Now this exactly corresponds to the process by which the Victorian Materialist group got its idea of God deriving from the “Old Man.” He is not even an hypothetical “Old Man,” for he corresponds to no known human habit. All vertebrates have fathers, and all fathers grow old. Some sorts are polygamous, others pair in couples. But of a vertebrate ancestral to man, polygamous, and possessing these habits of bullying his “group” of terrorized wives and young, there is no trace. There is not a shred of evidence in bone or flint or prehistoric painting or tradition. The whole thing was spun entirely out of the Victorian writer’s head. It gave him pleasure in this, as in other points, to think himself much nicer than his ancestors, because that flattered his pride. He liked to suppose the idea of God a figment of man’s brain, because that left him free from moral responsibility; but of _evidence_ there is not a fragment. This fairy (or ogre) tale corresponds to nothing in the human spirit; it has no relation to the reverence, the exaltation, the affection which we instinctively feel for that by which we come to be: not only for God, but for our parents and our country. It is not the way in which our minds work from childhood to maturity—at least it is not the way in which the minds of normal children work. I cannot answer for the workings of the mind in children brought up in strange heresies. I say of positive evidence there is nothing whatsoever. The whole thing is as much like sober history as “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It is invented from beginning to end. Mr. Wells is less to blame for this absurdity than if he had made it up himself out of his own head, and I hasten to spare him such ridicule. He did no more than copy it out of other people’s old books. But he cannot be spared the ridicule of having copied it. He had far better for his reputation have left it alone. It looks silly enough to-day, and in a few years’ time it will look far sillier. But the reader here may say, “It is true that those whom our Author copies had no evidence for the theory that primitive man suffered from base illusions, out of which grew up the illusion of a general God. But neither have we any evidence to show that early man had intuitions of the One God.” But is that so? Have we, indeed, no evidence leading towards, probably, a true answer? Now, in the nature of things, evidence of such a sort must be vague in quality and very insufficient in amount. But it is converging evidence, and it is striking.