The Soul of a Bishop

Abstract

During the years 1916–19 Wells passed through a phase of religious questioning which found expression in two non-fiction works, War and the Future and God the Invisible King, and three novels, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, The Soul of a Bishop, and The Undying Fire. During this period he professed a belief in a finite God—in contradiction to the views expressed in almost all his previous writings, and to the confusion of many of his friends and admirers. The phase appears to have been engendered by acute mental and spiritual distress in the wake of the First World War. Grieved by the universal carnage as the war intensified, frustrated in his search for a unifying political and educational creed, he turned for a time to religious and theological speculation. Although he repudiated these religious writings in both The World of William Clissold and Experiment in Autobiography,³⁴ admitting that ‘God the Invisible King was merely the Humanity of Comte with a crown on’, there can be no doubting the sincerity and strength of his convictions during this phase.