But seriously, is any conceivable sort of theocracy a desirable ideal? Or, to put the same question in more general terms, is it wise of Mr. Wells to make such play with the word "God"? He himself admits that "God trails with him a thousand misconceptions and bad associations: his alleged infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange preferences, his vindictive Old Testament past" (p. 8)--and, it may fairly be added, his blood-boltered, Kultur-stained present. Is it possible to deodorize a word which comes to us redolent of "good, thick stupefying incense-smoke," mingled with the reek of the auto-da-fe? Can we beat into a ploughshare the sword of St. Bartholomew, and a thousand other deeds of horror? God has been by far the most tragic word in the whole vocabulary of the race--a spell to conjure up all the worst fiends in human nature: arrogance and abjectness, fanaticism, hatred and atrocity. Religious reformers--with Jesus at their head--have time and again tried to divest it of some, at least, of its terrors, but they have invariably failed. Will Mr. Wells succeed any better? Is it not apparent in the foregoing discussion that, even if the word had no other demerits, it leads us into regions in which the mind can find no firm foothold? I have done my best to accept Mr. Wells's definitions, but I am sure he feels that I have constantly slipped from the strait and narrow path. Has he himself always kept to it? I think not. And, waiving that point, is it at all likely that people in general will be more successful than I have been in grasping and holding fast to the differentiating attributes of Mr. Wells's divinity? If the word is at best a confusion and at worst a war-whoop, should we not try to dispense with it, to avoid it, to find a substitute which should more accurately, if less truculently, express our idea? Is it wise or kind to seek to impose on the future an endless struggle with its sinister ambiguities? There are, no doubt, regions of thought from which it is extremely difficult to exclude the word; but these, fortunately, are regions in which it is almost necessarily divested of its historical associations. As a term of pure philosophy, if safeguarded by careful definition, it is a convenient piece of shorthand, obviating the necessity for a constant recourse to cumbrous formulas. But politics is not one of these regions of thought; and it is precisely in politics that the intervention of God has from of old been most disastrous. "Theocracy" has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained, tyranny. Why seek to revive and rehabilitate a word of such a dismal connotation? I suggest that even if the Invisible King _were_ a God, it would be tactful to pretend that he was not. As he is _not_ a God, in any generally understood sense of the term, it seems a curious perversity to pretend that he is. * * * * *