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

>2. HERESIES OF SPECULATION

 

One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest. It is infinitely

the most various sort. It includes all those heresies which result

from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those

which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the

heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse. The

former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in

comparison natural, simple confusions. The former are the errors of

the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside,

or are brought down to us in our social structure out of a barbaric

past.

 

To the heresies of thought and speculation belong the elaborate

doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about God’s absolute qualities, such

odd deductions as the accepted Christian teachings about the

virginity of Mary and Joseph, and the like. All these things are

parts of orthodox Christianity. Yet none of them did Christ, even

by the Christian account, expound or recommend. He treated them as

negligible. It was left for the Alexandrians, for Alexander, for

little, red-haired, busy, wire-pulling Athanasius to find out

exactly what their Master was driving at, three centuries after

their Master was dead… .

 

Men still sit at little desks remote from God or life, and rack

their inadequate brains to meet fancied difficulties and state

unnecessary perfections. They seek God by logic, ignoring the

marginal error that creeps into every syllogism. Their conceit

blinds them to the limitations upon their thinking. They weave

spider-like webs of muddle and disputation across the path by which

men come to God. It would not matter very much if it were not that

simpler souls are caught in these webs. Every great religious

system in the world is choked by such webs; each system has its own.

Of all the blood-stained tangled heresies which make up doctrinal

Christianity and imprison the mind of the western world to-day, not

one seems to have been known to the nominal founder of Christianity.

Jesus Christ never certainly claimed to be the Messiah; never spoke

clearly of the Trinity; was vague upon the scheme of salvation and

the significance of his martyrdom. We are asked to suppose that he

left his apostles without instructions, that were necessary to their

eternal happiness, that he could give them the Lord’s Prayer but

leave them to guess at the all-important Creed,* and that the Church

staggered along blindly, putting its foot in and out of damnation,

until the “experts” of Nicaea, that “garland of priests,” marshalled

by Constantine’s officials, came to its rescue… . From the

conversion of Paul onward, the heresies of the intellect multiplied

about Christ’s memory and hid him from the sight of men. We are no

longer clear about the doctrine he taught nor about the things he

said and did… .

 

* Even the “Apostles’ Creed” is not traceable earlier than the

fourth century. It is manifestly an old, patched formulary.

Rutinius explains that it was not written down for a long time, but

transmitted orally, kept secret, and used as a sort of password

among the elect.

 

We are all so weary of this theology of the Christians, we are all

at heart so sceptical about their Triune God, that it is needless

here to spend any time or space upon the twenty thousand different

formulae in which the orthodox have attempted to believe in

something of the sort. There are several useful encyclopaedias of

sects and heresies, compact, but still bulky, to which the curious

may go. There are ten thousand different expositions of orthodoxy.

No one who really seeks God thinks of the Trinity, either the

Trinity of the Trinitarian or the Trinity of the Sabellian or the

Trinity of the Arian, any more than one thinks of those theories

made stone, those gods with three heads and seven hands, who sit on

lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what not, in the temples of

India. Let us leave, therefore, these morbid elaborations of the

human intelligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the natural

heresies that spring from fundamental weaknesses of the human

character, and which are common to all religions. Against these it

is necessary to keep constant watch. They return very insidiously.

 

3. GOD IS NOT MAGIC

 

One of the most universal of these natural misconceptions of God is

to consider him as something magic serving the ends of men.

 

It is not easy for us to grasp at first the full meaning of giving

our souls to God. The missionary and teacher of any creed is all

too apt to hawk God for what he will fetch; he is greedy for the

poor triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about that many people

who have been led to believe themselves religious, are in reality

still keeping back their own souls and trying to use God for their

own purposes. God is nothing more for them as yet than a

magnificent Fetish. They did not really want him, but they have

heard that he is potent stuff; their unripe souls think to make use

of him. They call upon his name, they do certain things that are

supposed to be peculiarly influential with him, such as saying

prayers and repeating gross praises of him, or reading in a blind,

industrious way that strange miscellany of Jewish and early

Christian literature, the Bible, and suchlike mental mortification,

or making the Sabbath dull and uncomfortable. In return for these

fetishistic propitiations God is supposed to interfere with the

normal course of causation in their favour. He becomes a celestial

log-roller. He remedies unfavourable accidents, cures petty

ailments, contrives unexpected gifts of medicine, money, or the

like, he averts bankruptcies, arranges profitable transactions, and

does a thousand such services for his little clique of faithful

people. The pious are represented as being constantly delighted by

these little surprises, these bouquets and chocolate boxes from the

divinity. Or contrawise he contrives spiteful turns for those who

fail in their religious attentions. He murders Sabbath-breaking

children, or disorganises the careful business schemes of the

ungodly. He is represented as going Sabbath-breakering on Sunday

morning as a Staffordshire worker goes ratting. Ordinary everyday

Christianity is saturated with this fetishistic conception of God.

It may be disowned in THE HIBBERT JOURNAL, but it is unblushingly

advocated in the parish magazine. It is an idea taken over by

Christianity with the rest of the qualities of the Hebrew God. It

is natural enough in minds so self-centred that their recognition of

weakness and need brings with it no real self-surrender, but it is

entirely inconsistent with the modern conception of the true God.

 

There has dropped upon the table as I write a modest periodical

called THE NORTHERN BRITISH ISRAEL REVIEW, illustrated with

portraits of various clergymen of the Church of England, and of

ladies and gentlemen who belong to the little school of thought

which this magazine represents; it is, I should judge, a subsect

entirely within the Established Church of England, that is to say

within the Anglican communion of the Trinitarian Christians. It

contains among other papers a very entertaining summary by a

gentleman entitled—I cite the unusual title-page of the periodical—

“Landseer Mackenzie, Esq.,” of the views of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and

Obadiah upon the Kaiser William. They are distinctly hostile views.

Mr. Landseer Mackenzie discourses not only upon these anticipatory

condemnations but also upon the relations of the weather to this

war. He is convinced quite simply and honestly that God has been

persistently rigging the weather against the Germans. He points out

that the absence of mist on the North Sea was of great help to the

British in the autumn of 1914, and declares that it was the wet

state of the country that really held up the Germans in Flanders in

the winter of 1914-15. He ignores the part played by the weather in

delaying the relief of Kut-el-Amara, and he has not thought of the

difficult question why the Deity, having once decided upon

intervention, did not, instead of this comparatively trivial

meteorological assistance, adopt the more effective course of, for

example, exploding or spoiling the German stores of ammunition by

some simple atomic miracle, or misdirecting their gunfire by a

sudden local modification of the laws of refraction or gravitation.

 

Since these views of God come from Anglican vicarages I can only

conclude that this kind of belief is quite orthodox and permissible

in the established church, and that I am charging orthodox

Christianity here with nothing that has ever been officially

repudiated. I find indeed the essential assumptions of Mr. Landseer

Mackenzie repeated in endless official Christian utterances on the

part of German and British and Russian divines. The Bishop of

Chelmsford, for example, has recently ascribed our difficulties in

the war to our impatience with long sermons—among other similar

causes. Such Christians are manifestly convinced that God can be

invoked by ritual—for example by special days of national prayer or

an increased observance of Sunday—or made malignant by neglect or

levity. It is almost fundamental in their idea of him. The

ordinary Mohammedan seems as confident of this magic pettiness of

God, and the belief of China in the magic propitiations and

resentments of “Heaven” is at least equally strong.

 

But the true God as those of the new religion know him is no such

God of luck and intervention. He is not to serve men’s ends or the

ends of nations or associations of men; he is careless of our

ceremonies and invocations. He does not lose his temper with our

follies and weaknesses. It is for us to serve Him. He captains us,

he does not coddle us. He has his own ends for which he needs

us… .

 

4. GOD IS NOT PROVIDENCE

 

Closely related to this heresy that God is magic, is the heresy that

calls him Providence, that declares the apparent adequacy of cause

and effect to be a sham, and that all the time, incalculably, he is

pulling about the order of events for our personal advantages.

 

The idea of Providence was very gaily travested by Daudet in

“Tartarin in the Alps.” You will remember how Tartarin’s friend

assured him that all Switzerland was one great Trust, intent upon

attracting tourists and far too wise and kind to permit them to

venture into real danger, that all the precipices were netted

invisibly, and all the loose rocks guarded against falling, that

avalanches were prearranged spectacles and the crevasses at their

worst slippery ways down into kindly catchment bags. If the

mountaineer tried to get into real danger he was turned back by

specious excuses. Inspired by this persuasion Tartarin behaved with

incredible daring… . That is exactly the Providence theory of

the whole world. There can be no doubt that it does enable many a

timid soul to get through life with a certain recklessness. And

provided there is no slip into a crevasse, the Providence theory

works well. It would work altogether well if there were no

crevasses.

 

Tartarin was reckless because of his faith in Providence, and

escaped. But what would have happened to him if he had fallen into

a crevasse?

 

There exists a very touching and remarkable book by Sir Francis

Younghusband called “Within.” [Williams and Norgate, 1912.] It is

the confession of a man who lived with a complete confidence in

Providence until he was already well advanced in years. He went

through battles and campaigns, he filled positions of great honour

and responsibility, he saw much of the life of men, without

altogether losing his faith. The loss of a child, an Indian famine,

could shake it but not overthrow it. Then coming back one day from

some races in France, he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt

very cruelly. He suffered terribly in body and mind.