VITHE GREAT ROSY DAWN
Thelast factor in Mr. Wells’s pamphlet is one that we must always expect from your Bible Christian who has lost his God. He becomes a materialist troubled with Pantheism, and very eager to get away from the Puritan disease of his youth—yet a vision remains. He comes forward as the “Seventh Monarchy man,” which is, indeed, the natural term of your Bible Christian—even after he has lost his God.
“I see knowledge,” says Mr. Wells at the end of his diatribe, “increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limit set to it at all. Existence impresses me as perpetual dawn. Our lives as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.”
We have had this before over and over again, not only from the enthusiasts of the seventeenth century, but from the enthusiasts of the early heresies. There was a glorious time coming. Reality—that is the Faith—is a delusion. Now that you know it to be a delusion you are naturally down in the mouth. But cheer up, I have a consolation for you. All will yet be well; nay, much better. All is going forward. My donkey will soon grow wings.
I need not waste my reader’s time on that sort of thing. It is sheer stupid enthusiasm, indulged in to fill the void left by the loss of reason: by a man losing himself in a fog of cheap print and becoming fantastically unaware of things as they are.
When, in that connection Mr. Wells tells me that we of the Faith are backward people, who “because it is necessary for their comfort believe in Heaven and Hell”(a comfortable place Hell!) I answer that he appreciates the Faith as a man born blind might appreciate colour. When he tells me that this Catholic sort (to which I belong) are besotted to stand by accepted morals, beget children honestly, love one wife and live decently, I answer him that he is becoming disgusting. When he says that we believe in immortality “because we should be sorry to grow old and die,” I answer that he is talking nonsense on such a scale that it is difficult to deal with it.
When he goes on to say that we think we live on a “flat World” it becomes worse still, and one can’t deal with it; it is no longer nonsense, it is raving.
When he tells us that the Catholic has about him “a curious defensive note,” I am afraid he must be thinking of the Church Congress. There was certainly no “curious defensive note” in my demolition of his own ignorance, vanity and lack of balance.
When he tells us that I, as a Christian, “must be puzzled not a little by that vast parade of evolution through the immeasurable ages,” he clearly has not the least grasp of the very simple principle that eternity is outside time, and that relative values are not to be obtained by mere measurement in days or inches. When he says that “my” phantasy of a Creator....
Really, my dear Mr. Wells, I must here interrupt. Why “my” phantasy? Not that he uses the word “phantasy,” but he implies that I invented God (another enormous compliment to me). Does he not know that the human race as a whole, or at any rate the leading part of it, including his own immediate honourable ancestry, pay some reverence to Almighty God, and humbly admits His creative power and Sustained Omnipotence? But I must resume.
... that my phantasy of a Creator has worked within disproportionate margins both of space and time; when he tells me if I reach beatitude I shall feel like a fish out of water; when he speaks like this, I recognise the unmistakable touch of the Bible Christian who has lost his God.
Mr. Wells has never met anybody, I suppose, ofsufficient breadth of culture to instruct him in these things. He does not know that the truths of the Faith cannot be visualised; he does not know that the Faith is a philosophy; he does not know that our limitations are no disproof of an infinite Creator.
He boasts that his education was a modern one, and taught him things that were unknown a hundred years ago. So was mine. I also was taught that the Earth was a globe, that geological time was prolonged, and the rest of it, but I was also taught how to think, and I was also taught a little—not very much—history.
For instance, I was taught enough to know that the doctrine of immortality did not arise in the Middle Ages, as Mr. Wells thinks it did, nor even the doctrine of eternal beatitude. But I was taught enough to regard these great mysteries with reverence and not to talk about them as preposterous. In other words, I was taught not to measure the infinite things of God, nor even the great things of Christendom, by the standards of the Yellow Press.
When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying, “I strut to no such personal beatitude,” and then goes on to say, “the life to which I belong uses me and will pass on beyond me, and I am content,” he does two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with the imaginary (for whether he will attain beatitude or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with his opinions upon the subject), and next he falls into the very common error of confused intellects—the personification of abstract ideas. “The life to which we belong uses us” is a meaningless phrase. God may use us or we may use ourselves, or some other third Will, not God’s or our own, may use us: but “the life to which we belong” does not use us. Talking like that is harmless when it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets up to be definition.
He accuses the Christian of being anthropomorphic: it is just the other way. It is we who are perpetually compelled to drag back inferior minds to a confession of their own apparently ineradicable tendency to talk in terms of their own petty experience; to imagine thatthe whole world has “progressed” because they have daily hot baths and bad cooking, while in their childhood they had only occasional hot baths, but better cooking; that more people voting is “progressive” as compared with people not voting at all; that a lot of rich people going from England to the Riviera every year is “progressive” compared with staying at home in the hideous surroundings of poor old England.
This leads Mr. Wells, as it always does all his kind, to prophecy. We are all of us approaching what I may call The Great Rosy Dawn: a goldmine: a terrestrial Paradise.
This sort of exaltation is the inevitable first phase of Bible-mania in decay. But it is a very short phase. It is the shoddy remnant of the Christian hope, and when it is gone there will return on us, not the simple paganism of a sad world, but sheer darkness: and strange things in the dark.