ary, non-Wellsian sense of the word) is ever to be found, it must
be through patient investigation of the phenomena in which he clothes
himself.

V

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD?

Though many of Mr. Wells's asseverations of the substantive reality of
his Invisible King have been quoted above, it would be easy to
lengthen their array. There is nothing on which he is so insistent.
For example, "God is no abstraction nor trick of words....[3] He is as
real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace" (p. 56). And again, on the
same page: "He feels us and knows us; he is helped and gladdened by
us. He hopes and attempts." There is no limit to the anthropomorphism
of the language which Mr. Wells currently employs. Or rather, there is
only one limit: he disclaims the notion that his God is actually
existent in space, that he has parts and dimensions, and inhabits a
form in any way analogous to ours. He is the Invisible King, not
merely, like the Spanish Fleet, because he "is not yet in sight," but
because he has no material or "astral" integument. Being outside space
(though inside time) he can be omnipresent (p. 61). But of course Mr.
Wells would not pretend that no deity can be called anthropomorphic
who is not actually conceived as incarnate in the visible figure of a
man. An anthropomorphic God is one who reflects the mental
characteristics of his worshippers; and that Mr. Wells's God does, if
ever God did in this world.

[3] The words here omitted, "no Infinite," are nothing to the
present purpose. Mr. Wells has started by making this
declaration, which we accept without difficulty. No one will
suspect the Invisible King of being an "Infinite" in
disguise.

Yet almost in the same breath in which he is claiming for his God the
fullest independent reality--thinking of him "as having moods and
aspects, as a man has, and a consistency we call his character" (p.
63)--he will use language implying that he is that very abstraction of
the better parts of human nature which has been proposed for worship
in all the various "religions of humanity," "ethical churches," and so
forth, for two or three generations past. Listen to this: "Though he
does not exist in matter or space, he exists in time, just as a
current of thought may do; he changes and becomes more even as a man's
thought gathers itself together; somewhere in the dawning of mankind
he had a beginning, an awakening, and as mankind grows he grows....
_