could scarcely blame him for going ahead. And what
if, for contents and malcontents alike, he had an uncovenanted bonus
up his sleeve?

* * * * *

In this disquisition, with its shifting personifications, its
Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, we may seem to have wandered
far away from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader
has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the
idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as
to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an
eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our
intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be
possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience and
omni-benevolence, and yet to conceive a doctrine of origins into which
a well-willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible King, as a
sort of remedial afterthought, but as a prime mover in this baffling
business of life. We put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed
more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than Mr. Wells's scheme
of things. We imagined a wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly
setting up combinations in matter which it knew would work out in
cruelty and misery, and another co-ordinate though not quite equal
Power interfering from the first to introduce into the combinations of
the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards the good. Then we
proposed an alternative hypothesis, logically simpler, though more
difficult from the moral point of view. We conceived at the source of
organic life an intelligent and well-willing Power constrained, by
some necessity "behind the veil," to carry out his purposes through
the sluggish, refractory, hampering medium of matter. Supposing this
Power free to act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether he could
take the affirmative course--choose the "Everlasting Yea" as Carlyle
would phrase it--without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for
the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of the term. In a
tentative way, not exempt, perhaps, from a touch of special pleading,
we advanced certain considerations which seemed to suggest that his
decision to kindle the torch of life might, after all, be justified.
Our provisional conclusion was that though, as at present advised, we
might not quite see our way to hail him as a beneficent Invisible
King, yet we need not go to the opp