nate with the
Veiled Being, and in that case probably hostile, or subordinate, and
in that case instrumental? Are we, in a word, to consider the earth a
little rebel state in the gigantic empire of the universe, working out
its own salvation under its Invisible King? Or are we to regard God as
the Viceroy of the Veiled Being, to whom, in that case, our ultimate
allegiance is due?

I talked the other day to a young Australian who had been breaking new
land for wheat-growing. "What do you do?" I asked, "with the stumps of
the trees you fell? It must be a great labour to clear them out." "We
don't clear them out," he replied. "We use ploughs that automatically
rise when they come to a stump, and take the earth again on the other
side." I cannot but conjecture that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is
fitted with some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily over the
snags that stud the ploughlands of theology.

III

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD

Before examining the particular attributes and activities of the
Invisible King, let us look a little more closely into the question
whether a God detached alike from man below and (so to speak) from
heaven above, is a thinkable God in whom any satisfaction can be
found. Mr. Wells must not reply (he probably would not think of doing
so) that "satisfaction" is no test: that he asserts an objective truth
which exists, like the Nelson Column or the Atlantic Ocean, whether we
find satisfaction in it or not. Though he does not mention the word
"pragmatism," his standards are purely pragmatist. He offers no jot or
tittle of evidence for the existence of the Invisible King, except
that it is a hypothesis which he finds to work extremely well.
Satisfaction and nothing else is the test he applies. So we have every
right to ask whether the renunciation of all concern about the Veiled
Being, and concentration upon the thought of a finite God, practically
unrelated to the infinite, can bring us any reasonable sense of
reconciliation to the nature of things. For that, I take it, is the
essence of religion.

It was in no spirit of irony that I began this essay by expressing the
lively interest with which I learned that Mr. Wells was setting out on
the quest for God. The dogmatic agnosticism which declares it
impossible ever to know anything about the whence, how and why of the
universe does not seem to me more rational than any other dogma which
jumps from "not yet" to "never." Mr. Wells hims