Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 13 December 1923
Mr. St. John Ervine lectured in the Albert Hall, Manchester, last night on the religious beliefs of Mr. G. B. Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells. He began with the assumption that human beings needed a religion; that no nation could thrive without a faith of some sort which it held strongly enough to die for if need be. Shaw and Wells could be taken to symbolise the revolt of English people against established beliefs.
Mr. Shaw was a man of extraordinarily acute mind. He was a religious man with a Protestant rather than a Catholic mind, for he would have nothing between himself and God. Surveying the world, he found a great deal of cruelty and misery and pain which he could not reconcile with a Perfect Being. Having got to that point Mr. Shaw came to the conclusion that God was not perfect, but was an Imperfect Being striving to become perfect. To become perfect, God was making experiments through eternity and inventing instruments and agents to that end. Certain creatures that had existed once had disappeared because they were of no use, or because God had got all the use he could from them.
Another war on the scale of the Great War might destroy civilisation. Mr. Shaw would say that was a sign that God had become impatient with mankind and had begun the process of scrapping it.
Mr. Shaw's belief disposed of the theory of progress in the sense that we were marching from bad to good and from good to better. We might be marching the other way, and that put a tremendous responsibility upon us.
Criticising the Shavian doctrine, Mr. Ervine said that there was no guarantee that God would succeed in his efforts, and he did not think mankind would ever worship a God that did not give them a guarantee. Mr. Shaw said that if we did not do what God wanted we should be thrown on the scrapheap, but he did not seem to realise that if we did help God we might be scrapped likewise. Mr. Wells differed from Mr. Shaw inasmuch as he did believe that mankind was on the whole emerging to something better.
On one point the two men agreed – that organised society was better than disorganised society, and that the more it organised itself the more likely it was to reach the perfection we desired. That was probably why they were both Socialists, though neither was a democrat. [Mr. Wells] believed strongly in education. But we had seen educated men let nations down. You could have a healthy, splendid people which was nevertheless illiterate. If we were going to be a people that could not read the popular newspapers without being humbugged by them, then we were not worth saving.