een in grasping and holding fast to the
differentiating attributes of Mr. Wells's divinity? If the word is at
best a confusion and at worst a war-whoop, should we not try to
dispense with it, to avoid it, to find a substitute which should more
accurately, if less truculently, express our idea? Is it wise or kind
to seek to impose on the future an endless struggle with its sinister
ambiguities?

There are, no doubt, regions of thought from which it is extremely
difficult to exclude the word; but these, fortunately, are regions in
which it is almost necessarily divested of its historical
associations. As a term of pure philosophy, if safeguarded by careful
definition, it is a convenient piece of shorthand, obviating the
necessity for a constant recourse to cumbrous formulas. But politics
is not one of these regions of thought; and it is precisely in
politics that the intervention of God has from of old been most
disastrous. "Theocracy" has always been the synonym for a bleak and
narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained, tyranny. Why seek to revive
and rehabilitate a word of such a dismal connotation? I suggest that
even if the Invisible King _were_ a God, it would be tactful to
pretend that he was not. As he is _not_ a God, in any generally
understood sense of the term, it seems a curious perversity to pretend
that he is.

* * * * *

Even in the region of morals it is a backward step to restore God to
the supremacy from which he has with the utmost difficulty been
deposed. I am sure Mr. Wells does not in his heart believe that any
theological sanction is required for the plain essentials of social
well-doing, or any theological stimulus for the rare sublimities of
virtue. Incalculable mischief has been wrought by the clerical
endeavour to set up a necessary association between right conduct and
orthodoxy, between heterodoxy and vice. This Mr. Wells knows as well
as I do; yet he can use such phrases as "Without God, the 'Service of
Man' is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or a hypocrisy." No
doubt he has carefully explained that he does not mean by God or
religion what the clergy mean; but can he be sure that by imitating
their phrases he may not imperceptibly slide into their frame of mind?
or at any rate tempt the weaker brethren to do so? In using such an
expression he comes perilously near the attitude adopted by the Bishop
of London in a recent address to the sailors of th