Overview

God the Invisible King is a theological tract published by H.G. Wells in 1917. Wells describes his aim as to state as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious belief of the writer. He distinguishes his religious beliefs from Christianity, and warns readers that he is particularly uncompromising on the doctrine of the Trinity, which he blames on the violent ultimate crystallization of Nicaea. He pleads for a modern religion or renascent religion that has no revelation and no founder. Wells rejects any belief related to God as Nature or the Creator, confining himself to the finite God of the human heart. He devotes a chapter to misconceptions about God that are due to mistaken mental elaboration as opposed heresies of speculation, and says that the God in which he believes has nothing to do with magic, providence, quietism, punishment, the threatening of children, or sexual ethics. Positively, in a chapter entitled The Likeness of God, he states his belief that God is courage, a person, youth (i.e. forward- rather than backward-looking), and love. Wells finds in scientific atheists like Metchnikoff beliefs that are equivalent to what he regards as the fundamental proposition of religious translated into terms of materialistic science, the proposition that damnation is really over-individuation and that salvation is escape from self into the larger being of life.

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