The Undying Fire

This is the annotated edition including the rare biographical essay by Edwin E. Slosson called "H. G. Wells - A Major Prophet Of His Time". Once more Mr. Wells doubts whether the world can save itself; once more he invents a Redeemer to endorse his incorrigible millennial hope. The Undying Fire depicts man's plight in the physical universe with so vivid an imagery and so moving an eloquence that it properly belongs in the line of the Browne-Stevenson tradition. At the same time it fitfully approaches so near to the wise disillusion of Mr. Russell that its very fallings-short reinforce the lesson that there is salvation for us neither in Conscious Control, nor in Education, nor in faith in the Undying Fire of intuition of an organizing God at work in the hearts of men to make for orderly righteousness, nor in any hope-breeding mirage this newest anthropomorphic deity may dangle on the horizon of the desert of reality; but only in " the unflinching perception of our true place " in an indifferent universe. This is the only truth the knowledge off which can make us free. That Mr. Wells should perceive this truth, flinch, and then rest his eyes upon the old Utopian horizon, is a symptom of the recrudescence, with a special virulence, of his spiritual malady.