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God The Invisible King-Part7_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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decay; we forget that he came of two people and may beget many, that

he has forgotten much and will forget more, that he can be confused,



divided against himself, delirious, drunken, drugged, or asleep. On

the contrary we are, in our hasty way of thinking of him, apt to



suppose him continuous, definite, actingconsistently and never

forgetting. But only abstract and theoretical persons are like



that. We couple with him the idea of a body. Indeed, in the common

use of the word "person" there is more thought of body than of mind.



We speak of a lover possessing the person of his mistress. We speak

of offences against the person as opposed to insults, libels, or



offences against property. And the gods of primitive men and the

earlier civilisations were quite of that quality of person. They



were thought of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting

consistently. If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was



because they were aloof or because their "persons" were too splendid

for weak human eyes. Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the



person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted

upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was



utterly consumed. The early Islamic conception of God, like the

conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in



spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic

personality away somewhere in Heaven. The personal appearance of



the Christian God is described in The Revelation, and however much

that description may be explained away by commentators as



symbolical, it is certainly taken by most straightforward believers

as a statement of concretereality. Now if we are going to insist



upon this primary meaning of person and individual, then certainly

God as he is now conceived is not a person and not an individual.



The true God will never promenade an Eden or a Heaven, nor sit upon

a throne.



But current Christianity, modern developments of Islam, much Indian

theological thought--that, for instance, which has found such



delicate and attractive expression in the devotional poetry of

Rabindranath Tagore--has long since abandoned this anthropomorphic



insistence upon a body. From the earliest ages man's mind has found

little or no difficulty in the idea of something essential to the



personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing apart from the

body and continuing after the destruction of the body, and being



still a person and an individual. From this it is a small step to

the thought of a person existing independently of any existing or



pre-existing body. That is the idea of theological Christianity, as

distinguished from the Christianity of simple faith. The Triune



Persons--omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent--exist for all

time, superior to and independent of matter. They are supremely



disembodied. One became incarnate--as a wind eddy might take up a

whirl of dust. . . . Those who profess modern religion conceive



that this is an excessiveabstraction of the idea of spirituality, a

disembodiment of the idea of personality beyond the limits of the



conceivable; nevertheless they accept the conception that a person,

a spiritual individual, may be without an ordinary mortal body. . . .



They declare that God is without any specific body, that he is

immaterial, that he can affect the material universe--and that means



that he can only reach our sight, our hearing, our touch--through

the bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.



His nature is of the nature of thought and will. Not only has he,

in his essence, nothing to do with matter, but nothing to do with



space. He is not of matter nor of space. He comes into them.

Since the period when all the great theologies that prevail to-day



were developed, there have been great changes in the ideas of men

towards the dimensions of time and space. We owe to Kant the






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