character, no God at
all is needed to enable millions of men, in whom the blood runs high
and the joy of life is at its keenest, to achieve the conquest of self
in one of its noblest forms. Or (what comes to the same thing) any
sort of God will serve the purpose. Your God (divested of metaphysical
attributes) is simply a name for your own better instincts and
impulses. Many people, perhaps most, share Mr. Wells's tendency to
externalize, objectivate, personify these impulses; and there may be
no harm in doing so. But when it comes to asserting that your own
personification is the only true one, then--I am not so sure.

Finally there arises the question whether the personification of the
Invisible King can really, in any comprehensible sense, and for any
considerable number of normal human beings, rob death of its sting,
the grave of its victory? On this point discussion cannot possibly be
conclusive, for the ultimate test is necessarily a personal one. If
any sane and sincere person tells me that a certain idea, or emotion,
or habit of mind, or even any rite or incantation, has deprived death
of its terrors for him, I can only congratulate him, even if I have to
confess that my own experience gives me no clue to his meaning. It is
not even very profitable to enquire whether a man can be confident of
his own attitude towards death unless he has either come very close to
its brink himself, or known what it means to witness the extinction of
a life on which his whole joy in the present and hope for the future
depended. All one can do is to try to ascertain as nearly as possible
what the contemner of death really means, and to consider whether his
individual experience or feeling is, or is likely to become, typical.

One thing we must plainly realize, and that is that, for the purposes
of his present argument, Mr. Wells conceives death to be a real
extinction of the individual consciousness. He does not formally
commit himself to a denial of personal immortality, but it is a
contingency which he declines to take into account. Oddly enough, in
trying to acclimatize our minds to the idea of such an absolutely
incorporeal and immaterial, yet really existent, being as his
Invisible King, he comes near to clearing away the one great obstacle
to belief in survival after death. "From the earliest ages," he says,
"man's mind has found little or no difficulty in the idea of something
essential to the personality, a soul or a spirit