take the affirmative course--choose the "Everlasting Yea" as Carlyle would phrase it--without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of the term. In a tentative way, not exempt, perhaps, from a touch of special pleading, we advanced certain considerations which seemed to suggest that his decision to kindle the torch of life might, after all, be justified. Our provisional conclusion was that though, as at present advised, we might not quite see our way to hail him as a beneficent Invisible King, yet we need not go to the opposite extreme of writing him down a mere Ogre God, indifferent to the vast and purposeless process of groaning and travail, begetting and devouring, which he had wantonly initiated. That is the point at which we have now arrived. I hope it need not be said I do not attribute any substantive value to the hypothetical myths here put forward and discussed--that I do not accept either of them, or propose that anyone else should accept it, as a probable adumbration of what actually occurred "in the beginning"--a first chapter in a new Book of Genesis. My purpose was simply, since myth-making was the order of the day, to hint a criticism of Mr. Wells's myth, by placing beside it one or two other fantasies, perhaps as plausible as his, which had the advantage of not entirely eluding the question of origins. I submit, with great respect, that my Artificer comes a little less out of the blue than his Invisible King--that is all I claim for him. But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not without indignation. Myth-making, he declares, is _not_ the order of the day. Had he wanted to indulge in myth-making, he could easily have found some metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King. What he has done is to record a profound spiritual experience, common to himself and many other good men and true, which has culminated in the recognition of an actual Power, objectively extant in the world, to which he has felt it a sacred duty to bear witness. Very good; so be it; let us now look more in detail into the gospel according to Wells. IV THE APOSTLE'S CREED