Mr. Wells’s attitude to men, it is clear, is primarily that of a philosopher, while the attitude of the Bible is primarily that of a poet. It remains to be seen whether a philosopher’s Bible can move the common imagination as the older Bible has moved it. That it can move and excite it in some degree we know. We have only to read the glowing pages with which _The Salvaging of Civilisation_ opens in order to realise this. Mr. Wells’s passion for the human group is infectious. He expresses it with the vehemence of a great preacher. He plays, like many great preachers, not on our sympathy so much as on our hopes and fears. His book is a book of salvation and damnation--of warnings to flee from the wrath to come, of prophecies of swords turned into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks. He loves his ideal group-man almost as Bunyan loved Christian. He offers him, it is true, at the end of his journey, not Paradise, but the World-State. He offers it to him, moreover, not as an individual but as a type. He bids men be ready to perish in order that man may arrive at the goal. His book is a call to personal sacrifice to the end, not of personal, but of general salvation. That, however, is an appeal that has again and again been proved effective in history. It is of the same kind as the appeal of patriotism in time of war. “Who dies if England lives?” sang Mr. Kipling. “Who dies if the World-State lives?” Mr. Wells retorts. The question remains whether the ordinary man can ever be brought to think of the world as a thing worth living and dying for as he has often thought his country worth living and dying for. If the world were attacked by the inhabitants of another planet, world-patriotism would become a necessity of self-defence, and the peoples of the world would be presented with the alternatives of uniting or perishing. Mr. Wells believes, no doubt, that they are presented with these alternatives already. But can they be made to realise this by anything but an external enemy? It is external enemies that create and intensify patriotism. Can human beings as a whole organise themselves against war as the enemy with the same thoroughness with which Englishmen organised themselves against Germany as the enemy? Mr. Wells obviously believes that they can. But it is to the great religions, not to the great patriotisms, that he looks for examples of how this can be done. He recalls how the Christian religion spread in the first four centuries and how the Moslem religion spread in the seventh century, and he believes that these precedents “support a reasonable hope that such a change in the minds of men, whatever else it may be, is a practicable change.” His gospel of human brotherhood, indeed, is propounded as a larger Christianity rather than as a larger patriotism. He realises, however, the immensity of the difficulties in the way of the spread of this gospel. He sees that the majority of men are still indifferent to it.