then bowing down and
worshipping it?

The wrath of the tribal God against his bovine rival was certainly
excessive--yet we cannot regard idolatry as one of the loftier
manifestations of the religious spirit. The man who can bow down and
worship the work of his hands shows a morbid craving for
self-abasement. It is possible, no doubt, to plead that the graven
image is a mere symbol of incorporeal, supersensible deity; and the
plea is a good one, if, and in so far as, we can believe that the
distinction between the sign and the thing signified is clear to the
mind of the devotee. The difficulty lies in believing that the type of
mind which is capable of focussing its devotion upon a statuette is
also capable of distinguishing between the idea of a symbol and the
idea of a portrait. But when we pass from the work of a man's hands to
the work of his brain--from an actual piece of sculpture to a mental
construction--the plea of symbolism can no longer be advanced. This
graven image of the mind, so to speak, is the veritable God, or it is
nothing; and Mr. Wells, as we have seen, is profuse in his assurances
that it is the veritable God. That is what makes his whole attitude
and argument so baffling. One can understand an idolater who says "I
believe that my God inhabits yonder image," or "Yonder image is only a
convenient point of concentration for the reverence, gratitude, and
love which pass through it to the august and transcendent Spirit whom
it symbolizes." But how are we to understand the idolater who adores,
and claims actual divinity for, an emanation from his own brain and
the brains of a certain number of like-minded persons? Is it not as
though a ventriloquist were to prostrate himself before his own
puppet?

This craving for something to worship points to an almost uncanny
recrudescence of the spirit of Asia in a fine European intelligence.
For my own part, as above stated, I cannot believe Mr. Wells's case to
be typical; but in that I may be mistaken. It is possible that an
epidemic of Asiatic religiosity may be one of the sequels of the War.
If that be so--if there are many people who shrink from the condition
of the spiritual "ronin," and are in search of a respectable "daimio"
to whom to pay their devotion--I beg leave strongly to urge the claims
of the Veiled Being as against the Invisible King.

He has at the outset the not inconsiderable advantage of being an
entity instead of a non-entity. Whoever or w