hatever he may be, we are
compelled by the very constitution of our minds to assume his (or its)
existence; whereas there is manifestly no compulsion to assume the
existence of the Invisible King.

Then, again, the Veiled Being is entirely unpretentious. There is no
bluster and no cant about him. He does not claim our gratitude for the
doubtful boon of life. He does not pretend to be just, while he is
committing, or winking at, the most intolerable injustices. He does
not set up to be long-suffering, while in fact he is childishly
touchy. He does not profess to be merciful, while the incurable ward,
the battlefield--nay, even the maternity home and the dentist's
parlor--are there to give him the lie. (Here, of course, I am not
contrasting him with the Invisible King, but with more ancient and
still more Asian divinities.) It is the moral pretensions tagged on by
the theologians to metaphysical Godhead that revolt and estrange
reasonable men--Mr. Wells among the rest. If you tell us that behind
the Veil we shall find a good-natured, indulgent old man, who chastens
us only for our good, is pleased by our flatteries (with or without
music), and is not more than suitably vexed at our naughtinesses in
the Garden of Eden and elsewhere--we reply that this is a nursery tale
which has been riddled, time out of mind, not by wicked sceptics, but
by the spontaneous, irrepressible criticism of babes and sucklings.
But if you divest the Veiled Being of all ethical--or in other words
of all human--attributes, then there is no difficulty whatever in
admiring, and even adoring, the marvels he has wrought. Tennyson went
deeper than he realized into the nature of things when he wrote--

"For merit lives from man to man,
But not from man, O Lord, to thee."

Once put aside all question of merit and demerit, of praise and blame,
and more especially (but this will shock Mr. Wells) of salvation and
damnation--and nothing can be easier than to pay to the works of the
Veiled Being the meed of an illimitable wonder. When we think of the
roaring vortices of flame that spangle the heavens night by night, at
distances that beggar conception: when we think of our tiny earth,
wrapped in its little film of atmosphere, spinning safely for ages
untold amid all these appalling immensities: and when we think, on the
other hand, of the battles of claw and maw going on, beneath the
starry vault, in that most miraculous of jewels, a drop of water: we