God, the Invisible KingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Religion
God, the Invisible King
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
God (Christianity)
The writer’s sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that he
speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist
nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no pretence,
therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his best to be as
fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the reader must reckon
with this bias. He has found this faith growing up in himself; he has
found it, or something very difficult to distinguish from it, growing
independently in the minds of men and women he has met. They have been
people of very various origins; English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians,
French, people brought up in a “Catholic atmosphere,” Positivists,
Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans. Their diversity of source is as remarkable
as their convergence of tendency. A miscellany of minds thinking upon
parallel lines has come out to the same light. The new teaching is also
traceable in many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be
heard from Christian pulpits. The phase of definition is manifestly at
hand.
2. MODERN RELIGION HAS A FINITE GOD
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between this new faith and any
recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or unknowingly, it
worships A FINITE GOD. Directly the believer is fairly confronted with
the plain questions of the case, the vague identifications that are
still carelessly made with one or all of the persons of the Trinity
dissolve away. He will admit that his God is neither all-wise, nor
all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he is neither the maker of heaven
nor earth, and that he has little to identify him with that hereditary
God of the Jews who became the “Father” in the Christian system. On the
other hand he will assert that his God is a god of salvation, that he is
a spirit, a person, a strongly marked and knowable personality, loving,
inspiring, and lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human
soul. He will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a
close resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
“Christ.” . . .
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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