* * * * * One is conscious of a sort of churlishness in thus rejecting the advances of so amiable a character as the Invisible King. But is Mr. Wells, on his side, quite courteous, or even quite fair, to the Veiled Being? "Riddle me no riddles!" he seems to say; "I am tired of your guessing games. Let us have done with 'distressful enquiry into ultimate origins,' and 'bring our minds to the conception of a spontaneous and developing God'--one of whose existence and benevolence we are sure, since we made him ourselves. I want something to worship, to take me out of myself, to inspire me with brave phrases about death. How can one worship an insoluble problem? Will an enigma die with me in a reeling aeroplane? While you lurk obstinately behind that veil, how can I even know that your political views are sound? Whereas the Invisible King gives forth oracles of the highest political wisdom, in a voice which I can scarcely distinguish from my own. You are a remote, tantalizing entity with nothing comforting or stimulating about you. But as for my Invisible King, 'Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.'" A little way back, I compared Mr. Wells to Moses; but, looked at from another point of view, he and his co-religionists may rather be likened to the Children of Israel. Tired of waiting for news from the God on the cloudy mountain-top, did they not make themselves a synthetic deity, finite, friendly, and very like the Invisible King, inasmuch as he seems to have worked no miracles, and done, in fact, nothing whatever? But the God on the mountain-top was wroth, and accused them of idolatry, surely not without reason. For what is idolatry if it be not manufacturing a God, whether out of golden earrings or out of humanitarian sentiments, and then bowing down and worshipping it?