verge
of some illuminating and beautiful statement of his cause; always he
was finding his writing inadequate, a thin treachery to the impulse of
his heart." Have we not in such an experience an irrefutable proof of
the inefficacy of Mr. Britling's God? Always the world has been all
ears for a clear, convincing, compulsive message from God; always, or
at any rate for many thousands of years, there have been men who
seemed the predestined mouthpieces of such a message; always what
purported to be the word of God has proved to be either powerless to
make itself heard, or powerful only to the begetting of hideous moral
and social corruptions. God spoke (it is said) through the Vedic
_rishis_, the sages of the Himalayas--and the result has been caste,
cow-worship, suttee, abominations of asceticism, and nameless orgies
of sensuality. God spoke through Moses, and the result was--Judaism!
God spoke through Jesus, and the result was Arianism and
Athanasianism, the Papacy, the Holy Office, the Thirty Years' War,
massacres beyond computation, and the slowly calcined flesh of an
innumerable army of martyrs. All this, no doubt, was due to gross and
palpable misunderstanding of the message delivered through Jesus; but
since it was so fatally open to misunderstanding, would it not better
have remained undelivered? Could the world have been appreciably worse
off without it? The question is rather an idle one, since it turns on
"might have beens." That the element of good in the message of Jesus
has been to some extent efficient, no one would deny. But the alloy of
potential evil has made itself so overpoweringly actual that to strike
a balance between the two forces is impossible, and the question is
generally decided by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into one
scale or the other.

There has never been a time when a really well-informed revelation,
uttered with charm and power, might not have revolutionized the world.
"A well-informed revelation!" the reader may cry: "What terrible
bathos!" Mr. Wells, moreover, speaks slightingly of revelation (pp.
19, 163) in a tone that seems to imply that "modern religion" would
have nothing to do with it even if it could. But the demand for a
revelation is eminently reasonable and justified; and the only trouble
about the historic revelations is that they have all been so
shockingly ill-informed, and have revealed nothing to the purpose.
Robert Louis Stevenson anticipated Mr. Wells's view o