But with that part of the Palestinian story which is told in the New Testament I am not directly concerned till the next chapter; and the matter here is a more general one.  The truth is that through a thousand channels something has returned to the modern mind.  It is not Christianity.  On the contrary, it would be truer to say that it is paganism.  In reality it is in a very special sense paganism; because it is polytheism.  The word will startle many people, but not the people who know the modern world best.  When I told a distinguished psychologist at Oxford that I differed from his view of the universe, he answered, “Why universe?  Why should it not be a multiverse?” The essence of polytheism is the worship of gods who are not God; that is, who are not necessarily the author and the authority of all things.  Men are feeling more and more that there are many spiritual forces in the universe, and the wisest men feel that some are to be trusted more than others.  There will be a tendency, I think, to take a favourite force, or in other words a familiar spirit.  Mr. H. G. Wells, who is, if anybody is, a genius among moderns and a modern among geniuses, really did this very thing; he selected a god who was really more like a daemon.  He called his book God, the Invisible King; but the curious point was that he specially insisted that his God differed from other people’s God in the very fact that he was not a king.  He was very particular in explaining that his deity did not rule in any almighty or infinite sense; but merely influenced, like any wandering spirit.  Nor was he particularly invisible, if there can be said to be any degrees in invisibility.  Mr. Wells’s Invisible God was really like Mr. Wells’s Invisible Man.  You almost felt he might appear at any moment, at any rate to his one devoted worshipper; and that, as if in old Greece, a glad cry might ring through the woods of Essex, the voice of Mr. Wells crying, “We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible God.”  I do not mean this disrespectfully, but on the contrary very sympathetically; I think it worthy of so great a man to appreciate and answer the general sense of a richer and more adventurous spiritual world around us.  It is a great emancipation from the leaden materialism which weighed on men of imagination forty years ago.  But my point for the moment is that the mode of the emancipation was pagan or even polytheistic, in the real philosophical sense that it was the selection of a single spirit, out of many there might be in the spiritual world.  The point is that while Mr. Wells worships his god (who is not his creator or even necessarily his overlord) there is nothing to prevent Mr. William Archer, also emancipated, from adoring another god in another temple; or Mr. Arnold Bennett, should he similarly liberate his mind, from bowing down to a third god in a third temple.  My imagination rather fails me, I confess, in evoking the image and symbolism of Mr. Bennett’s or Mr. Archer’s idolatries; and if I had to choose between the three, I should probably be found as an acolyte in the shrine of Mr. Wells.  But, anyhow, the trend of all this is to polytheism, rather as it existed in the old civilisation of paganism.