Let him add only one other note of explanation in this preface, and that is to remark that except for one incidental passage (in Chapter IV., 1), nowhere does he discuss the question of personal immortality. [It is discussed in “First and Last Things,” Book IV, 4.] He omits this question because he does not consider that it has any more bearing upon the essentials of religion, than have the theories we may hold about the relation of God and the moral law to the starry universe.  The latter is a question for the theologian, the former for the psychologist.  Whether we are mortal or immortal, whether the God in our hearts is the Son of or a rebel against the Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of salvation, is still our self-identification with God, irrespective of consequences, and the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and in the world.  Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect righteousness.  Many people seem to find the prospect of a final personal death unendurable.  This impresses me as egotism.  I have no such appetite for a separate immortality.  God is my immortality; what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not is of no more permanent value than the snows of yester-year.

H. G. W.

Dunmow, May, 1917.

GOD THE INVISIBLE KING

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION

1.  Modern religion has no founder

Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be an exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world.  A little while ago and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found in existence, and already in a state of diffusion.  People have begun to hear of the new belief first here and then there.  It is interesting, for example, to trace how Christianity drifted into the consciousness of the Roman world.  But when a religion has been interrogated it has always had hitherto a tale of beginnings, the name and story of a founder.  The renascent religion that is now taking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points to no origins.  It is the Truth, its believers declare; it has always been here; it has always been visible to those who had eyes to see.  It is perhaps plainer than it was and to more people—­that is all.

It is as if it still did not realise its own difference.  Many of those who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of Christianity.  Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley’s, speak of it as Christianity without Theology.  They do not know the creed they are carrying.  It has, as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle theology, flatly opposed to any belief that could, except by great stretching of charity and the imagination, be called Christianity.  One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the system ascribed to some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather than a sympathetic coincidence.  Of that the reader shall presently have an opportunity of judging.