ABSTRACT
An astonishing success in the difficult art of prophecy appears to have tempted Mr. Wells into the adventure of explaining A. God. Frankly, what Mr. Wells has to say about the Deity interests me very little. His creed is partly a restatement of the doctrine of Immanence, partly a half-hearted acceptance of the system of Dualism, and largely—on the negative side—a passionate impatience with the dogma of the Trinity. All this has been argued before. When Mr. Wells informs us that “it was not Christianity that took possession of the Roman Empire, but an imperial adventurer who took possession of an all too complacent Christianity,” he merely repeats a truth which Gibbon, in his more polished manner, long ago established. When he attacks the Church, “with its sacraments and its sacerdotalism,” as “the disease of Christianity,” he is poaching on preserves in which Samuel Butler sniped with greater glee and more deadly effect. However, as there are a great many people to-day who read Wells though they do not—and more fools they—read Gibbon and Samuel Butler, there can be no harm in a popular author abstracting and reissuing some fragment of the wisdom of the ages. Besides, to be fair, Mr. Wells does not profess to be making any new contribution to theological thought. He merely claims to be defining a faith vaguely held by the intelligentia of many lands, a faith that would appear to be a sort of halfway house between orthodoxy and disbelief. How widely these rather foggy convictions are held is a matter for debate, because an ever-accumulating body of evidence tends to prove that the more intelligent minds of our day adhere either to a sturdy rationalism or to some tentative spiritualist theory.
