When H. G. Wells Found God

A forgotten spiritual conversion

In 1914, H. G. Wells was widely considered to be one of the greatest public intellectuals in the world. By that time, almost all the novels for which he is still remembered today had been written years earlier, including The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The First Men in the Moon (1900), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

Wells was a revered futurist. He had the prescience to see the world that was coming, including the invention of aircraft and the reality of space travel. He predicted modern warfare. No less a figure than Winston Churchill credited Wells with conceiving of the tank.

Way back in 1879, when he was only thirteen years old, Wells rejected religion. Thereafter he clung tenaciously to “sturdy atheism.” Many people saw this as part of his futurism—Wells was an early adopter of the godless world that was coming. Soon there would be no believers.

Then Wells found God. But like many celebrity converts, after struggling to make God the center of his life for several years he gave up. During those years, however, he had the zeal of a new convert. Wells became highly evangelistic, writing earnest books in which he tried to convince people that God is their only hope.

Also like many celebrity converts, Wells later became embarrassed by all this and tried to explain it away. He insisted that his passionate, spiritual appeals were only rhetorical sleights of hand, “terminological disingenuousness.” As his sympathetic biographer Adam Roberts conceded, however, Wells’ main evangelistic book was “deeply ingenuous.” Wells also later claimed he had been using the language of God to deify human traits and goals: “He was like a personification of, let us say, the Five Year Plan.” Yet at the time Wells went out of his way to explain that he was not speaking metaphorically, that he believed in a deity who is “living” and “personal.”

It was World War I that had got him thinking. Wells lost his faith in human progress. He became convinced that God was the only answer. It was time to stop enjoying the adolescent pleasure of being a member of God’s loyal opposition and to join his side.

To communicate his new, spiritual identity to the wider world, Wells tried his hand at faith fiction. Mr. Britling Sees It Through appeared in 1916, the same year as the deadliest battle in British history. Wells did not bother to disguise the fact that Mr. Britling is a stand-in for himself. Britling is middle-aged, a husband and a father, and—also like his author—a serial adulterer.

Britling is also a writer. Wells had written The War That Will End War (1914); Britling’s analog is And Now War Ends. Britling was an atheist, but when his seventeen-year-old son Hugh joins the army, unbelief does not seem enough anymore: “If Mr. Britling could have prayed, he would have prayed for Hugh. He began and never finished some ineffectual prayers.” When Hugh is killed, Britling realizes that it is time to return to faith. A colleague’s wife, Letty, is bewildered:

“How can you believe in God after Hugh? Do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Britling after a long pause; “I do believe in God.”

Britling begins to evangelize Letty. He describes the divine presence with a line from Tennyson: “Closer he is than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.” Letty is slowly convinced: “I have never thought of him like that.” The book ends with Britling realizing that what he must write about is the coming of the kingdom of God. Mr. Britling Sees It Through was Britain’s best selling novel of 1916. In 1917 it was the bestselling novel in America.

Following the task he has set for Britling, Wells now began to proclaim the kingdom of God in works of nonfiction. The first was War and the Future (1917). Wells staked his reputation as a futurist on his evangelistic message: The day is approaching when there will be “no king, no emperor, nor leader but the one God of mankind. This is my faith. I am as certain of this as I was in 1900 that men would presently fly. To me it is as if it must be so.” One chapter is on “The Religious Revival.” The winds of faith are rising: “That is why I assert so confidently that there is a real deep religious movement afoot in the world.” Now is the time to return to “the true worship of God.”

Wells’ spiritual magnum opus came just a few months later, God the Invisible King (1917). He described it as “a religious book written by a believer.” He proclaimed the “living God,” “God the Redeemer,” and “the personal God of mankind.” Like many a preacher before him, Wells resorted to shouting: “GOD IS A PERSON.” He testified to his own spiritual experience: “God is with us and there is no more doubt of God.” It is as if (one might say) people have a God-sized hole in their heart, for atheism has “a God-shaped blank at its heart.” Cry out to the King and he will change your life: “God can indeed work miracles.” One section is titled, “Believe, and You Are Saved.” There have been numerous ministers who have written a whole stack of religious books but who never once wrote a work of such gushing piety as God the Invisible King.

People today are blithely told that World War I caused people to lose their faith. Of course, some did—as is true at any time in history. What people are not told, however, is that the war also led many people to faith, including one of the world’s most famous atheists. Wells thought he had settled the question decades earlier, but the war caused him to rethink his view of God. This time it was personal.

Timothy Larsen teaches at Wheaton College and is an Honorary Fellow at Edinburgh University, as well as President Elect of the American Society of Church History. He is the author of John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Christmas.  He is currently working on a book about military chaplains who served in World War I.