By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as its fundamental

belief, without which everyone was to be "damned everlastingly," a
conception of God and of Christ's relation to God, of which even by

the Christian account of his teaching, Jesus was either totally
unaware or so negligent and careless of the future comfort of his

disciples as scarcely to make mention. The doctrine of the Trinity,
so far as the relationship of the Third Person goes, hangs almost

entirely upon one ambiguous and disputed utterance in St. John's
gospel (XV. 26). Most of the teachings of Christian orthodoxy

resolve themselves to the attentive student into assertions of the
nature of contradiction and repartee. Someone floats an opinion in

some matter that has been hitherto vague, in regard, for example, to
the sonship of Christ or to the method of his birth. The new

opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds unaccustomed to so
definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil they fly to a

contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit that they
worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the

divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be
polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction

from the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced
into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary

assertions, and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to
save it from a reductio ad absurdam. The entire history of the

growth of the Christian doctrine in those disordered early centuries
is a history of theology by committee; a history of furious

wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still more hasty attempts to
clinch matters by anathema. When the muddle was at its very worst,

the church was confronted by enormous political opportunities. In
order that it should seize these one chief thing appeared

imperative: doctrinal uniformity. The emperor himself, albeit
unbaptised and very ignorant of Greek, came and seated himself in

the midst of Christian thought upon a golden throne. At the end of
it all Eusebius, that supreme Trimmer, was prepared to damn

everlastingly all those who doubted that consubstantiality he
himself had doubted at the beginning of the conference. It is quite

clear that Constantine did not care who was damned or for what
period, so long as the Christians ceased to wrangle among

themselves. The practical unanimity of Nicaea was secured by
threats, and then, turning upon the victors, he sought by threats to

restore Arius to communion. The imperial aim was a common faith to
unite the empire. The crushing out of the Arians and of the

Paulicians and suchlike heretics, and more particularly the
systematic destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings,

had about it none of that quality of honest conviction which comes
to those who have a real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of

dissensions that, left to work themselves out, would have spoilt
good business; it was the fist of Nicolas of Myra over again, except

that after the days of Ambrose the sword of the executioner and the
fires of the book-burner were added to the weapon of the human

voice. Priscillian was the first human sacrifice formally offered
up under these improved conditions to the greater glory of the

reinforced Trinity. Thereafter the blood of the heretics was the
cement of Christian unity.

It is with these things in mind that those who profess the new faith
are becoming so markedly anxious to distinguish God from the

Trinitarian's deity. At present if anyone who has left the
Christian communion declares himself a believer in God, priest and

parson swell with self-complacency. There is no reason why they
should do so. That many of us have gone from them and found God is

no concern of theirs. It is not that we who went out into the
wilderness which we thought to be a desert, away from their creeds

and dogmas, have turned back and are returning. It is that we have
gone on still further, and are beyond that desolation. Never more

shall we return to those who gather under the cross. By faith we
disbelieved and denied. By faith we said of that stuffed scarecrow

of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antiquetheological
notions, the Nicene deity, "This is certainly no God." And by faith

we have found God. . . .
3. THE INFINITE BEING IS NOT GOD

There has always been a demand upon the theological teacher that he
should supply a cosmogony. It has always been an effective

propagandist thing to say: "OUR God made the whole universe. Don't
you think that it would be wise to abandon YOUR deity, who did not,

as you admit, do anything of the sort?"
The attentive reader of the lives of the Saints will find that this

style of argument did in the past bring many tribes and nations into
the Christian fold. It was second only to the claim of magic

advantages, demonstrated by a free use of miracles. Only one great
religious system, the Buddhist, seems to have resisted the

temptation to secure for its divinity the honour and title of
Creator. Modern religion is like Buddhism in that respect. It

offers no theory whatever about the origin of the universe. It does
not reach behind the appearances of space and time. It sees only a

featureless presumption in that playing with superlatives which has
entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the

delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or the
Unconditioned, can assert anything at all. At the back of all known

things there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence
is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or

good or ill. Of that Being, whether it is simple or complex or
divine, we know nothing; to us it is no more than the limit of

understanding, the unknown beyond. It may be of practically
limitless intricacy and possibility. The new religion does not

pretend that the God of its life is that Being, or that he has any
relation of control or association with that Being. It does not

even assert that God knows all or much more than we do about that
ultimate Being.

For us life is a matter of our personalities in space and time.
Human analysis probing with philosophy and science towards the

Veiled Being reveals nothing of God, reveals space and time only as
necessary forms of consciousness, glimpses a dance of atoms, of

whirls in the ether. Some day in the endless future there may be a
knowledge, an understanding of relationship, a power and courage

that will pierce into those black wrappings. To that it may be our
God, the Captain of Mankind will take us.

That now is a mere speculation. The veil of the unknown is set with
the stars; its outer texture is ether and atom and crystal. The

Veiled Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods over the
mirror upon which the busy shapes of life are moving. It is as if

it waited in a great stillness. Our lives do not deal with it, and
cannot deal with it. It may be that they may never be able to deal

with it.
4. THE LIFE FORCE IS NOT GOD

So it is that comprehensivesetting of the universe presents itself
to the modern mind. It is altogether outside good and evil and love

and hate. It is outside God, who is love and goodness. And coming
out of this veiled being, proceeding out of it in a manner

altogether inconceivable, is another lesser being, an impulse
thrusting through matter and clothing itself in continually changing

material forms, the maker of our world, Life, the Will to Be. It
comes out of that inscrutable being as a wave comes rolling to us

from beyond the horizon. It is as it were a great wave rushing
through matter and possessed by a spirit. It is a breeding,

fighting thing; it pants through the jungle track as the tiger and
lifts itself towards heaven as the tree; it is the rabbit bolting

for its life and the dove calling to her mate; it crawls, it flies,
it dives, it lusts and devours, it pursues and eats itself in order

to live still more eagerly and hastily; it is every living thing, of
it are our passions and desires and fears. And it is aware of

itself not as a whole, but dispersedly as individual self-
consciousness, starting out dispersedly from every one of the

sentient creatures it has called into being. They look out for
their little moments, red-eyed and fierce, full of greed, full of

the passions of acquisition and assimilation and reproduction,
submitting only to brief fellowships of defence or aggression. They

are beings of strain and conflict and competition. They are living
substance still mingled painfully with the dust. The forms in which

this being clothes itself bear thorns and fangs and claws, are
soaked with poison and bright with threats or allurements, prey

slyly or openly on one another, hold their own for a little while,
breed savagely and resentfully, and pass. . . .

This second Being men have called the Life Force, the Will to Live,
the Struggle for Existence. They have figured it too as Mother