All is warped, diseased, increasingly unsatisfactory, and running down to some chaos. All is sick and ultimately doomed; not in our speculation, but in our action and being. If we get it right all falls into order, down to the smallest actions of daily life. The picture falls into perspective. We are one with reality; we are sane men; and we may, if we choose, go forward towards our end—which is an eternal happiness.

If God be and is our Creator, performs in us His works and makes of Himself our end, then the great structure of doctrine reposes upon a firm foundation. For there could not but be between That which made all things and ourselves the link of the intelligent creature with his Maker. There could not but be some intuition and some communion. Reason being present in man, there could not but be a process of striving for the fullness of being. Correspondingly, it becomes rational that the Creator should reveal Himself. It becomes rational, though awfully mysterious, that the Fatherhood should accept redemption. The Incarnation falls into place; and from thence onwards everything—to the last bead of the Rosary.

But if all this be an illusion, if (to summarize St. Thomas again, in his famous Two Objections to the Being of God), “Nature be sufficient to herself” (“_Ea quae sunt naturalia reducuntur in principium quod est natura_”), then everything of the Creed fails, and so do all mortals. Whence we come and whither we go, and how we so proceed, are left at large and appear indifferent. Each man will adopt some petty object of his own for living, or deny that living has any object at all. Men will despair and satisfy the moment only. Lacking God, Unity and consecutive effort are dissolved.

“_Utrum Deus Sit._” “Whether God Be.”

“_Is Religion from God or from Man_”?

Now these questions Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ proposes to answer simply enough. To the first, “No”: God is Not. He is a figment of man’s imagination. To the second, “From man”: Man invented the idea of God: it is a phantasm of his brain.

I owe to a man for whose talents I have so great an admiration (though none for his culture or instruction) to say here, that I am not judging Mr. Wells’s private opinion upon the existence or non-existence of God. Indeed, that is not very important. Further, he is so impressionable, so carried away by his emotions, and so unaccustomed to close, consecutive thinking, that his decisions vary, as it would seem, with the last thing he happens to have read. In such and such a book he invented a new kind of Trinity. In another place he protests against what he elegantly calls the “stuffed Nicæan God.” In another he protests against the idea of God’s omnipotence. In general, he is in a state of flux, very characteristic of his time. He has thought nothing out.

But in this book (and it is with this book alone that I am concerned here) he quite definitely answers the essential question in that way which I have described. Religion is of man. God is a figment of our human imagining. He sets down again for us in 1926, at too great length (pp. 68 to 73), the old vacuous guesswork of the seventies and eighties on how man came to imagine God, first as a projection of a man they knew, then by extension into a greater and greater being. With characteristic confusion of mind, he calls this process (p. 72) “Discovering God.” But that’s exactly what it isn’t. It’s _inventing_ God—and one can’t have it both ways. I know Mr. Wells honestly wants to have a sort of God, and, being a typical Modernist, he insists on combining what his emotions crave with what his creed denies. To say that primitive man “discovers God” when, as a fact, he is making Him up out of his head, is a contradiction in terms. There are not two truths, an historic and a moral. There is only one truth.

Of two processes, one must have been the actual process at work in man’s mind from the moment when a true man existed and could think at all. Either he first felt instinctively that there was an external power upon which he was dependent, and later, perhaps, corrupted that instinct by identifying such power with lesser things; or he had no such intuition, but from having at first, though intelligent and a true man, no idea whatever of the spiritual life and of such an invisible external power, he came later to _imagine_ it, to suffer the _illusion_ of a god, by an erroneous taking of confused mental habits within for reality without.

No one can say the two processes could mingle or exist side by side. You do not mix a northward direction with a southward one. There is contradiction. Either the process was in one direction or the reverse. If the historical order was in the direction, “First a recognition of God ... then the corruption of that idea by visible association ... then idolatry, perversion, and all the rest of it” (as the very slight evidences and analogies suggest, and as common sense suggests also), that is one thing. If it was “A confused memory of being bullied by the Old Man of the Tribe—then perversions such as human sacrifice—idolatries—later vague imagining of some overshadowing spirit,” that is the opposite. To postulate the _first_ process is to say, in terms of Theology, that man had an original apprehension of God, and later often overlaid it with false worship:—even to the degree of losing the original idea. To postulate the _second_ is to lay down the definite affirmation that God is but a fiction, man-made: and therefore has no being: is _not_. And it is the second which Mr. Wells repeats once more in this book, from the popular materialist works of our boyhood.

Those who are of Mr. Wells’s generation, the men who date their birth from the sixties and seventies of the last century, will remember the many efforts then made to get rid of God.

What efforts were made to get rid of Him as Creator I have described in my examination of the birth and death of that crude error known in its time as “Natural Selection.” There was a moment when those who were attacking the idea of creation tried to turn this error from a mere fashion into a dogma. Created beings had no End for which they were designed. This grossly mechanical system, Natural Selection, thus invented, has failed. They must seek for another.

But meanwhile they went to the heart of the matter—or at least the bolder of them did—and proposed to show not only that Creation and Design were illusions of the human spirit, but that the idea of God Himself was such an illusion. They made many efforts; they started a dozen major theories, and scores of minor ones, to account for that illusion. Mr. Wells in this book characteristically follows one of the crudest—Grant Allen’s. But while all of them, old or new, differ, they differ most amicably as fellow-opponents of true religion; for men do not mind how much their theories disagree so long as they all have for their root-motive a common antagonism to the Faith and right living.

Note that these people were not out to observe historical record or to ascertain prehistoric fact upon the actions and the thought of man. That would have been true science; and true science was not in their line. They were out to bolster up a theory. Facts must be twisted to meet theory, or, even more often, invented to support theory. A disciplined subjection to ascertained truth was abhorrent to them.

Since all can see that God—and God Creative—explains the Universe, some odd system must be constructed to get rid of that simplest and most obvious explanation. Since man in his most primitive condition apparently takes God for granted, and only in later perversions distorts his vision of that primordial truth, some brief must be got together to argue an exactly contrary process.

We have had the suggestion that man first thought of spirits because in his dreams he saw dead friends again; then came to imagine a universal governing spirit. We have had the suggestion that early man’s vivid imagination, comparable to that of a child, saw personality in every natural object that moved and apparently acted with intention—wind, trees, clouds, rivers—put gods into these, and so, very late, came to unite them in one Universal God. We have had a totally different suggestion that man, perceiving the action of the sun upon the earth, both beneficent and maleficent, got his illusion of God from that. This piece of foolery ran riot in my youth, and was made to explain not only the idea of God, but even great poems, until the very heroes of Homer and Patriarchs of the Bible became “Sun-myths”—as the silly jargon went.

How it all dates, to be sure! As I read Mr. Wells on the Evolution of the idea of God, I recall those successive cataracts of nonsense in this country alone: Grant Allen’s, Max Müller’s, and the rest of them. I am back in my youth. I am back in the days of the Bustle and the Bang, of Knowles’s old _Nineteenth Century_, of _Sweetness and Light_, and many another faded picture and phrase that turn me cold with the mere memory of them, and yet give me a sort of homely feeling. I smell the gas of the old gas-burners, and I hear the wheels of the hansom cab along the London streets, and the clatter of horse hoofs in Pall Mall.

Mr. Wells brings out one only of these venerable contraptions. He goes in for “The Old Man Theory.” It dates from about forty years ago. Here—as in the case of “Natural Selection,” or of the Croll theory of glaciation—he reposes upon his early manhood; he is not even immediately pre-war, as he was in the case of Eoanthropos. He is as modern as the days before the _Daily Mail_. How it dates! How it dates!

But, like Cyrano, we elder men must be just as we approach the tomb, and I must do Mr. Wells the justice to admit that the “Old Man” theory is something a good number of his contemporaries still swear by. He is not so high and dry here as he is in the more antiquated passages of the book.

The “Old Man” theory is, briefly, this:

When man was not yet fully man, but still of a bestial type, the brutes went about in little groups, consisting of a father, several mothers, and a lot of young. The father was a vile bullying beast, and the subordinate members of the little group lived in terror of him. As the younger males grew up he got jealous of them and chased them out. What with one thing and another his horrid cruelty, his vicious temper, his jealousy—the dread of him filled the mind of all his wretched dependants. The mothers would tell their children hair-raising stories about him. He became an obsession. When this “Old Man” grew to be a little over forty, and lost some of his original vigour, he was knocked on the head by a younger male, or if that did not happen to him, something else got rid of him. He went off to die, or another rather younger “Old Man” supplanted him. But his legend was firmly fixed, and _that’s_ where we got the idea of God.

Personally, I think it a more unpleasant suggestion by far than the still older ineptitudes of men making God up out of Dreams, or the Sun, or even than that ubiquitous modern mania of Sex and the rest of it. In my judgment, the “Old Man” rubbish is an awful example of what happened to the nineteenth-century child who suffered a Calvinistic upbringing. There must, I fear, have been many “Old Men” at the head of suburban households forty to fifty years ago to give rise to this disgusting vision.

But what I would like to point out is not so much the offensiveness of the picture (and of the minds that entertain it) as its gratuitous inanity.

It is one thing to confuse hypothesis with fact—and bad enough, God knows—but it is a still more degraded thing for the human intelligence to descend to mere unsupported affirmation.

Let us get this point quite clear—for it applies to the whole of Mr. Wells’s work. Not only is hypothesis stated as fact, but things are stated as fact which aren’t even hypothesis—which have _no_ evidence at all in their favour.

If I see a man throw away an old pair of boots by the roadside, I can register the fact that he threw them away. That is science; that is ascertained fact.

If I see an old pair of boots by the roadside I can, if I like, attempt to account for their presence by an hypothesis, that is, by a suggestion which (if I am a reasonable man who can distinguish knowledge from guessing) I do not _affirm_, but only put forward as a possible explanation. I say, “These boots _may have been_ thrown away by the man who stole a new pair of boots from my neighbour Brown.”

But what should we say of a man who, although no old boots had been found, made up a circumstantial story of the thief, saying, “This is where he threw away his old boots. His name was Archie Williams, he had red hair, he was a teetotaller, a widower, and had been in gaol for assaulting the police”?

Now this exactly corresponds to the process by which the Victorian Materialist group got its idea of God deriving from the “Old Man.”

He is not even an hypothetical “Old Man,” for he corresponds to no known human habit. All vertebrates have fathers, and all fathers grow old. Some sorts are polygamous, others pair in couples. But of a vertebrate ancestral to man, polygamous, and possessing these habits of bullying his “group” of terrorized wives and young, there is no trace. There is not a shred of evidence in bone or flint or prehistoric painting or tradition. The whole thing was spun entirely out of the Victorian writer’s head. It gave him pleasure in this, as in other points, to think himself much nicer than his ancestors, because that flattered his pride. He liked to suppose the idea of God a figment of man’s brain, because that left him free from moral responsibility; but of _evidence_ there is not a fragment. This fairy (or ogre) tale corresponds to nothing in the human spirit; it has no relation to the reverence, the exaltation, the affection which we instinctively feel for that by which we come to be: not only for God, but for our parents and our country. It is not the way in which our minds work from childhood to maturity—at least it is not the way in which the minds of normal children work. I cannot answer for the workings of the mind in children brought up in strange heresies.

I say of positive evidence there is nothing whatsoever. The whole thing is as much like sober history as “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It is invented from beginning to end.

Mr. Wells is less to blame for this absurdity than if he had made it up himself out of his own head, and I hasten to spare him such ridicule. He did no more than copy it out of other people’s old books. But he cannot be spared the ridicule of having copied it. He had far better for his reputation have left it alone. It looks silly enough to-day, and in a few years’ time it will look far sillier.

But the reader here may say, “It is true that those whom our Author copies had no evidence for the theory that primitive man suffered from base illusions, out of which grew up the illusion of a general God. But neither have we any evidence to show that early man had intuitions of the One God.”

But is that so? Have we, indeed, no evidence leading towards, probably, a true answer?

Now, in the nature of things, evidence of such a sort must be vague in quality and very insufficient in amount. But it is converging evidence, and it is striking.

In the first place, we also are men. We can examine our own minds and find how they work upon the matter. The old-fashioned doctrinaires, the “Natural Selection” men, who are now rapidly becoming museum specimens, may tell us that such an examination is no guide because man is always changing; so what we feel to-day is no guide to what our remote forefathers felt. But they have been proved wrong. _Man is a fixed type._ We have just as much right to infer Early Man from ourselves as we have to infer the reindeer he hunted from the reindeer of to-day.

It is the neglect of this elementary truth that _Man is a fixed type_ which renders ridiculous all the monstrous recent mythology on man. And, indeed, why is it that they only apply this mythology to man? They infer the habits and reactions of all other existing animals in the remote past from their present habits and reactions. Why is man alone treated as an unique anomaly, perpetually changing not his implements but the very nature of his mind, and changing vastly in a few centuries, while his fellow creatures stand unchanged for countless generations? Because their theories have for object a denial of man’s Divine connection, and these theories break down unless facts are twisted to fit them.

Whether Man became a fixed type by this or by that process may be debated, but that when he had once appeared as true Man he remained a fixed type is certain.

Now when we consult our own Man-mind upon this problem of God and ask ourselves (as we are perfectly capable of doing), “How should I have felt about it had I not the traditions and teaching which I have had?” the answer is not far to seek. We should wonder at the unity and diversity of life of the world around us. We should suppose an origin for such things. Probably we should think of it vaguely, but undoubtedly we should think of it personally. We should conceive governance and a Being behind it all.

Here is another line of approach.

Nothing is more common in anti-Christian argument than the appeal to contemporary savages as examples of what Early Man was like. It is true that this cardinal doctrine, the close similarity of the modern savage with primitive man, having been turned against them, the materialists have recently been warning us against too close a parallel, and have begun repeating something we Christians talked of long ago (it ought to be obvious enough) that the savage has been at it just as long as we have, and that often he may have degraded rather than have risen. But they can’t have it both ways. They can’t use the savage to make out the origins of Man as abominable as possible, and then, when the savage gives evidence on our side, say that they won’t accept it.

Now the evidence from the savage in this respect is very remarkable. Not only is its general trend clear, but the more it is examined the stronger it becomes.

It is twofold. First, the very simple (and therefore, presumably, the very primitive) peoples are precisely those which have, as a rule (not always) the primary conception of a Universal God. That is true of the Pigmies, it is true of certain striking cases in Australasia; it seems less certain of the Esquimaux.

Secondly, when you get successive layers of culture, _it is precisely the later layers in which this idea fades away, and local immediate gods begin to obscure it_. The whole process has every appearance of being that of an original concept of a Universal God, later modified by particular tangible relations with immediate things, or, in plain words, Idolatry.

You get all the successive stages: The Supreme God still believed in, but regarded as indifferent; the Supreme God half-forgotten; the Supreme God wholly forgotten. They are like geological strata.

As an example of the way in which closer examination confirms this succession, I may take the case of the Andaman islanders and those who have observed them.

It was at first generally admitted, on the witness of an original observer, that these primitives held the idea of one Universal God. Then came a later observer who made his enquiries and decided that they had no such idea at all. Then came the careful scientific critic of this later observer (Andrew Lang), and showed, to the delight of all those who enjoy the comic, that the _first_ witness spoke the language and lived intimately with the natives for years, while the _second_ was a passing traveller who could not speak a word of it.

To all this add a third form of evidence. Primitive man, unless he was quite unlike contemporary savages, and unless his thought did not follow the ordinary rules of thinking, could not possibly turn a local God or deified chieftain or what not into the Universal God. That is a wholly gratuitous assumption born of modern academic speculation. In the actual practice of the mind the two things are quite apart.

When a statement is continually repeated and is also simple, it easily comes to be an accepted commonplace. We ought always to test such ambient ideas by close inspection, and this one of many gods coalescing with one God won’t hold water. Our minds do not generalize local attachments: they concentrate them.

They may extend the field of operation of such attachments, as when the patriotism of the city is extended to a nation or empire. But they remain fiercely exclusive. There is no “patriotism of the Universe.”

Local gods are essentially competitive, active in a defined sphere. They are, by definition, many. Their very nature is to conflict one with another. There is no mental process whereby they can coalesce into a totally different kind of being. Far from it. They should, in the nature of things, and they do in actual historical example, degrade yet further, until they fall of their own insufficiency; but they don’t turn into the one Universal God. There is no case of it in all History.

One body of Men—the ancient Jews—did indeed say that their God was the only true God and the Universal God. But they were unique in this, _and_ they didn’t begin by imagining many Gods. The whole point of their peculiarity was their affirmation of unity. That was what separated them from all other religions around them. The worshippers of local gods mocked this Jewish Jehovah (as on the Moabite Stone), but they never called _their_ gods universal.

More than that we cannot say, and we do not know. The beginnings of the race are hidden from us, so far as scientific examination is concerned, save for certain analogies. There is no record of a contemporary sort, there is no direct archæological evidence. But such analogy as there is, and such examination of mental processes as is possible, leave the old anti-Christian theories—sun-myth and sexual and animistic and somniac—wrecked; and none more derelict than the unpleasant “Old Man.”

* * * * *

So much for that one, and much the most important, point.

If anyone would support the contention that man had not in him the idea of God, nor came to fulfil it, but acquired it as an illusion from circumstance, he must make up some better theory than this. It is even stupider than those still older exploded attempts which Mr. Wells has wisely left alone. After all, there is such a thing as the sun, and there are such things as dreams: and children, and all people with vivid imaginations, and in a healthy spiritual state, feel separate spiritual forces behind the world which well might be erroneously deified. But the “Old Man” is fictitious altogether. He is as unreal as Santa Claus; but we lose him with less regret.