poor
tent-maker, whose sermons were not even reported in the religious
press, while his letters probably counted their public by scores, or
at most by hundreds. Mr. Wells, from the outset of his mission, has
the ear of two hemispheres.

What, then, does he tell us of his God? The first characteristic which
differentiates him from all the other Gods with a big G--for of course
we pay no heed to the departmental gods of polytheism--the first fact
we must grasp and hold fast to, is that he lays no claim to infinity.
"This new faith ... worships _a finite God_" (p. 5; Mr. Wells's
italics). "He has begun and he never will end" (p. 18). "He is within
time and not outside it" (p. 7). Nothing can be more definite than
that. There was a time when God did not exist; and then somehow,
somewhen, he came into being.

Perhaps to ask "When?" would be to trespass on the department of
origins, from which we are explicitly warned off. It would be to
trench upon "cosmogony." Yet we are not quite without guidance. "The
renascent religion," we are told, "has always been here; it has always
been visible to those that had eyes to see" (p. 1). "Always," in this
context, can only mean during the whole course of human history.
Therefore God must have come into being some time between the issue
of the creative fiat and the appearance of man on the planet. This is
a pretty wide margin, but it is something to go upon. He may have been
contemporary with the amoeba, or with the ichthyosaurus, or haply
with the earliest quadrumana. At the very latest (if "always" is
accurate) he must have made his appearance exactly at the same time as
man; and if I were to give my opinion, I should say that was extremely
probable. At all events, even if he preceded man by a few thousand or
million years, we are compelled to assume that he came in preparation
for the advent of the human species, determined to be on hand when
wanted. For we do not gather that the lower animals stand in need of
his services, or are capable of benefiting by them. One might be
tempted to conceive him as guiding the course of evolution and
hastening its laggard process; but (as we shall see) he scorns the
role of Providence, and resolutely abstains from any intromission in
organic or meteorological concerns. It would be pleasant to think that
he had something to do with (for instance) the retreat of the ice-cap
in the northern hemisphere; but we are not encouraged to indulge in
any suc