If you go wrong on that, your whole philosophy of politics and of individual human life will be wrong in its practical applications, and you prepare the ruin, certainly of society and perhaps of your own soul. CHAPTER IV MR. WELLS AND GOD “_Utrum Deus Sit._” “Whether God be.” That is the title of the second question in the Summa of St. Thomas (2nd article); and it is, out of all comparison, the most important question which man can put to his own mind. There is another question on that same overwhelming subject, put centuries ago in the tersest form: “_Is Religion from God or from Man_”? Upon the right answer to these questions the whole meaning of the Universe and of our own lives depends. If we get it wrong, all is wrong, down to the least details. All is warped, diseased, increasingly unsatisfactory, and running down to some chaos. All is sick and ultimately doomed; not in our speculation, but in our action and being. If we get it right all falls into order, down to the smallest actions of daily life. The picture falls into perspective. We are one with reality; we are sane men; and we may, if we choose, go forward towards our end—which is an eternal happiness. If God be and is our Creator, performs in us His works and makes of Himself our end, then the great structure of doctrine reposes upon a firm foundation. For there could not but be between That which made all things and ourselves the link of the intelligent creature with his Maker. There could not but be some intuition and some communion. Reason being present in man, there could not but be a process of striving for the fullness of being. Correspondingly, it becomes rational that the Creator should reveal Himself. It becomes rational, though awfully mysterious, that the Fatherhood should accept redemption. The Incarnation falls into place; and from thence onwards everything—to the last bead of the Rosary. But if all this be an illusion, if (to summarize St. Thomas again, in his famous Two Objections to the Being of God), “Nature be sufficient to herself” (“_Ea quae sunt naturalia reducuntur in principium quod est natura_”), then everything of the Creed fails, and so do all mortals. Whence we come and whither we go, and how we so proceed, are left at large and appear indifferent. Each man will adopt some petty object of his own for living, or deny that living has any object at all. Men will despair and satisfy the moment only. Lacking God, Unity and consecutive effort are dissolved. “_Utrum Deus Sit._” “Whether God Be.” “_Is Religion from God or from Man_”? Now these questions Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ proposes to answer simply enough. To the first, “No”: God is Not. He is a figment of man’s imagination. To the second, “From man”: Man invented the idea of God: it is a phantasm of his brain.