ite this down partly for the pleasure of recalling him. He used to
come to my cabin every hour or so, shake his head mournfully, and go
away again. I felt his good will and was grateful for it; but it would
be affectation to pretend that I would not have been still more
grateful had he possessed some "control of phenomena"--had he brought
with him a remedy. Since those days, more than one efficacious
preventive of sea-sickness has been discovered; and I own to counting
the nameless chemists who have achieved this marvel among the most
authentic friends to poor humanity of whom we have any knowledge.
Where is the God (as Mr. Zangwill has pertinently enquired) who will
give us a cure for cancer?

This, however, is a digression, or at any rate an anticipation. What
the Invisible King actually does, without meddling with phenomena, is
to assume the "captaincy" of the "racial adventure" in which we are
engaged (p. 76). "God must love his followers as a great captain loves
his men ... whose faith alone makes him possible. It is an austere
love. The Spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and
bodily death" (p. 67). And what is this "racial adventure"? It is, in
the first place, the achievement of Mr. Wells's political ideals--an
object which has all my sympathy, since they happen to be, generally
speaking, my own. "As a knight in God's service," says Mr. Wells, "I
take sides against injustice, disorder, and against all those
temporal kings, emperors, princes, landlords, and owners, who set
themselves up against God's rule and worship" (p. 97). By all means!
Only one does not see how, if the kings, emperors and landlords
declare that they, too, have found God, and found him on the side of
monarchy and landlordism, this contention of theirs is to be confuted.
If God does not control phenomena, the actual controllers of events
will be able to maintain in the future, as in the past, that he is on
the side of the big battalions--an argument which it will be hard to
meet, except by raising bigger battalions. In the meantime we have to
note that God's political opinions are only provisional, and that he
himself is open to conviction. "The first purpose of God is the
attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more
knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to power" (p. 98-9). And the
object to which he will apply this power is "the conquest of death:
first the overcoming of death in the individual by the inco