God, the Invisible KingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Religion
God, the Invisible King
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
God (Christianity)
Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher apes,
is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less. He has passed
within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to a nearly
cosmopolitan tolerance. And he has his tribe about him. He is not, as
Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST gregarious beast. Why
should his desire for God be regarded as the overflow of an unsatisfied
gregarious instinct, when he has home, town, society, companionship,
trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at hand to glut it? Why should
gregariousness drive a man to God rather than to the third-class
carriage and the public-house? Why should gregariousness drive men out
of crowded Egyptian cities into the cells of the Thebaid? Schopenhauer
in a memorable passage (about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is
flatly opposed to Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when
he declares that the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious. The
parallel with the dog is not a valid one.
Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the
Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation? Is not the
real deception, our belief that we are completely individualised, and
is it not possible that this that Professor Murray calls “instinct”
is really not a vestige but a new thing arising out of our increasing
understanding, an intellectual penetration to that greater being of the
species, that vine, of which we are the branches? Why should not the
soul of the species, many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul like
our own?
Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff, and in many other cases
of atheism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate understanding
of individuation bars the way to at least the intellectual recognition
of the true God.
6. RELIGION AS ETHICS
And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent
interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston’s. You will note that while
in this book we use the word “God” to indicate the God of the Heart,
Sir Harry uses “God” for that idea of God-of-the-Universe, which we have
spoken of as the Infinite Being. This use of the word “God” is of late
theological origin; the original identity of the words “good” and “god”
and all the stories of the gods are against him. But Sir Harry takes up
God only to define him away into incomprehensible necessity. Thus:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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