God The Invisible King, H. G. Wells [best self help books to read txt] 📗

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH

 

1. THE WORLD DAWN

 

As yet those who may be counted as belonging definitely to the new

religion are few and scattered and unconfessed, their realisations

are still uncertain and incomplete. But that is no augury for the

continuance of this state of affairs even for the next few decades.

There are many signs that the revival is coming very swiftly, it may

be coming as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical night.

It may seem at present as though nothing very much were happening,

except for the fact that the old familiar constellations of theology

have become a little pallid and lost something of their multitude of

points. But nothing fades of itself. The deep stillness of the

late night is broken by a stirring, and the morning star of

creedless faith, the last and brightest of the stars, the star that

owes its light to the coming sun is in the sky.

 

There is a stirring and a movement. There is a stir, like the stir

before a breeze. Men are beginning to speak of religion without the

bluster of the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak of God

without any reference to Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence.

The Deists and Theists of an older generation, be it noted, never

did that. Their “Supreme Being” repudiated nothing. He was merely

the whittled stump of the Trinity. It is in the last few decades

that the western mind has slipped loose from this absolutist

conception of God that has dominated the intelligence of Christendom

at least, for many centuries. Almost unconsciously the new thought

is taking a course that will lead it far away from the moorings of

Omnipotence. It is like a ship that has slipped its anchors and

drifts, still sleeping, under the pale and vanishing stars, out to

the open sea… .

 

2. CONVERGENT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

 

In quite a little while the whole world may be alive with this

renascent faith.

 

For emancipation from the Trinitarian formularies and from a belief

in an infinite God means not merely a great revivification of minds

trained under the decadence of orthodox Christianity, minds which

have hitherto been hopelessly embarrassed by the choice between

pseudo-Christian religion or denial, but also it opens the way

towards the completest understanding and sympathy and participation

with the kindred movements for release and for an intensification of

the religious life, that are going on outside the sphere of the

Christian tradition and influence altogether. Allusion has already

been made to the sympathetic devotional poetry of Rabindranath

Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism parallel with and

assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.

 

It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is

entirely towards otherworldness, to a treatment of this life as an

evil entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing. It is

too easily assumed that Eastern teaching is wholly concerned with

renunciation, not merely of self but of being, with the escape from

all effort of any sort into an exalted vacuity. This is indeed

neither the spirit of China nor of Islam nor of the everyday life

of any people in the world. It is not the spirit of the Sikh nor of

these newer developments of Hindu thought. It has never been the

spirit of Japan. To-day less than ever does Asia seem disposed to

give up life and the effort of life. Just as readily as Europeans,

do the Asiatics reach out their arms to that fuller life we can

live, that greater intensity of existence, to which we can attain by

escaping from ourselves. All mankind is seeking God. There is not

a nation nor a city in the globe where men are not being urged at

this moment by the spirit of God in them towards the discovery of

God. This is not an age of despair but an age of hope in Asia as in

all the world besides.

 

Islam is undergoing a process of revision closely parallel to that

which ransacks Christianity. Tradition and mediaeval doctrines are

being thrust aside in a similar way. There is much probing into the

spirit and intention of the Founder. The time is almost ripe for a

heart-searching Dialogue of the Dead, “How we settled our religions

for ever and ever,” between, let us say, Eusebius of Caesarea and

one of Nizam-al-Mulk’s tame theologians. They would be drawn

together by the same tribulations; they would be in the closest

sympathy against the temerity of the moderns; they would have a

common courtliness. The Quran is but little read by Europeans; it

is ignorantly supposed to contain many things that it does not

contain; there is much confusion in people’s minds between its text

and the ancient Semitic traditions and usages retained by its

followers; in places it may seem formless and barbaric; but what it

has chiefly to tell of is the leadership of one individualised

militant God who claims the rule of the whole world, who favours

neither rank nor race, who would lead men to righteousness. It is

much more free from sacramentalism, from vestiges of the ancient

blood sacrifice, and its associated sacerdotalism, than

Christianity. The religion that will presently sway mankind can be

reached more easily from that starting-point than from the confused

mysteries of Trinitarian theology. Islam was never saddled with a

creed. With the very name “Islam” (submission to God) there is no

quarrel for those who hold the new faith… .

 

All the world over there is this stirring in the dry bones of the

old beliefs. There is scarcely a religion that has not its Bahaism,

its Modernists, its Brahmo Somaj, its “religion without theology,”

its attempts to escape from old forms and hampering associations to

that living and world-wide spiritual reality upon which the human

mind almost instinctively insists… .

 

It is the same God we all seek; he becomes more and more plainly the

same God.

 

So that all this religious stir, which seems so multifold and

incidental and disconnected and confused and entirely ineffective

to-day, may be and most probably will be, in quite a few years a

great flood of religious unanimity pouring over and changing all

human affairs, sweeping away the old priesthoods and tabernacles and

symbols and shrines, the last crumb of the Orphic victim and the

last rag of the Serapeum, and turning all men about into one

direction, as the ships and houseboats swing round together in some

great river with the uprush of the tide… .

 

3. CAN THERE BE A TRUE CHURCH?

 

Among those who are beginning to realise the differences and

identities of the revived religion that has returned to them,

certain questions of organisation and assembly are being discussed.

Every new religious development is haunted by the precedents of the

religion it replaces, and it was only to be expected that among

those who have recovered their faith there should be a search for

apostles and disciples, an attempt to determine sources and to form

original congregations, especially among people with European

traditions.

 

These dispositions mark a relapse from understanding. They are

imitative. This time there has been no revelation here or there;

there is no claim to a revelation but simply that God has become

visible. Men have thought and sought until insensibly the fog of

obsolete theology has cleared away. There seems no need therefore

for special teachers or a special propaganda, or any ritual or

observances that will seem to insist upon differences. The

Christian precedent of a church is particularly misleading. The

church with its sacraments and its sacerdotalism is the disease of

Christianity. Save for a few doubtful interpolations there is no

evidence that Christ tolerated either blood sacrifices or the

mysteries of priesthood. All these antique grossnesses were

superadded after his martyrdom. He preached not a cult but a

gospel; he sent out not medicine men but apostles.

 

No doubt all who believe owe an apostolic service to God. They

become naturally apostolic. As men perceive and realise God, each

will be disposed in his own fashion to call his neighbour’s

attention to what he sees. The necessary elements of religion could

be written on a post card; this book, small as it is, bulks large

not by what it tells positively but because it deals with

misconceptions. We may (little doubt have I that we do) need

special propagandas and organisations to discuss errors and keep

back the jungle of false ideas, to maintain free speech and restrain

the enterprise of the persecutor, but we do not want a church to

keep our faith for us. We want our faith spread, but for that there

is no need for orthodoxies and controlling organisations of

statement. It is for each man to follow his own impulse, and to

speak to his like in his own fashion.

 

Whatever religious congregations men may form henceforth in the name

of the true God must be for their own sakes and not to take charge

of religion.

 

The history of Christianity, with its encrustation and suffocation

in dogmas and usages, its dire persecutions of the faithful by the

unfaithful, its desiccation and its unlovely decay, its invasion by

robes and rites and all the tricks and vices of the Pharisees whom

Christ detested and denounced, is full of warning against the

dangers of a church. Organisation is an excellent thing for the

material needs of men, for the draining of towns, the marshalling of

traffic, the collecting of eggs,