lk-lore. If this God does not belong to
folk-lore, surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be indicated
without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we have seen, hints that his
reticence may be due to the fact that he does not know. In that case
this "modern" God is suspiciously like all the ancient Gods, whose
most unfortunate characteristic was that they never knew anything more
than their worshippers. The reason was not far to seek--namely, that
they were mere projections of the minds of these worshippers,
fashioned in their own image. But Mr. Wells assures us that this is
not the case of the Invisible King.

Mr. Wells will scarcely deny that if it were possible to compress his
mythology and merge his Invisible King in his Veiled Being, the result
would be a great simplification of the problem. But this is not, in
fact, possible; for it would mean the positing of an all-good and
all-powerful Creator, which is precisely the idea which Mr. Wells
rebels against,[1] in common with every one who realizes the facts of
life and the meaning of words. Short of this, however, is no other
simplification possible? Would it not greatly clarify our thought if
we could bring the Invisible King into action, not, indeed, as the
creator of all things, but as the organizer and director of the
surprising and almost incredible epiphenomenon which we call life? Our
scheme would then take this shape: an inconceivable unity behind the
veil, somehow manifesting itself, where it comes within our ken, in
the dual form of a great Artificer and a mass of terribly recalcitrant
matter--the only medium in which he can work. In other words, the
Veiled Being would be as inscrutable as ever, but the Invisible King,
instead of dropping in with a certain air of futility, like a doctor
arriving too late at the scene of a railway accident, would be placed
at the beginning, not of the universe at large, but of the atomic
re-arrangements from which consciousness has sprung. Can we, on this
hypothesis (which is practically that of Manichaeanism) hazard any
guess at the motives or forces actuating the Invisible King,--or, to
avoid confusion, let us say the Artificer--which should acquit him of
the charge of being a callous and mischievous demon rather than a
well-willing God? Can we not only place pain and evil (a tautology) to
the account of sluggish, refractory matter, but also conjecture a
sufficient reason why the Artificer should have started the painful
e