12 June 1882 – 18 June 1882

Walking with William Morris from the Society of Arts to Bloomsbury last Friday, we talked, among other things, of believing or not believing in a God, and he said ' It's so unimportant, it seems to me,' and he went on to say that all we can get to, do what we will, is a form of words. I think we agree in part, not entirely ; but in the street and in a hurry explanation was impossible. ^ On May i ith Allingham's youngest child, Henry William Allingham, was born. ' Le Sujet de Dieu ' might be called unimportant in a sense, because, as the French editor said, ' il manque I'actualite,' One knows that it is impossible to arrive at any- thing definite, and those who do not trouble their heads about the matter can get on as well as other people, so far as one sees. It must be remembered, however, that our whole society is based upon traditionary belief in a God, and, believe what we will, we continue to get the benefit of this in many ways. But there are, and always will be, many people who cannot help asking often and anxiously, ' Is there a God ? — Is there no God ? ' and the sort of answer that comes home may be highly important to them and others in its practical results, especially in certain crises, common to human life, but new and intensely interesting to each human being. In crises, too, of national life the subject may have a terrible actuality. • But this does not justify dogmatism upon it. Here also I think sincerity best, with oneself and others. I will have nothing to do with the Church of Rome, or indeed with any form of Christianity, in spite of all the beauty and power, all the comforting and controlling influences, because I know the structure is built on false dogmas. No verbal Revelation of any date, in any tongue, has the least authority with me. Nor do I want a puppet God constructed or kept up because it may scare some from robbery and revolution, murder and suicide ; and it seems to me that whoever goes about to describe or define the Deity, sets up an idol or puppet, a man's work, whether it be mean as African fetish or majestic as the Jupiter of Pheidias. We cannot in the least describe, or comprehend, or even think Deity. And yet we can believe in Deity, and that belief is not fantastic, but natural, sound, and reasonable. There is to me no conception of the Universe possible save as the dominion of Power and Wisdom, unfathomably great, yet in sympathy with my own intelligent nature ; a Greatness presenting itself to me (when I dare at all to shape it) as a true Personality, comprising all that man at his best in measured degree feels, thinks, and is ; and much more. Almighty God^ — to whom turns my soul, sharing, I know not how, the mystic divine nature ; whose reality is indubitable, whose quality is incomprehen- sible, whose plans are inscrutable. This conception is in harmony and consistency with my whole moral, reasonable, and imaginative being. It bears little talking about, and that only in the choicest moments. Logic has no hold here. Rhetoric is out of place. I do not know that I am bound to turn my mind towards the problem of the universe, or that any one is bound to send his thoughts outside of his daily life and business. But my mind does naturally and voluntarily so turn, and when it does so turn it finds before it the idea of God^ and therefrom receives a sense of strength and serenity. Nor is this experience contradicted in the least by anything that I know, feel, or imagine.