painful death. Moreover, it destroys social values which can be added up. In this respect it leaves the world face to face with an appalling deficit. But we must not let it weigh upon us too heavily, or make it too great a reproach to the Artificer of human destiny. For the soldier, like every other sentient organism, is immured in his own universe, and his individual debit-and-credit account with the Power which placed him there would be no whit different if he were indeed the only real existence, and the world around him were naught but a dance of shadows.

If there were a country of a hundred million people, in which every citizen was born to an allowance of five pounds, which in all his life he could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock enterprises, though he might leave some of it unexpended—we should not, in spite of the £500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy country. Its effective wealth would be precisely a five-pound note. Similarly, given a world in which every one is born with a limited capacity of sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we should do wrong to call that world a multi-millionaire in misery, even if it could be proved that in each individual account the balance of sensation was on the wrong side of the ledger. It is true that if, in one man's account, the balance were largely to the bad, he would be entitled to reproach the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred or five thousand of his fellows declared themselves satisfied with the result of their audit. But if the Banker, in opening business, had good reason to think that, in the long run, the contents would largely outvote the non-contents, we could scarcely blame him for going ahead. And what if, for contents and malcontents alike, he had an uncovenanted bonus up his sleeve?

In this disquisition, with its shifting personifications, its Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, we may seem to have wandered far away from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence, and yet to conceive a doctrine of origins into which a well-willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible King, as a sort of remedial afterthought, but as a prime mover in this baffling business of life. We put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than Mr. Wells's scheme of things. We imagined a wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly setting up combinations in matter which it knew would work out in cruelty and misery, and another co-ordinate though not quite equal Power interfering from the first to introduce into the combinations of the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards the good. Then we proposed an alternative hypothesis, logically simpler, though more difficult from the moral point of view. We conceived at the source of organic life an intelligent and well-willing Power constrained, by some necessity "behind the veil," to carry out his purposes through the sluggish, refractory, hampering medium of matter. Supposing this Power free to act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether he could take the affirmative course—choose the "Everlasting Yea" as Carlyle would phrase it—without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of the term. In a tentative way, not exempt, perhaps, from a touch of special pleading, we advanced certain considerations which seemed to suggest that his decision to kindle the torch of life might, after all, be justified. Our provisional conclusion was that though, as at present advised, we might not quite see our way to hail him as a beneficent Invisible King, yet we need not go to the opposite extreme of writing him down a mere Ogre God, indifferent to the vast and purposeless process of groaning and travail, begetting and devouring, which he had wantonly initiated. That is the point at which we have now arrived.

I hope it need not be said I do not attribute any substantive value to the hypothetical myths here put forward and discussed—that I do not accept either of them, or propose that anyone else should accept it, as a probable adumbration of what actually occurred "in the beginning"—a first chapter in a new Book of Genesis. My purpose was simply, since myth-making was the order of the day, to hint a criticism of Mr. Wells's myth, by placing beside it one or two other fantasies, perhaps as plausible as his, which had the advantage of not entirely eluding the question of origins. I submit, with great respect, that my Artificer comes a little less out of the blue than his Invisible King—that is all I claim for him.

But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not without indignation. Myth-making, he declares, is not the order of the day. Had he wanted to indulge in myth-making, he could easily have found some metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King. What he has done is to record a profound spiritual experience, common to himself and many other good men and true, which has culminated in the recognition of an actual Power, objectively extant in the world, to which he has felt it a sacred duty to bear witness. Very good; so be it; let us now look more in detail into the gospel according to Wells.

IV

THE APOSTLE'S CREED

A gospel it is, in all literalness; an evangel; a message of glad tidings. It is not merely a truth, it is "the Truth" (p. 1). Let there be no mistake about it: Mr. Wells's ambition is to rank with St. Paul and Mahomet, as the apostle of a new world-religion. He does not in so many words lay claim to inspiration, but it is almost inevitably deducible from his premises. He is uttering the first clear and definite tidings of a God who is endowed with personality, character, will and purpose. To that Deity he has submitted himself in enthusiastic devotion. If the God does not seize the opportunity to speak through such a marvellously suitable, such an ideal, mouthpiece, then practical common-sense cannot be one of his attributes. Which of the other Gods who have announced themselves from time to time has found such a megaphone to reverberate his voice? St. Paul was a poor tent-maker, whose sermons were not even reported in the religious press, while his letters probably counted their public by scores, or at most by hundreds. Mr. Wells, from the outset of his mission, has the ear of two hemispheres.

What, then, does he tell us of his God? The first characteristic which differentiates him from all the other Gods with a big G—for of course we pay no heed to the departmental gods of polytheism—the first fact we must grasp and hold fast to, is that he lays no claim to infinity. "This new faith ... worships a finite God" (p. 5; Mr. Wells's italics). "He has begun and he never will end" (p. 18). "He is within time and not outside it" (p. 7). Nothing can be more definite than that. There was a time when God did not exist; and then somehow, somewhen, he came into being.

Perhaps to ask "When?" would be to trespass on the department of origins, from which we are explicitly warned off. It would be to trench upon "cosmogony." Yet we are not quite without guidance. "The renascent religion," we are told, "has always been here; it has always been