ned the trick
To hold us gaping here,
Till our minds in the spell of his maze almost
Have forgotten the time of year?

One never could have the least idea.
Yet why he disposed to twit
A fellow who does such wonderful things
With the merest lack of wit?

Likely enough, when the show is done
And the balls all back in his hand,
He'll tell us why he is smiling so,
And we shall understand.

I am not, perhaps, very firmly assured of this consummation. Yet I am
much more hopeful of one day understanding the Juggler and the Balls
than of ever getting into confidential relations with Mr. Wells's
Invisible King.

* * * * *

One is conscious of a sort of churlishness in thus rejecting the
advances of so amiable a character as the Invisible King. But is Mr.
Wells, on his side, quite courteous, or even quite fair, to the Veiled
Being? "Riddle me no riddles!" he seems to say; "I am tired of your
guessing games. Let us have done with 'distressful enquiry into
ultimate origins,' and 'bring our minds to the conception of a
spontaneous and developing God'--one of whose existence and
benevolence we are sure, since we made him ourselves. I want something
to worship, to take me out of myself, to inspire me with brave phrases
about death. How can one worship an insoluble problem? Will an enigma
die with me in a reeling aeroplane? While you lurk obstinately behind
that veil, how can I even know that your political views are sound?
Whereas the Invisible King gives forth oracles of the highest
political wisdom, in a voice which I can scarcely distinguish from my
own. You are a remote, tantalizing entity with nothing comforting or
stimulating about you. But as for my Invisible King, 'Closer is he
than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.'"

A little way back, I compared Mr. Wells to Moses; but, looked at from
another point of view, he and his co-religionists may rather be
likened to the Children of Israel. Tired of waiting for news from the
God on the cloudy mountain-top, did they not make themselves a
synthetic deity, finite, friendly, and very like the Invisible King,
inasmuch as he seems to have worked no miracles, and done, in fact,
nothing whatever? But the God on the mountain-top was wroth, and
accused them of idolatry, surely not without reason. For what is
idolatry if it be not manufacturing a God, whether out of golden
earrings or out of humanitarian sentiments, and