any the worse. But where are the men and women who feel the
immortality of God, however we define or construct him, a rich
compensation for their own mortality?

It may be said that I am applying shockingly terrestrial tests to Mr.
Wells's soaring transcendentalisms. I am simply asking: "Will they
work?" A world-religion cannot be what I have called a luxury for the
intellectually wealthy. It must be within the reach of plain men and
women; and plain men and women cannot, as the French say, "pay
themselves with words." Take them all round, they do not make too much
of death. With or without the aid of religion, they generally meet it
with tolerable fortitude. But it will be hard to persuade them that
annihilation is a thing to be faced with rapture, because a synthetic
God is indestructible; or that death is not death because other people
will be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence. Even if you cannot
offer them another life, you may tell them of the grave as a place
where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, and
they will understand. But will they understand if you tell them that
we triumph over the grave because God dies with us and yet never dies?
I fear it will need something clearer and more credible than this to
make the undertaker a popular functionary.

The doctrines of "the modern religion" may give us a new motive for
living; but how can they at the same time diminish our distaste for
dying? That might be their effect, no doubt, in cases where we felt
that our death was promoting some great and sacred cause more than our
life could have done; but such cases must always be extremely rare.
Even the soldier on the battlefield will help his country more by
living than by dying, if he can do so without failing in his duty. His
death is not a triumph, but only a lesser evil than cowardice and
disgrace. And what shall we say, for example, of the case of a young
biologist who dies of blood-poisoning on the eve of a great and
beneficent discovery? Is not this a case in which the modern God might
with advantage have swerved from his principles and (for once) played
the part of Providence? It is better, no doubt, to die in a good cause
than to throw away life in the pursuit of folly or vice; but is it
not playing with words to say that even the end of a martyr to science
like Captain Scott, or a martyr to humanity like Edith Cavell, is a
triumph over death and the grave? It is a triumph over