“God is a handy name for all and everything”

God is a handy name for all and everything is the expression Bella Baxter uses to describe a conception of God learned from her guardian, Godwin Baxter: not a separate heavenly person, but the name for the whole of existence and its ceaseless activity. The idea’s central force is movement, which makes new forms and living possibilities while also producing the collisions that make life vulnerable. Bella’s explanation is both a strikingly material account of the sacred and a measure of how incompletely she understands the suffering around her.

Origin and Scope

Bella gives the formulation when Dr. Hooker and Harry Astley ask how she perceives God. She presents it as something Godwin Baxter taught her, then assembles an unhierarchical inventory of what belongs to the whole: a top-hat and dreams, Loch Lomond and borscht, molten lava and time, ideas and whooping-cough, wedded bliss, and her white rabbit Flopsy with its hutch. The list crosses the boundary between physical things and inner experience. Nothing is too ordinary, intimate, painful, or grand to be included.

The expression’s breadth is important: Bella does not describe God as an agent standing outside the world and directing it. Instead, everything that can be named belongs to the divine whole. Her phrase “god is a handy name for all and everything” makes naming itself practical rather than mysterious: God is a convenient word for existence taken together, not an explanation that removes its physical particulars.

Movement and Material Change

Within this totality, Bella singles out movement as its “wholly-est” part because it keeps stirring things into new forms. She illustrates the claim through transformations on very different scales. Dead dogs become maggots and daisies; flour, butter, sugar, an egg, and milk become Abernethy biscuits; spermatozoa and ovaries can become the beginnings of a child if reproduction is not prevented. The examples make change neither exclusively miraculous nor exclusively human. Decay, cooking, and reproduction all belong to the same active world.

Movement is also dangerous. Bella explains that pain arises when solid bodies collide with living ones, or living bodies with one another. Eyes and brains, in her account, are capacities developed through successive stages of life that allow organisms to notice approaching impacts and dodge them. Existence is therefore generative without being gentle: the same world that makes new things also exposes bodies to injury, and the ability to perceive danger is one response formed within that process.

Optimism and Its Limits

Bella’s account of movement sits beside a striking confidence that the worst forms of human suffering belong to the past. She has read histories and novels that show cruelty, but reasons that people are no longer cruel to one another, only sometimes foolish when they bet. She also repeats the claim in Punch that only lazy people are unemployed, concluding that the poorest must enjoy poverty and can take comfort in being comic. Her expansive inclusion of all things thus does not give her a clear understanding of the social conditions she names: poverty is part of her world, but she interprets it through a comforting assumption rather than as evidence of injustice.

The same tension shapes her treatment of personal loss. Her parents died in a train crash, but she cannot remember them and says she hardly weeps; she assumes they must have been old and nearly worn out. She has also been told that she lost a baby somewhere else, yet believes her little daughter is safe. Her reasoning turns on Godwin Baxter’s unpaid care for sick dogs and cats: if he looks after them, Bella concludes, a lost little girl must also be looked after. Her faith in the goodness of movement and care is emotionally sustaining, but it cannot establish what happened to the child.

Reception and Significance

The expression is spoken into a conversation about religious faith, but Bella answers by describing the physical and biological world. As she speaks, Harry Astley leans closer while Dr. Hooker leans back; after she stops, Dr. Hooker asks whether she has ever read the Bible. Their different reactions register the unease between Bella’s confident, all-inclusive explanation and the theological frame of the question. The exchange leaves her material conception intact while showing that its scope does not guarantee wisdom about history, poverty, or loss.