came the rumour that the thing had been achieved, followed soon by ocular demonstration; and now we rub shoulders every day with men who have outsoared the eagle, and--alas!--carried death and destruction into the hitherto stainless empyrean. It would seem, then, that there is no reason absolutely to despair of some advance towards a conception of the nature and reason of the universe. And it is certain that Mr. Wells's God would stand a better chance of satisfying the innate needs of the human intelligence if he had not (apparently) given up as a bad job the attempt to relate himself to the causal plexus of the All. Is he outside that causal plexus, self-begotten, self-existent? Then he is the miracle of miracles, a second mystery superimposed on the first. If, on the other hand, he falls within the system, he might surely manage to convey to his disciples some glimmering notion of his place in it. The birth-stories of Gods are always grotesque and unedifying, but that is because they belong to folk-lore. If this God does not belong to folk-lore, surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be indicated without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we have seen, hints that his reticence may be due to the fact that he does not know. In that case this "modern" God is suspiciously like all the ancient Gods, whose most unfortunate characteristic was that they never knew anything more than their worshippers. The reason was not far to seek--namely, that they were mere projections of the minds of these worshippers, fashioned in their own image. But Mr. Wells assures us that this is not the case of the Invisible King.