I think, to take a favourite force,
or in other words a familiar spirit. Mr. H. G. Wells, who is,
if anybody is, a genius among moderns and a modern among geniuses,
really did this very thing; he selected a god who was really
more like a daemon. He called his book _God, the Invisible King_;
but the curious point was that he specially insisted that his God differed
from other people's God in the very fact that he was not a king.
He was very particular in explaining that his deity did not
rule in any almighty or infinite sense; but merely influenced,
like any wandering spirit. Nor was he particularly invisible,
if there can be said to be any degrees in invisibility.
Mr. Wells's Invisible God was really like Mr. Wells's Invisible Man.
You almost felt he might appear at any moment, at any rate to his
one devoted worshipper; and that, as if in old Greece, a glad cry
might ring through the woods of Essex, the voice of Mr. Wells crying,
"We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible God." I do not mean
this disrespectfully, but on the contrary very sympathetically;
I think it worthy of so great a man to appreciate and answer the general
sense of a richer and more adventurous spiritual world around us.
It is a great emancipation from the leaden materialism which weighed
on men of imagination forty years ago. But my point for the moment
is that the mode of the emancipation was pagan or even polytheistic,
in the real philosophical sense that it was the selection of a
single spirit, out of many there might be in the spiritual world.
The point is that while Mr. Wells worships his god (who is not his
creator or even necessarily his overlord) there is nothing to prevent
Mr. William Archer, also emancipated, from adoring another god in
another temple; or Mr. Arnold Bennett, should he similarly liberate
his mind, from bowing down to a third god in a third temple.
My imagination rather fails me, I confess, in evoking the image
and symbolism of Mr. Bennett's or Mr. Archer's idolatries;
and if I had to choose between the three, I should probably be found
as an acolyte in the shrine of Mr. Wells. But, anyhow, the trend
of all this is to polytheism, rather as it existed in the old
civilisation of paganism.

There is the same modern mark in Spiritualism. Spiritualism also
has the trend of polytheism, if it be in a form more akin to
ancestor-worship. But whether it be the invocation of ghosts or of gods,
the mark of it is that it invokes