I owe to a man for whose talents I have so great an admiration (though none for his culture or instruction) to say here, that I am not judging Mr. Wells’s private opinion upon the existence or non-existence of God. Indeed, that is not very important. Further, he is so impressionable, so carried away by his emotions, and so unaccustomed to close, consecutive thinking, that his decisions vary, as it would seem, with the last thing he happens to have read. In such and such a book he invented a new kind of Trinity. In another place he protests against what he elegantly calls the “stuffed Nicæan God.” In another he protests against the idea of God’s omnipotence. In general, he is in a state of flux, very characteristic of his time. He has thought nothing out. But in this book (and it is with this book alone that I am concerned here) he quite definitely answers the essential question in that way which I have described. Religion is of man. God is a figment of our human imagining. He sets down again for us in 1926, at too great length (pp. 68 to 73), the old vacuous guesswork of the seventies and eighties on how man came to imagine God, first as a projection of a man they knew, then by extension into a greater and greater being. With characteristic confusion of mind, he calls this process (p. 72) “Discovering God.” But that’s exactly what it isn’t. It’s _inventing_ God—and one can’t have it both ways. I know Mr. Wells honestly wants to have a sort of God, and, being a typical Modernist, he insists on combining what his emotions crave with what his creed denies. To say that primitive man “discovers God” when, as a fact, he is making Him up out of his head, is a contradiction in terms. There are not two truths, an historic and a moral. There is only one truth. Of two processes, one must have been the actual process at work in man’s mind from the moment when a true man existed and could think at all. Either he first felt instinctively that there was an external power upon which he was dependent, and later, perhaps, corrupted that instinct by identifying such power with lesser things; or he had no such intuition, but from having at first, though intelligent and a true man, no idea whatever of the spiritual life and of such an invisible external power, he came later to _imagine_ it, to suffer the _illusion_ of a god, by an erroneous taking of confused mental habits within for reality without.