g is
fitted to survive, my criticism will reinforce and not invalidate him.
Even if he should come to life in a way one can scarcely anticipate,
his proceedings will have to be carefully watched. He cannot claim the
reticences of a "party truce." He will be all the better for a candid,
though I hope not captious, Opposition.

I thought of printing on my title-page a motto from Mr. Bernard Shaw;
but it will perhaps come better here. "The fact," says Mr. Shaw, "that
a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the
fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of
credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no
means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out
of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of
Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys;
and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all
events, it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our
hope lies now."

Besides, it has yet to be proved that the believer in the Invisible
King is happier than the sceptic.

LONDON, _May_ 24, 1917.

CONTENTS

I The Great Adventurer 1
II A God Who "Growed" 3
III New Myths for Old 8
IV The Apostle's Creed 32
V When Is a God Not a God? 47
VI For and Against Personification 73
VII Back to the Veiled Being 101

GOD AND MR. WELLS

I

THE GREAT ADVENTURER

When it was known that Mr. H. G. Wells had set forth to discover God,
all amateurs of intellectual adventure were filled with pleasurable
excitement and anticipation. For is not Mr. Wells the great Adventurer
of latter-day literature? No quest is too perilous for him, no
forlorn-hope too daring. He led the first explorers to the moon. He
it was who lured the Martians to earth and exterminated them with
microbes. He has ensnared an angel from the skies and expiscated a
mermaid from the deep. He has mounted a Time Machine (of his own
invention) and gone careering down the vistas of the Future. But these
were comparatively commonplace feats. After all, there had been a
Jules Verne, there had been a Gulliver and a Peter Wi