Since all can see that God—and God Creative—explains the Universe, some odd system must be constructed to get rid of that simplest and most obvious explanation. Since man in his most primitive condition apparently takes God for granted, and only in later perversions distorts his vision of that primordial truth, some brief must be got together to argue an exactly contrary process. We have had the suggestion that man first thought of spirits because in his dreams he saw dead friends again; then came to imagine a universal governing spirit. We have had the suggestion that early man’s vivid imagination, comparable to that of a child, saw personality in every natural object that moved and apparently acted with intention—wind, trees, clouds, rivers—put gods into these, and so, very late, came to unite them in one Universal God. We have had a totally different suggestion that man, perceiving the action of the sun upon the earth, both beneficent and maleficent, got his illusion of God from that. This piece of foolery ran riot in my youth, and was made to explain not only the idea of God, but even great poems, until the very heroes of Homer and Patriarchs of the Bible became “Sun-myths”—as the silly jargon went. How it all dates, to be sure! As I read Mr. Wells on the Evolution of the idea of God, I recall those successive cataracts of nonsense in this country alone: Grant Allen’s, Max Müller’s, and the rest of them. I am back in my youth. I am back in the days of the Bustle and the Bang, of Knowles’s old _Nineteenth Century_, of _Sweetness and Light_, and many another faded picture and phrase that turn me cold with the mere memory of them, and yet give me a sort of homely feeling. I smell the gas of the old gas-burners, and I hear the wheels of the hansom cab along the London streets, and the clatter of horse hoofs in Pall Mall. Mr. Wells brings out one only of these venerable contraptions. He goes in for “The Old Man Theory.” It dates from about forty years ago. Here—as in the case of “Natural Selection,” or of the Croll theory of glaciation—he reposes upon his early manhood; he is not even immediately pre-war, as he was in the case of Eoanthropos. He is as modern as the days before the _Daily Mail_. How it dates! How it dates! But, like Cyrano, we elder men must be just as we approach the tomb, and I must do Mr. Wells the justice to admit that the “Old Man” theory is something a good number of his contemporaries still swear by. He is not so high and dry here as he is in the more antiquated passages of the book. The “Old Man” theory is, briefly, this: