ersonal
existence of his God represent the efficient element in his thought,
and that if other passages seem inconsistent with that idea--seem to
point to mere abstraction or allegorization of the mind of the
race--it is these passages, and not the more full-blooded
pronouncements, that must be cancelled as misleading or inadequate.
There can be no doubt that the God to whom Mr. Wells seeks to convert
us is (in his apostle's conception) much more of a President Wilson
than of a Zeitgeist.

* * * * *

It would be possible, of course, for a God, however dubious and even
inconceivable the method of his "synthesis," to manifest himself in
his effects--to prove his existence by his actions. But this, as we
have seen, the Invisible King scorns to do. His adherents, we are
told, "advance no proof whatever of the existence of God but their
realization of him" (p. 98). There is a sort of implication that the
Deity will not descend to vulgar miracle-working. "An evil and
adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be
given to it"--not even "the sign of Jonah the prophet."

But to ask for some sort of visible or plausibly conjecturable effect
is not at all the same thing as to ask for miracles. Mr. Wells
proclaims with all his might that the Invisible King works the most
marvellous and beneficent changes in the minds of his devotees; why,
then, do these changes produce no recognizable effect on the course of
events? The God who can work upon the human mind has the key to the
situation in his hands--why, then, does he make such scant use of it?
Is God only a luxury for the intellectually wealthy? The champagne of
the spiritual life? A stimulant and anodyne highly appreciated in the
best circles, but inaccessible to the man of small spiritual means,
whether he be a dweller in palaces or in the slums?

To say that a given Power can and does potently affect the human mind,
and yet cannot, or at least does not, produce any appreciable or
demonstrable effect on the external aspects of human life, is like
asking us to believe that a man is a heaven-born conductor who can get
nothing out of his orchestra but discords and cacophonies.

Mr. Wells may perhaps reply that his God _does_ recognizably influence
the course of events--indeed, that everything in history which we see
to be good and desirable is the work of the Invisible King--but that
he does not advance this fact as a pro