Biographers (including Wells himself) agree in regarding this foray into theology, which is also remarkable in the novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), as the result of the trauma of World War I.
God the Invisible King "was so different from what Wells normally wrote that most people did not know how to handle it." The book led to Wells having lunch with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and provoked a number of works controverting his statement of his beliefs.
Wells later repudiated the God of God the Invisible King as "no God at all." "What we have here is really a falling back of the mind towards immaturity under the stress of dismay and anxiety. ... I thought it was pitiful that [men looking for some lodestar for their loyalty] should pin their minds to 'King and Country' and suchlike claptrap, when they might live and die for greater ends, and I did my utmost to personify and animate a greater, remoter objective in God the Invisible King. So by a sort of coup d'état I turned my New Republic for a time into a divine monarchy." "In What Are We to Do with Our Lives? (1932) I make the most explicit renunciation and apology for this phase of terminological disingenuousness."
References
↑ H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. v.
↑ H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. ix. These views also appear in his novel The Soul of a Bishop.
↑ H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 173.
↑ H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. ix & Ch. 1 passim.
↑ H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), Ch. 2 passim.
↑ H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), Ch. 3 passim.