At all events, "God the Invisible King" is not the creator and sustainer of the universe. As to the origin of things Mr. Wells professes the most profound agnosticism. "At the back of all known things," he says, "there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or good or ill.... The new religion does not pretend that the God of its life is that Being, or that he has any relation of control or association with that Being. It does not even assert that God knows all, or much more than we do, about that ultimate Being" (p. 14). Very good; but--here is the first question which seems to arise out of the Wellsian thesis--are we not entitled to ask of "the new religion" some more definite account of the relation between "God" and "the Veiled Being"? Surely it is not enough that it should simply refrain from "asserting" anything at all on the subject. If "God" is outside ourselves ("a Being, not us but dealing with us and through us," p. 6) we cannot leave him hanging in the void, like the rope which the Indian conjurer is fabled to throw up into the air till it hooks itself on to nothingness. If we are to believe in him as a lever for the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God? Do we really get over any difficulty--do we not rather create new difficulties,--by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to disentangle it a little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort of seemliness and order"? Is it an idle and presumptuous curiosity which enquires whether we are to consider him co-ordinate with the Veiled Being, and in that case probably hostile, or subordinate, and in that case instrumental? Are we, in a word, to consider the earth a little rebel state in the gigantic empire of the universe, working out its own salvation under its Invisible King? Or are we to regard God as the Viceroy of the Veiled Being, to whom, in that case, our ultimate allegiance is due? I talked the other day to a young Australian who had been breaking new land for wheat-growing. "What do you do?" I asked, "with the stumps of the trees you fell? It must be a great labour to clear them out." "We don't clear them out," he replied. "We use ploughs that automatically rise when they come to a stump, and take the earth again on the other side." I cannot but conjecture that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is fitted with some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily over the snags that stud the ploughlands of theology. III NEW MYTHS FOR OLD