God as All Things and Movement

God as All Things and Movement is Godwin Baxter’s conception of God as the sum of everything that exists and could be named, with movement as the vital principle that makes new things possible. Bella Baxter presents this idea to Dr. Hooker and Harry Astley as an account of a world joined by material processes rather than divided between sacred and ordinary things. Her explanation gives movement both creative power and a capacity to cause pain, while the assumptions she attaches to it reveal the limits of her understanding of human suffering.

Definition and Scope

Bella attributes the idea to her guardian, Godwin Baxter, who describes God as a handy name for all things. Her examples range from a top hat and dreams to sky, ideas, and molten lava; even Flopsy, her white rabbit, and the hutch she lives in belong within this totality. The concept admits no boundary between the grand and the homely: everything named in any book or dictionary, including anything that could be named in the future, adds up to God.

This is not, in Bella’s account, primarily a portrait of a divine person issuing commands. The emphasis falls instead on an all-encompassing world and the activity within it. Movement is the most complete expression of God because it keeps stirring things into new forms. Divinity is therefore described through process and transformation, not set apart from the ordinary material world.

Movement, Making, and Pain

Bella makes the abstract principle vivid through transformations on different scales. A dead dog becomes maggots and daisies; flour, butter, sugar, an egg, and milk become Abernethy biscuits. In another example, spermatozoa and ovaries become developing organisms unless people take care to prevent that process. These instances place decomposition, cooking, and reproduction within one account of ceaseless material change.

Movement is not presented as benevolent in every consequence. Bodies collide with living things, and living things collide with one another; pain follows from those impacts. Eyes and brains, in turn, have developed through a succession of changes that enable creatures to see danger approaching and dodge it. The same moving world that produces new life also produces injury, while perception and adaptation offer ways to survive its hazards.

Bella’s Understanding of the World

Bella’s explanation grows into a much broader claim that the world works beautifully, but her confidence outruns her knowledge. She has read histories and novels filled with cruelty, yet treats that cruelty as belonging to the past. In the present, she thinks, people are no longer cruel to one another, only sometimes stupid, as when they gamble. She has also accepted the claim in Punch that only lazy people are unemployed, and concludes that the very poorest must enjoy being poor, with the consolation of being comic. Her mistaken optimism sits uneasily beside her own account of a world in which collisions cause pain.

The gap is also personal. Bella says that her parents were killed in a train crash but that she can hardly weep because she cannot remember them; she assumes they must have been old and nearly worn out. She has been told that she lost a baby elsewhere, but believes her little daughter is safe because Godwin cares for sick dogs and cats without payment. Her account thus turns the idea of universal movement toward reassurance: since all things belong to one world, she trusts that the vulnerable will be cared for. That faith is emotionally powerful, but it rests on an incomplete grasp of loss and cruelty.

The Concept’s Moral and Narrative Force

The response to Bella’s speech makes its limits visible. As she speaks, Harry Astley leans closer while Dr. Hooker leans farther back; when she finishes, Astley does not answer, and Hooker asks whether she has ever read the Bible. The contrast frames Bella’s explanation not simply as a statement of belief but as a test of how her listeners understand God, morality, and suffering. Her wide-ranging account is coherent in its insistence that everything belongs together, even as her confidence about the goodness of present-day life is sharply mistaken.

Later, Bella’s remembered sense of Godwin’s wisdom takes on a more explicitly moral force. After waking to the sound of wind moving through the eucalyptus leaves outside a hotel, she recalls a peaceful morning and thoughts of tending sick animals. The memory of Godwin, she reflects, kept horror and weeping away because he never told her that cruelty to the helpless was good, inevitable, or unimportant. This distinction adds ethical weight to the concept: a world governed by movement may explain how things change, but it does not make cruelty acceptable. For Bella, Godwin’s teaching matters not only as an account of what the world contains, but as a basis for imagining that its suffering can be confronted.