[42] The reading of this paper brought a string of informants eager to let me know that Mr. Wells had already written a story on this theme. I was grateful to them for having caused me to read the _New Accelerator_, which by some strange chance I had managed to miss: but Mr. Wells’s treatment is so wholly different from that which I have sketched that I feel no scruples in letting it stand: and, if amends are needed, at least I make him a present of the germ of a new tale, and so feel that honour should be satisfied. VI RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD GODS Surprised by doubt, and longing but to know, I asked of men and books what God might be:-- “An immanent spirit, clothed with the world we see”-- “A King of kings, ruler of all below”-- “Pure Love”--“A golden calf set up for show”-- “A jealous chief and tribal sectary”-- “Figment of fear and Man’s servility”-- “The final Judge that dooms to joy or woe” ... I turned away; and found my God alone. God is the world--yet captive in our thought: Our thought--when it the head of the world is grown: Love--with what love we to ourselves have taught. The Soul must incarnate Divinity, And God in each anew must builded be. RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD “Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.” --GOETHE. “Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, are still too important for Knowledge, and remain subjects for certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of instinctive belief because we have not learnt adequately to value the capacity to foretell.”--W. TROTTER. No one who has read Flaubert’s _Tentation de St. Antoine_ will be likely to forget that amazing procession of Gods, hundreds upon hundreds, in every diversity of form, defiling past the visionary Saint to topple over into the abyss of nothingness and be for ever destroyed--the doomed and outworn divinities of man’s childhood and adolescence, put away as he came to maturity. “Man created God in his own image,” wrote the irrepressible pen of Voltaire; and if it is not always true that Gods have been in his own image, but also in the image of animals and monsters, of embodied fears and hopes, it is indubitable that man has created God after God, only to throw them on the scrapheap as he outgrows them, like a child rejecting his old toys for new.