Yet almost in the same breath in which he is claiming for his God the fullest independent reality--thinking of him "as having moods and aspects, as a man has, and a consistency we call his character" (p. 63)--he will use language implying that he is that very abstraction of the better parts of human nature which has been proposed for worship in all the various "religions of humanity," "ethical churches," and so forth, for two or three generations past. Listen to this: "Though he does not exist in matter or space, he exists in time, just as a current of thought may do; he changes and becomes more even as a man's thought gathers itself together; somewhere in the dawning of mankind he had a beginning, an awakening, and as mankind grows he grows.... _He is the undying human memory, the increasing human will_" (p. 61). When, in the last chapter, I discussed the date of the divinity's birth, I had overlooked this text. Here we have it in black and white that he did not precede mankind--that, of course, would have implied independence--but began with the "dawning" of the race, and has grown with its growth. Moreover, the analogy of a "current of thought" is expressly suggested--reinforcing the suspicion which has all along haunted us that the God of Mr. Wells is nothing else than what is known to less mythopoeic thinkers as a "stream of tendency." But Mr. Wells will by no means have it so. Indeed he evidently regards this as the most annoying, and perhaps damnable, of heresies. On the very next page he proceeds to rule out the suggestion that "God is the collective mind and purpose of the human race." "You may declare," he says, "that this is no God, but merely the sum of mankind. But those who believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that. God is, they say, not an aggregate but a synthesis." And he goes on to suggest various analogies: a temple is more than a gathering of stones, a regiment more than an accumulation of men: we do not love the soil of our back garden, or the chalk of Kent, or the limestone of Yorkshire; yet we love England, which is made up of these things. So God is more than the sum or essence of the nobler impulses of the race: he is a spirit, a person, a friend, a great brother, a captain, a king: he "is love and goodness" (p 80); and without him the Service of Man is "no better than a hobby, a sentimentality or a hypocrisy" (p. 95).