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sel. During the thirteen months' strike, however, a great number of Argentine steamers had gone under the Uruguay or the Paraguay flag, and had been partially manned by sailors from the navies of those governments. The fact that there was any shipping service whatever had been due to the employment of men who were not members of the

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organization — though they could hardly be classed as strike-breakers under the conditions existing. Now that the strike is over, the union insists that these people be dismissed. The crew of the river steamer Humanitá, flying the Paraguay flag, refused to consent to this, and sailed from Asunción with its own captain, and proceeded up the river, endeavoring to reach Brazilian territory. When prevented from doing this, the crew sank the steamer. The company naturally presented a claim against the government of Paraguay for its loss, and the latter insists that the government of Argentina shall assume responsibility for the operations of the Fom, which has extended its activities into neighboring countries.

So the arbitrary actions of the labor leaders and the tolerance of the Argentine government are likely to involve the country at any moment in international complications. Another incident illustrates this. A dispute arose between the crew and the owners of the United States steamer Martha Washington, which is lying in this harbor. The Fom, although in no wise concerned in the matter, interfered on the side of the crew and boycotted the steamer. When the efforts of the United States consul to secure action from the authorities failed, the American ambassador protested to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. We now hear from Washington that the incident is embarrassing Harding's administration, because it knows that it is against the fixed policy of the Argentine government to op

pose the Fom. Meanwhile, the Martha Washington stays here under boycott. Its owners have diverted their other vessels for the time being to Montevideo; and the Argentine government is puzzling over the crisis. Such conditions must have an end. The Washington government is right.

The administration here would be acting contrary to its fixed policy were it to intervene against the all-powerful Fom. Probably this attitude is not determined solely by campaign motives. I believe the authorities are moved by fear or undue prudence, lest they invite the hostility of these federations on top of the bitter opposition the administration is already meeting from the Conservatives and the Socialists in Congress. That is the only explanation for the remarkable apathy which they have shown toward the insurrectionary movements in the interior.

We have previously described the proletarian agitation which is sweeping through the country districts.1 Violent disorders have occurred among the rural laborers; and some of their strikes have been for outright revolutionary objects. Agitators were not responsible for all this violence. Employers have often exploited their workers, until the latter were compelled to use methods of self-protection which led naturally to violence.

Conditions bordering upon slavery prevailed among the timbermen in Misiones Territory, and a widespread insurrection was prevented only by a large corps of armed guards and bloodhounds, the silent witnesses of whose work were numerous corpses floating down the Parana. In this case the government had a splendid opportunity to adopt a humanitarian programme.

Farther south, at Chaco in the province of Santa Fé, and even in less re1 Compare The Living Age for April 10 and October 2, 1920.

mote districts, conditions are not quite

so bad at the quebracho camps; but on the other hand the unions are stronger. There the strikers have formed armed bands, and soldiers have been used to suppress them. These disorders attained their widest extent in the territory of Santa Cruz, in the extreme southern part of Argentina. Armed strikers gathered in troops of several hundred men, and scourged the whole country with fire and sword. The government did not intervene until the English and German ambassadors protested on account of outrages inflicted upon their citizens settled in this vicinity.

However, there is not the slightest prospect of a revolution in Argentina. The government feels insecure, and it is easy to understand that its attention is largely occupied with economic and local political problems, which are even more critical than these social problems. It should be a source of universal regret that President Irigoyen's administra

tion has not been as successful at home as abroad. Argentina's unfavorable balance of trade with the United States, due to its excessive importations from that country, has given North American financiers a control here which the nation can escape only by a series of good wheat harvests, which will enable it to restore its trade balance from its collections in other markets. We have greatly overestimated Argentina's consuming power, with the result that every branch of trade is overstocked, and even the most legitimate fields of commerce have become highly speculative. The failure to find a profitable foreign market for its wheat this year, which has caused a general unfavorable trade balance, and not only has raised the dollar to a premium of thirty-three per cent, but has raised also the English pound, the Dutch guilder, and the Swiss franc above par, is due mainly to the incapacity of the government, which failed to take timely and effective measures to forestall this situation.

THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF H. G. WELLS. III

BY A. E. BAKER

From The Church Quarterly Review, April
(LONDON THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL)

WHAT is to be made of Mr. Wells's denials? He denies that God is omnipotent, and he denies, with vulgar and savage sarcasm, the doctrine of the Trinity. His new religion would not be sufficiently distinct from orthodoxy to have disturbed any dovecotes were it not for the fact that these denials are not even incidental to it, but are central; for it is in the assertion that God is not omnipotent, not yet, that Mr. Wells

finds the possibility of escape from the nightmare problem of evil, and of a real religious faith in spite of the chaos and cruelty of life.

There is an unforgettable scene in Mr. Britling Sees It Through, in which a woman who has lost her husband in the war, and Mr. Britling who has lost his son, talk of their faith in the light of their loss. She talked to Mr. Britling, as many women, surely, have talked in

the same terrible circumstances, of how cruel the world is, all set about with knives, and accidents and disease. . . . If such people as Teddy are killed, so fine, so vital, then the world must be hell. Getting born is getting damned. Cruelty is the law. There is no God, or he is like an idiot pulling wings off a fly . . . if he lets these things happen. And he must let them happen.

Mr. Britling agrees that all that she says is true, her anger is justified, if God is omnipotent. But the omnipotent God is a figment of the theologians. The real God of the Christians is a mocked and wounded God nailed on a

cross of matter. Some day He will triumph, rising in a nail-pierced body out of death. But He cannot be held

responsible, not yet. The omnipotent God is a quack God, a panacea. Common sense and true religion know that He does not exist:

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God is not absolute, God is finite. A finite God, who struggles in his great and comprehensive way as we struggle in our weak and silly way, who is with us; that is the essence of all real religion. .. Necessity is the uttermost thing, but God is the innermost thing. 'Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.' He is the other thing than this world, greater than nature or Necessity, for he is a Spirit and they are blind, but not controlling them, not yet.

And then he goes on to say that the God of love and righteousness is proved by the sacrifice of all those dear boys who by the hundred thousand have laid down their lives ('our sons have shewn us God'), and their own kindness and love for each other.

It is not easy, indeed, to criticize this conception of God, stated with such earnestness and eloquence. But in Mr. Wells's presentation, the problem is not really solved, it is only stated. There is evil in the world; cruelty and hate and disease and waste

and filthiness. But even when he is thinking of these things, Mr. Wells speaks of the limitless kindness and tenderness of God,' and, in God, the Invisible King, he says: 'He is, by our poor scales of measurement, boundless love, boundless courage, boundless generosity.' These words need not be pressed to their literal meaning; Mr. Wells is writing for a non-philosophical public. But, allowing for that, in a world of moral beings, among persons, not among things, if the aim of the kingdom of God is not a clock-work heaven, but freedom, what further meaning can you give to 'omnipotent'? The only moral omnipotence is love, which expresses itself in necessity. For if love is the ground of freedom, law is its condition. Mr. Wells is fighting a bogey of the unphilosophical mind.

He is merely perplexing when he says that the God of love and friendliness, kin to man and kind, closer than breathing, fights against necessity, is other than nature. No religion could be built on such an unrelieved dualism. The problem for any religion worthy of the name is to show how love and necessity, nature and spirit, are reconciled. If the spirit of man is not to be overwhelmed by chance and fate, he must have more than an ideal, he must have some sure hope that the ideal can be realized, and that what is can be transformed into what ought to be. This reconciliation has been accomplished, or, at least, the way made clear to its accomplishment, in Christianity. The symbol of this is precisely the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity which Mr. Wells, particularly in God, the Invisible King and The Soul of the Bishop, has made the target for so much smart sarcasm.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the crown of all Christian theology, and has been the inspiration of the deepest Western thinking. It was designed to meet a deep human need, practical and

religious as well as intellectual. This need can be stated quite simply. Everyone who has had the privilege of worshiping in one of the many beautiful Gothic churches of our land must have felt something of their appeal. However weak or cold or conventional a man's own faith may be, he knows that these were built in the ages of faith, and built by men who thought that worship is worth while, and that the Eternal is real. However little he may pray himself (perhaps prayer has ceased to be even a habit) prayer is a little easier here; here the veil between seen and unseen has worn thin; the Holy Sacrifice has been offered here for centuries; the hearts and lives of humble men and women have been consecrated by the Real Presence of their Lord. Here a man is touched by the Highest. He believes in God, in goodness, in love. He forgets to be cynical. The door is left open into the experience of the writers of the Twenty-Third Psalm, and of 'Lead, Kindly Light.' The divine presence in man's upward struggle becomes a luminous reality to him. He feels the urge and drive of the Self which is not himself, which links him on to other selves, to the ideal and the absolute, the Self which is the God within. He begins to believe.

But what happens when he goes outside? The inspiration of common worship, of the great church, passes. He is in a different world, a world of competition, and cruelty, and war, where the strong succeed, and the weak suffer. The work-a-day world seems so careless of all the things that seemed so important in the cathedral. The sun shines on the evil and on the good; the rain falls on just and unjust alike. Men say that there is law in nature, law in human society, law in industry, inexorable, indifferent. But who shall say if there be indeed a Lawgiver, a Ruler, a Creator, behind nature and society? The

VOL. 310.-NO. 4021

Stoics postulated a Logos; Herbert Spencer conceded 'The Unknowable'; Mr. Britling speaks of Necessity and Nature; Mr. Wells writes of a 'Veiled Being.' But what least sign is there that this 'Ultimate Mystery' is the same as the God who reveals Himself as Love and Beauty in the moment of religious communion? What reconciles Law and Love, Spirit and Necessity, the freedom of man's soul and the rigid system of nature, the worship of the Sunday and the dull indifferent task of every day? What principle, what person, can hold together, and make one, heaven and earth, faith and life, the God who created the world, and the Spirit who speaks in love and holiness and worship? The world has had only one answer to that question. Mr. Wells leaves it unanswered; his religion is, at last, a dualism.

The answer is contained in the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, stated by St. Paul, defined at Nicæa, sung in triumph in the Athanasian Creed. Jesus of Nazareth showed men, by the victory of his own life, that the Divine Spirit within is the Ruler without, that the God whom Mr. Wells calls our Friend and Companion is one with the 'Veiled Being' who is on the further side of Fate. In fearless trust in the Divine Spirit within Him, He proved that every external happening could be brought into obedience to that Inner Voice, that every event could be accepted as a revelation of his Love, and every duty fulfilled as an expression of his will. The outer world and the inner are not in conflict in Christ. He reconciled them. He saw that God sendeth his rain upon the just and the unjust, not because nature is indifferent to morality, but because He pursued his wandering children with his kindness. Jesus saw nature filled with Spirit, the world a sacrament of God, so that not even a sparrow falls without Him, Law is an

outward and visible sign of Love. It is only in the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit are seen to be one. There atonement is made between nature and Spirit, between Love and necessity. He made necessity mean love.

Mr. Wells is beginning to see that a religion which makes no attempt at such a reconciliation can never satisfy or inspire right through to the end.

The creeds declare in a beautiful symbol [he says in The Undying Fire] that the God who is present in our hearts is one with the universal Father, and at the same time his beloved Son, continually and eternally begotten from the universal fatherhood, and crucified only to conquer. He has come into our lives to raise them up at last to himself.

But to believe that is to believe in the significance and continuity of the whole effort of mankind.

The human spirit is not strong enough to face the complexities and overwhelming immensities of life with only a faith in a God who struggles. We need a God who struggles and wins; a God who dies, and is alive for evermore; a God who is God in my own life, and therefore God in heaven.

I have gone past where ye must go;
I have seen past the agony,

I behold God in heaven, and strive.

There is no part of Mr. Wells's religious ideas which, to the Christian, is less satisfactory than his conception of Jesus Christ- though here, again, there are signs that closer study is leading him to modify his view.

This great and very definite personality in the hearts and imagination of mankind [he says] does not, and never has, attracted me. . . . I cannot love him any more than I can love a man upon the rack. . . . The Christian Christ, in none of his three characteristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from whom I am cut off by the wanton and indecent purity of the Immaculate Conception), nor as the white-robed, spotless mir

acle-worker, nor in the fierce unreal torment of the Cross, comes close to my soul. I do not understand the Agony in the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play in an unknown tongue. The last cry of despair is the one human touch, discordant with all the rest of the story. One cry of despair does not suffice. The Christian Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not flesh enough, not earth enough. He was never foolish, and hot-eared, and inarticulate, never vain, he never forgot things, never tangled his miracles. I would love him, I think, more easily if the dead had not risen and if he had lain in peace in his sepulchre instead of coming back more enhaloed and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own tragedy.

What stands in Mr. Wells's way is just that he allows some theory or interpretation of a fact to hide the fact itself. (A man who speaks of the 'unreal' torment of the Cross has surely, if only for a moment, lost all contact with reality.) He will not look at the Magic Babe because he dislikes the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; though it does not require much penetration to see that, if the Christ, Babe and Man, had not been so potent to bless and redeem, there would never have been any theology of his conception. He does not understand the Agony in the Garden because he sees it through the medium of his theory of Christ as an incomprehensible being, neither God nor man. But He was a young man in the early thirties, in love with life, in love with little children, with men and women. He had incredibly great ambitions for the service He was to render mankind. At an age when most men are at the beginning of their life work, He was called to choose death. There is an intensity in his agony which our human measures cannot plumb; but it is an obvious exaggeration to say that we can understand it no more than a scene from a play in an unknown tongue.

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