More practical benefits were to follow. Everywhere doctors reported a marked drop in the numbers of their patients. Neuroses and other mental ills disappeared overnight, as the discovery of the deity’s existence worked its instant therapy. All over the world police forces were disbanded. Members of the armed services were sent on indefinite leave pending demobilization, long-closed frontiers were unsealed. The Berlin Wall was dismantled. Everywhere people behaved as if some immense victory had been won against an invincible enemy. Here and there, between particularly aggressive rivals, such as the United States and Cuba, Egypt and Israel, long-standing pacts of friendship were signed. Military aircraft and naval fleets were sent to the scrapyards, stockpiles of weapons were destroyed. (However, a few sporting rifles were retained when the spirit of universal brotherhood produced its first casualty — a Swedish engineer in Bengal who attempted to embrace a tiger. Warnings were issued that an awareness of God’s existence had yet to extend to the lower members of the animal kingdom, where for the time being the struggle for life remained as pitiless as ever.)
To begin with, such isolated episodes were barely noticed in the general euphoria. Thousands of spectators sat around the great telescopes at Jodrell Bank and Arecibo, not to mention a number of commercial TV aerials and any other structures that vaguely resembled radio antennae, waiting patiently for a direct message from the Almighty. Gradually people drifted back to work — or, more exactly, those returned who considered their work morally gainful. Manufacturing industry was able to keep going, but the agencies responsible for selling its products to the public found themselves in a dilemma. The elements of guile and exaggeration at the basis of all merchandizing, whether on the level of nationwide advertising campaigns or door-to-door salesmanship, were no longer tolerable under the new dispensation, but no alternative machinery of distribution was available.
The inevitable slackening of commerce and industry seemed unimportant during these first weeks. The majority of people in Europe and the United States were still celebrating a new estate of man, the beginnings of the first true millennium. The whole basis of private life had changed, and with it attitudes towards sex, morality and all human relationships. Newspapers and television had been transformed — the previous diet of crime reports and political gossip, westerns and soap-operas had given way to serious articles and programmes elaborating the background to the discovery of the deity.
This growing interest in the precise nature of the godhead led to a closer examination of its presumed moral nature. Despite the generalizations of scientists and clergy, it was soon clear that the dimensions of the supreme being were large enough to embrace any interpretation one cared to invent. Although the deity’s overall moral purpose could be assumed from the harmony, purity and formal symmetry that the mathematical analyses revealed — qualities more pronounced in response to cohesive and creative actions than to random or destructive ones — these characteristics seemed little more specific in relation to man and his day-to-day behaviour than the principles underlying music. Without doubt a supreme intelligence existed whose being permeated the entire fabric of the universe, flowing in a myriad ripples through their minds and bodies like an infinite moral ether, but this deity seemed far less ready with explicit demands and directives than it had been in its previous incarnations.
Fortunately, their god was clearly neither a jealous nor a vengeful one. No thunderbolt fell from the sky. The first fears of a judgment day, of darkening landscapes covered with gibbets, safely receded. The nightmares of Bosch and Breughel failed to materialize. And for once humanity needed no goads to make it regulate its conduct. Marital infidelities, promiscuity and divorce had almost vanished. Curiously, there was also a drop in the number of marriages, perhaps because of a common feeling that some sort of a millennial kingdom was at hand.
This widespread notion revealed itself in many ways. Great numbers of industrial workers in Europe and North America had lost all interest in their jobs, and sat about on their doorsteps with their neighbours, gazing at the sky and listening to the radio bulletins. At the summer’s end farmers harvested their crops but seemed much less enthusiastic about preparing for the coming season. The flow of pronouncements, and the first disputed interpretations, from the committees of divines and scientists still investigating the phenomenon of the deity suggested that it might be unwise to plan too carefully on an indefinite future.
Within two months of the confirmation of the worldwide rumour of God’s existence came the first indications of government concern over the consequences. Industry and agriculture were already affected, though far less than commerce, politics and advertising. Everywhere the results of this new sense of morality, of the virtues of truth and charity, were becoming clear. A legion of overseers, time-keepers and inspectors found themselves no longer needed. Longestablished advertising agencies became bankrupt. Accepting the public demand for total honesty, and fearful of that supreme client up in the sky, the majority of television commercials now ended with an exhortation not to buy their products.
As for the world of politics, its whole raison d’tre — its appeals to self-assertion, intrigue and nepotism — had been destroyed. A dozen parliaments, from the US Congress to the Russian Chamber of Deputies and the British House of Commons, found themselves deprived of the very machinery of their existence.
The United Faith Assembly was faced with equal problems. Although people still attended their places of worship in larger numbers than ever before, they were doing so at times other than those of the formal services, communing directly with the Almighty rather than playing the part of a subordinate laity in a ritual mediated to them through a priesthood.
The former Christian members of the United Faith Assembly, who remembered the Reformation and Martin Luther’s revolt against a clergy claiming privileged access to the supreme being, were of course perturbed by these developments. They were reluctant to accept the mathematical description of the deity offered by the world’s scientists, but had nothing to offer in its place and for the time being were on the defensive. The physicists, conversely, were only too quick to remind the clergy that their long-hallowed symbols — cross, trinity and mandala were based more on fancy than on the scientific reality which they themselves had made available. The long-standing fear of all churches, that the revelation of God might come from knowledge rather than faith, had at last been justified.
The continued change in the character of life on both sides of the Atlantic began to disturb prominent members of government and industry. Conditions in the United States and Northern Europe were beginning to resemble those in India and the Far East, where legions of amiable beggars wandered the streets without a thought for the morrow. The Kingdom of God might be at hand, but that hand was empty.
During October little happened on the surface of events, but at the end of the month a second meeting of the United Faith Assembly was held in Jerusalem. Here a prominent archbishop publicly challenged the scientific view of the deity as a being of vast neutral intelligence. Without doubt, the archbishop affirmed, this was to take a naive and over-simplified view based on what were admitted to be crude methods of detection. Was the deity entirely passive or, like the sea, did it reveal itself in many forms and moods? Remarking that he was not ashamed to refer to the Manichean Heresy, the archbishop stressed the dualism of good and evil that had always existed in the past, in man as in nature, and which would continue to exist in the future. This was not to suggest that evil was a fundamental part of man’s nature, or that he was incapable of redemption, but this passive contemplation of an invisible God should not be allowed to blind them to the inevitable antagonisms within themselves, or indeed to their own failings. The great achievements of mankind, its commerce, art and industry, had been based on this sound understanding of the dual nature of mankind and its motives. The present decline of civilized life was a symptom of the refusal to see themselves as they were, a warning of the dangers of identifying themselves too closely with the Almighty. The capacity for sin was a prerequisite of redemption.