God, the Invisible KingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Religion
God, the Invisible King
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
God (Christianity)
The new conceptions do not tolerate either kings or aristocracies or
democracies. Its implicit command to all its adherents is to make plain
the way to the world theocracy. Its rule of life is the discovery and
service of the will of God, which dwells in the hearts of men, and the
performance of that will, not only in the private life of the believer
but in the acts and order of the state and nation of which he is a part.
I give myself to God not only because I am so and so but because I am
mankind. I become in a measure responsible for every evil in the world
of men. I become a knight in God’s service. I become my brother’s
keeper. I become a responsible minister of my King. I take sides against
injustice, disorder, and against all those temporal kings, emperors,
princes, landlords, and owners, who set themselves up against God’s rule
and worship. Kings, owners, and all who claim rule and decisions in the
world’s affairs, must either show themselves clearly the fellow-servants
of the believer or become the objects of his steadfast antagonism.
2. THE WILL OF GOD
It is here that those who explain this modern religiosity will seem most
arbitrary to the inquirer. For they relate of God, as men will relate of
a close friend, his dispositions, his apparent intentions, the aims
of his kingship. And just as they advance no proof whatever of the
existence of God but their realisation of him, so with regard to these
qualities and dispositions they have little argument but profound
conviction. What they say is this; that if you do not feel God then
there is no persuading you of him; we cannot win over the incredulous.
And what they say of his qualities is this; that if you feel God then
you will know, you will realise more and more clearly, that thus and
thus and no other is his method and intention.
It comes as no great shock to those who have grasped the full
implications of the statement that God is Finite, to hear it asserted
that the first purpose of God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of
knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to
power. For that he must use human eyes and hands and brains.
And as God gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only beginning
to apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as time goes on. But
it is possible to define the broad outlines of the attainment he seeks.
It is the conquest of death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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