I therefore sum up in a
few words the argument of this chapter.

In the first place, I have shown that, if words mean anything, Mr.
Wells does actually wish us to believe that his God is not a figure of
speech, but a person, an individual, as real and independent an entity
as the Kaiser or President Wilson. In the second place, I have
enquired whether anything he says enables us to conceive _a priori_
the possibility of such an entity disengaging itself from the mind of
the race, and have regretfully been led to the conclusion that the
genesis of this God remains at least as insoluble a mystery as that of
any other God ever placed before a confiding public. Thirdly, I have
approached the question _a posteriori_ and enquired whether history or
present experience offers any evidence from which we can reasonably
infer the existence and activity of such a God--arriving once more at
a negative conclusion. With the best will in the world, I can discover
nothing in this Invisible King but a sort of new liqueur--or old
liqueur with a new label--suited, no doubt, to the constitutions of
certain very exceptional people. Mr. Wells avers that he himself finds
it supremely grateful and comforting, and further appeals to the
testimony of a number of other (unnamed) believers--"English,
Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French ... Positivists, Baptists,
Sikhs, Mohammedans" (p. 4)--a quaint Pentecostal gathering. It is
true, of course, that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and
of the liqueur in the drinking. But some of us are inveterately
sceptical of the virtues of alcohol, even in non-intoxicant doses, and
are apt to think that the man who discovers a remedy for sea-sickness
or a prophylactic against typhoid is a greater benefactor of the race
than a God whose special characteristic it is to be not only invisible
himself but equally imperceptible in his workings.

VI

FOR AND AGAINST PERSONIFICATION

For those of us who cannot accept Mr. Wells's Invisible King as a God
in any useful or even comprehensible sense of the term, there remains
the question whether he is a useful figure of speech. Metaphors and
personifications are often things of great potency, whether for good
or evil. It might quite well happen that, if we wholly rejected Mr.
Wells's gospel, on account of a mere squabble as to the meaning of the
word "God," we should thereby lose something which might have been of
the utmost value to us. Let us not