lkins, there had
been a More, a Morris and a Bellamy. It might be that he was fitted
for far greater things. "There remains," we said to ourselves, "the
blue ribbon of intellectual adventure, the unachieved North Pole of
spiritual exploration. He has had countless predecessors in the
enterprise, some of whom have loudly claimed success; but their
log-books have been full of mere hallucinations and nursery tales.
What if it should be reserved for Mr. Wells to bring back the first
authentic news from a source more baffling than that of Nile or
Amazon--the source of the majestic stream of Being? What if it should
be given him to sign his name to the first truly-projected chart of
the scheme of things?"

We almost held our breath in eager anticipation, just as we did when
there came from America a well-authenticated rumor that the problem of
flying had at last been solved. Were we on the brink of another and
much more momentous discovery? Was Mr. Wells to be the Peary of the
great quest? Or only the last of a thousand Dr. Cooks?

II

A GOD WHO "GROWED"

Our excitement, our suspense, were so much wasted emotion. Mr. Wells's
enterprise was not at all what we had figured it to be.

GOD
THE INVISIBLE KING

is a very interesting, and even stimulating disquisition, full of a
fine social enthusiasm, and marked, in many passages, by deep poetic
feeling. But it is not a work of investigation into the springs of
Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from the outset any dealings
with "cosmogony." It is a description of a way of thinking, a system
of nomenclature, which Mr. Wells declares to be extremely prevalent in
"the modern mind," from which he himself extracts much comfort and
fortification, and which he believes to be destined to regenerate the
world.

But Mr. Wells will not have it that what is involved is a mere system
of nomenclature. He avers that he, in common with many other
like-minded persons, has achieved, not so much an intellectual
discovery as an emotional realisation, of something actual and
objective which he calls God. He does not, so far as I remember, use
the term "objective"; but as he insists that God is "a spirit, a
person, a strongly marked and knowable personality" (p. 5), "a single
spirit and a single person" (p. 18), "a great brother and leader of
our little beings" (p. 24) with much more to the same purpose, it
would seem that he must have in his mind an object external to us, no