A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History”

When a man is talking of a social class whereof he knows nothing, you will notice that he does two things. First of all, he goes very much by the current statements about it which he has seen in print or on the stage: what he has met in the books and plays he happens to come across. Baronets are wicked, Dukes haughty, great Ladies disdainful and dazzlingly fair. Next, his imagination plays on that unknown world, creates out of the void, and then takes for granted a number of habits in it which are, as a fact, nonexistent and wholly of his own imagining: as, for instance, Cabinet Ministers wielding awful power in whispered conclaves.

But when he comes to talking of his own world, of his own class, of the things he really knows, his manner changes altogether. He becomes, for one thing, much more interesting, and, for another, much more definite. In that region, one can judge his style and credentials by real standards.

Something like this change from romance and misjudgment to appreciation and reason takes place in Mr. Wells’s book when he turns from what is called to-day “Pre-history” (of which we know hardly anything) to recorded History (of which we know a great deal, and which is in a totally different category).

This change takes place in Mr. Wells’s Outline of History with the opening of Book III.

In the first two books, where he was dealing with the world before Man, and Man before History, he went by such textbooks as he had come across (all of them anti-Catholic, few or none of them continental, and most of them old-fashioned stuff thirty or forty years old, the theories of which are to-day, for the most part, exploded). He filled up the gaps with guesswork, rather confused, even contradictory, and often in direct conflict with the evidence—had he known or noticed what the evidence was. He romanced, and he romanced out of the map. The world he saw in his vivid imagination was an unreal world, much as the English aristocratic world of a popular novel is an unreal world comically unlike the thing itself.

But when it comes to real and tangible stuff, record and monument, and still better, record in writing—in other words, when it comes to real History—Mr. Wells’s excellent qualities as a writer appear in a much better light and are put to a much better purpose. His narrative, which even in its misshapen prehistoric part was lucid, vivid and well put, capable of holding the reader’s attention, retains all these characters, and now becomes in great sections really informing without distortion. There is also a very successful packing of a great deal of information into a short space without redundancy of detail and without too much repetition. The order is well observed, and the survey is as wide as the Author intended it to be—that is, world-wide.

52Unfortunately, in this second part of Mr. Wells’s account, he cannot help suffering from the disabilities of the modern industrial town world, under which he naturally labours. He has never experienced the great part played by popular memory and impressions handed down from one generation to another, as the counterpart and corrector of documentary Record. He is, therefore, too prone to treat what is handed down by masses of men living familiarly in neighbourhood (they still do so in our villages) as being, on its large lines and in its general sense, misleading; whereas it is, on its large lines and in its general sense, true. He has no appreciable knowledge of the Catholic Church, and, therefore, does not know how History falls into line under that philosophy which alone properly explains it. He also suffers, as we shall see, from that unfortunate tendency to violent personal hatred for the nobler things, especially for the great and united succession of civilization in Europe: Tradition.

But the merits, at first, outweigh the faults. Until he runs up against the beginnings of Rome—with all the irritation which the mere name of Rome provokes in him—he keeps his head and writes excellently. The thing is well balanced and of real value. The exceptions which must be made, even to the part before Greece and Rome, to this praise do not colour his story of early record as a whole. He gives a rather imaginary account of the beginnings of agriculture, but much of it is more probable than improbable; and he modifies it well enough by conditional adverbs proper to our necessarily speculative attitude towards these early and uncertain things.

Now and then, in a sentence or two, he is unwise enough to abandon this conditional attitude and bolts away again into fiction: for instance, he tells us that when man settled down to agriculture, the Red Sea was still connected with the Mediterranean (p. 91). We do not know that; it is mere guesswork, and ought not to be put up as historical fact. On the other hand, an immediately following remark, that “the Persian Gulf then extended much further northwards than it does now,” is real history; for there is sufficient proof of that.

Again (on p. 92), he puts down as historical fact the invariable conquest of settled populations by barbaric and nomadic populations outside. He treats it as a necessarily recurrent phenomenon and as the only process. Of course, we all know from History that in plain recorded fact the converse is just as common, and far more lasting in its effects. Subjugation of the barbarian by the civilized man is very much more the rule of recorded History than its opposite. And as for agricultural work being regarded as the lot of an inferior, that is a false generalization from our own suburban conditions. On the contrary, the tradition of the Mediterranean peoples, as of the Chinese, is just the other way. Agricultural work was the basis of their society and was clothed with moral dignity.

The account of early Mesopotamian civilization (including in that term the earliest culture before the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris systems) is excellent, and the subsequent short section on the beginnings of Egypt is equally good—with a paragraph on the causes of the difference of record (on p. 98) between the Nile and the Euphrates Valleys particularly well put.

In order to keep the survey parallel and marching on one front, there follow a few lines on the early civilization of India and on the early history of China; in which, by the way, Mr. Wells rightly rejects the somewhat shadowy hypothesis put forward of late years, which gives a Mesopotamian origin to the Chinese culture.

If only Mr. Wells had also rejected from these first stones of his building in real History such pure guesswork as the supposed “heliolithic” culture—an imaginary matrix for all future civilization—this early part might be called completely well done. It is a pity he yielded to that temptation, for it is one of the things that will “date” the book most seriously in a few years. Theories of this kind come and go, like the weather. The passage (pp. 107, 108) in which he quotes from another authority upon the 53development of the rowing ship in the Mediterranean, is a good example of sane reasoning and informing conjecture. While the conclusion—a rapid review of the Cretan discoveries and of the Phœnician civilization—is on the same high level.

Unfortunately, the reader is, of course, left under the impression that civilization of any complexity came very late, a judgment which the author has to make in order to fit it in with his Messianic ideas—his ardent inherited faith in a Millennium for which we are only beginning to prepare.

In point of fact, we do not know how far back the origins of our complex civilization may stretch, and these very Cretan discoveries should give us pause before we make any confident statement upon the point.

It is not forty years ago that all popular history was roundly affirming the original semi-barbarism of the Greek world at a time long after the culture of the Labyrinthine Palace fell—if fall it did—or decayed. The really interesting thing about the whole affair is that we cannot find a transition from barbaric to civilized conditions. We find civilization in all essentials fully present at the very origin of research. We have not yet, and probably we never shall, have final information upon the phase by which it passed from embryonic to mature. On the analogy of nearly all other development we may believe that change to have been a rapid leap. But where it took place or when, whether Egypt or Western Asia arose of themselves or whether there lay behind them some tradition of culture, far older, which they inherited, or which one of them inherited, and which later either by submergence or in any other way disappeared, we simply do not know.

The next section, Chapter XV, is, so far, the best of all. It deals with the development of the various forms of writing, and will be read with the greatest profit. It has all the qualities of Mr. Wells’s close précis writing at its best. Nor should the Author be blamed for having left out the theory (Sergi’s, if I remember right) that the alphabetic system had an origin of its own, connected neither with the Egyptian script nor with the Phœnician, but rather one from which the Phœnician itself derived. He has put the necessary facts simply and clearly and in the right order. He notes the reaction of writing on thought, and even (as in the case of China) upon social systems and method of government. And he has done well not to confuse so short a catalogue with too much consideration of learned theories.

But even this first-rate chapter is somewhat marred by a conclusion based upon the false hypothesis of a perpetual change in human nature. Writing is made to play a part far too great in the creation of something like a new man. That is not, historically, what happens to Man through any of his own inventions. Man’s inventions do not change Man in essentials. Man remains Man throughout. And when Mr. Wells goes on to say that the very widespread use (and abuse) of printing to-day will create a further apocalyptic transformation of our poor minds, he is going right against the common experience of all cultivated men, and living in an unreal newspaper world of his own. The modern mind, in countries where this quite recent habit of promiscuous and universal reading has arisen, has not improved; it has visibly degenerated; it thinks less clearly, it has a less intelligent grip than had the more sparing readers of the past.

You have only to contrast the peasant or fisherman to-day against the average newspaper-skimming townsman artisan, with an equal or higher material revenue, to appreciate this truth. In the popular appreciation of life and philosophy it is self-evident. The peasant is immeasurably superior. When, therefore, Mr. Wells concludes this admirable little section with the confident remark that “our world to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge,” he must be told that all that is mere Messianic stuff, part of a false religion, and worthless. It is the mood in which the same false Puritan religion from which he comes produced the Seventh Monarchy men, Second Adventists, Jump to Glory Jane, and the rest of them: the facile and contemptible mood of “The Good Time Coming” as an imaginary escape from 54this Lachrymarum Vallis: the “Great Rosy Dawn.”

The detail of what will happen to Man in the future we do not know. One thing we do know quite certainly: he will be Man in the future just as he has been Man in the past. The type will not change. He will yield to the same temptations, be strengthened by discipline and renunciation, weakened by indulgence and excessive opportunity—especially weakened by his own material creations when they are abused. And we further know, from all the records of our race, that a contempt for the past and a planting of standards in an imaginary future is the destruction of culture. Of all popular moods which a failing civilization can catch, it is the most fatal.

At the end of this section comes in again (with Chapter XVI) that note which is the principal motive for these comments. For it is with this Chapter XVI of his third book that we come again upon the Author’s reaction against religion and particularly against the essential idea of a Priesthood. Mr. Wells’s sixteenth chapter is entitled, “Gods and Stars, Priests and Kings.”

He introduces it at the beginning of his account of recorded History, and it is the first example in this account of that personal and violent reaction of his against true religion which I am following throughout these articles.

His reaction is, of course, only part of the general spirit of our time outside the Catholic Church, and in his attitude towards all religion properly so-called—especially in his contempt and dislike of the high religious functions of ritual, hierarchy, sacrifice and the rest—Mr. Wells is but one individual in the millioned English-speaking Protestant public for whom he writes, and whose ideas he repeats to their satisfaction. But he feels this hatred with a particular animosity where other people nowadays feel it but vaguely: he is stirred by an antipathy to the Catholic Church which they also feel, but do not feel so pointedly or so continually. And he can express it in a very readable, popular fashion, which enables the average reader of his own sort to say “This is what I have always thought, more or less, but more forcibly and better put than I could have put it.”

He here declares himself fully for the first time on the special point of Priesthood. What he thinks about it in general his readers had already heard on an earlier page, where he made an imaginary picture of its origin (p. 72 of the Outline of History). He there tells them that “bold men, wise men, shrewd and cunning men, were arising” (in neolithic times) “to become magicians, priests and kings.”

There is, of course, no evidence at all as to how mankind first connected a Priesthood with the general idea of religion; and this specific attachment of it to the neolithic period (itself a very vague term, for who can tell that men using polished stones were everywhere earlier than men using metals?) is not History, but arbitrary assertion. However, it is a guide to what Mr. Wells, and the myriads who have had the same education as he, in England and America, feel with regard to the institution of Priesthood. It was wholly man-made, seeing that religion itself is man-made; and it proceeded from the same sort of very unpleasant origins as religion itself. Mr. Wells, on the same page, is careful to say that the Priests were not to be thought of as cheats; he wisely admits that they “usually believed in their own ceremonies,” but the innuendo is that any “ceremony” performed by any Priest in any religion is bunkum.

Now that, of course, is a mere assumption the opposite to which may equally well be true: that all ceremonies of all Priests had something in them, and that, in a true religion, the ceremony would be efficacious and the Priestly office justified.

So much for his first attack on page 72 of his Outline.

On page 120, he goes in some detail into the matter; and with a better basis for discussion, because he is talking of things historically certain, and not copying the story from nineteenth-century writers who made it up out of their own heads. There 55were full Priests in the old Pagan religions, or at any rate in the finest and most civilized of them; and for that matter in nearly all of them there were Priests in some form or another. The theory Mr. Wells repeats with regard to the early recorded Priesthoods may, like so many of his repetitions, be called “The theory of the eighteen-eighties”: the theory current about a generation ago. It is the contention that the Priest came first when man was inferior and was at last ousted, as man advanced, by the King—the innuendo being that the power of the Priest essentially belongs to an earlier time, and therefore to a more degraded period in human History; for to the man who believes in a childishly simple theory of “Progress” (as Mr. Wells believes in it, and as do the great majority of his readers), whatever is earlier must be worse than what comes later.

At this point I repeat what I have had to say so often in the course of these comments. It cannot be said too often in the ears of our opponents, because we know by experience that the modern half-educated mind, nourished on masses of print and without that capacity of clear thinking which our fathers had, feels a difficulty in grasping the distinction between two connected ideas. Once it hears the same word used in connection with two separate ideas it tends to confuse the two ideas together. So we Catholics who have the privilege of inheriting the higher culture must always patiently explain our position to our opponents, lest we should merely antagonize them instead of teaching them. The following, then, is the point I wish to emphasize:

When we are presented with any universal statement which is (1) hypothetical (i.e. not a matter of ascertained fact); (2) of an exaggerated simplicity and therefore very easily swallowed; (3) motived consciously by a contempt for true religion, that is for the Catholic Faith, we Catholics do not deny the portion of ascertained fact contained in the universal statement. What we deny is the universality of the statement. When we, who can reason, are told that London and Carthage were great seaports, and that therefore all the capitals of high civilizations are great seaports, we do not deny the character of London and Carthage; what we deny is that they are the models of all other capitals. What the trained and clear Catholic intelligence finds intellectually repugnant is a false simplicity imposed on highly complex organic phenomena, especially social phenomena. What we particularly complain of is the apparent inability of our opponents to recognize their own motives, and to see that they are putting things in a particular and artificial fashion in order to fit in with their theories instead of honestly inducing theory from fact.

Let me give an example drawn from a sphere where there is less violent emotion aroused, and which therefore can be calmly examined by anyone of our opponents. Supposing a man to maintain that the shorter races in the history of mankind had always conquered the taller races. He is putting forward a universal statement. He is putting forward, because it is universal and because it has so few terms, a statement absurdly simple. Finally, he is putting forward this absurdly simple universal statement with some motive. If we find that the man is himself a member of a short race, we at once divine what the motive is. It is the motive of satisfying self-esteem.

Now a statement like that put to the member of a race as short as you like, put to an intelligent dwarf, ought to rouse him to immediate contradiction: however flattering he might find it. So it ought to rouse a man of average stature to even stronger contradiction, and still more, I suppose, a tall man. But it is contradicted, not because the contradictor favours tall men as against short men, but because the statement is in itself false and ridiculous. Sometimes short races have conquered tall ones, as the Romans the Germans, or the Normans the Saxons, or the Japanese the Koreans. Sometimes it has been notoriously the other way about.

The putting forward, then, of a statement (1) as universal (when as a fact it is just the 56opposite), (2) as absurdly simple so that it can be easily swallowed (when as a fact the situation being human is exceedingly complex), (3) with a motive which is not acknowledged, is a thoroughly unscientific way of going to work; yet that is what we Catholics are perpetually finding in the attacks made directly and indirectly against Catholic truths by popular writers on what these writers believe to be “Science” or “History.”

So it is with Priesthood. You can cite cases of Priesthood revered in a very simple state of society and cases of a Priesthood dispossessed of power by an advancing lay organization. But so also can you find ample examples of the opposite: Priesthood powerful in a very high civilization and Priesthood overcoming lay power.

How a Priesthood arose we do not know: presumably after the same fashion as all other functions of religion. These functions being awful and sacred, there would, in the nature of things, be a special class of men attached to them. But, anyhow, the relations between the idea of a Priest and the idea of Civil Government are most emphatically not the relations between earlier and baser social functions on the one hand, and more developed and higher social functions on the other. You can cite cases where the power of a Priesthood (or, rather, of religion, for it is never the Priest who imposes his religion, but always the religion that needs the Priest) was mastered by the civil power; but you can also cite cases where the exact opposite took place; and you can cite intermediary cases innumerable.

Now, what Mr. Wells does in this sixteenth chapter of his is to put forward one leading case—the Sumerian—in which (quite probably) an earlier Priestly power yielded to (though it was never downed by) what was in that one time and place a later kingly power. He first of all gives us (on p. 125) a purely imaginary account of Kings arising through the quarrels between Priests or during the inability of Priests to withstand foreign conquerors. He then proceeds, on the same page and the following, to present the Sumerian Kingship as becoming in time superior to the Sumerian Priesthood. The thing is, of course, neither recorded nor ascertained History, but it is a fair guess. It may very well be History; and if it is so, then it is one particular example of the process going one way. But that is no sort of argument for the process never going the other way. When Mr. Wells comes to talking of the Egyptian development, he admits that the King was divine, and in that quality superior to and including both Priest and King. He again admits it in the case of China in another form. The Chinese civil ruler was also High Priest.

How, then, without any evidence to go on save one particular (and purely hypothetical) case, is this ridiculously simple theory made justifiable to the reader as a universal process? How can Mr. Wells use it to prove that Priesthood goes with base undeveloped minds and yields to “Progress”?

By the usual practice of allusion. In the case of the Sumerian King, the plain statement that the gods entrusted him with power is called by Mr. Wells his “doing it with the utmost politeness to the gods”—the innuendo being, of course, that the King’s power arose in spite of the Priesthood, that the King being later in development, and therefore more “enlightened,” despised the gods, and that all he did was to compromise somewhat with old decaying superstitions in order to strengthen his hold on government. But we have no evidence of that; it may be the right interpretation, or the exact opposite may be the right interpretation. The Sumerian King may have been sincerely devoted to the gods—as he says he was—and have risen through that devotion.

We are told (on p. 121), with regard to the early Priesthoods that “it is clear” the Priesthood early developed political powers. But it is not clear at all. It is merely stated. True to the wearying puerility of his black and white “Progress” idea (Wednesday superior to Tuesday, Tuesday superior to 57Monday), Mr. Wells tells us that the temples began with an idol, “usually a somewhat monstrous half-animal form.” Why “usually”? We know nothing about it at all. We know the half-animal legend in Babylonia, or, rather, the purely animal legend that a fish started culture. We know the animal and half-animal deities of the Egyptians. But no one can say that the Greek or Italian shrine began with a half-animal figure, or that there was anything “monstrous” about it. No one can say that the primitive worship to which the Bible bears witness was that of a monstrous or half-animal figure. The thing is only set down thus in order to confirm the statements already gratuitously made that religion, like all other human affairs, begins in something offensive.

It is the characteristic of these thin and erroneous theories, first, that they quote only what is in their own favour; secondly, that they bring in every possible indication, no matter how remote, which may be twisted into a support; and, thirdly, that those who promote them either are (as is usually the case) ignorant of, or (as is less common) refuse to mention, still more to study, any opposing evidence. They refuse to weigh the full record of the past or (what is equally available) to make a full examination of the present.

Take this case of the fading away of Priesthood and the mastering of it by a civil power as a necessary part of human “Progress.” It is not what happened in our European community. It is not what happened in the history of our own race during the last twenty-five centuries, of which we know infinitely more than we do of the Euphrates or the Nile Valleys thousands of years ago.

What happened in the history of our own race is very well known: the religions of Pagan European antiquity had Priesthoods—all of them. Those Priesthoods were of very varying political power, and the variation in their political power had nothing to do with the stage of culture. You do not find Priests more powerful in the lower stages of culture, less powerful in the higher stages of culture; you certainly find them more powerful in Gaul, for instance, than you do in the more barbaric world beyond the Rhine. There is hardly a trace of any Priesthood among the lowest of all, the Scythians.

What Priesthood was in Etruria we do not know, but we do know that in the Roman religious origins which were probably Etruscan there is a curious rigidity and strength attaching to the hierarchic function, a union (again) between civil rule and Priestly action, and yet certainly not a government of Priests. We know how powerful was the horrible Priesthood of Carthage, but we know that government was civilian. There is every sort of type and degree in the power, the character, the rise and fall of Priesthood, and no indication whatsoever of a monotonous, regular elimination of the Priest by “Progress” such as Mr. Wells was taught in his youth.

When the great change comes over the recorded history of our race—the conversion of the Roman Empire to Catholicism—it is not the power of any Priesthood that weakens; it is the hold of the local Pagan religion that weakens. The Pagan Priest is in no way conquered by the civil power. There is no trace of such a thing. On the contrary, it is the civil power which, as Paganism dies, works hard to keep the Pagan Priest going. Next arises the Catholic Church. It has a Priesthood, and a very strong organized Priesthood, from the earliest records of it that we possess.

In the later centuries you find, in the West, that Priesthood acting together under a personal Chief and at last dominating society in the main struggle between this head of the hierarchy and the nominal head of civil society. It is the head of the hierarchy (the Pope) who wins, and the head of the civil society (the Emperor) who loses—not the other way about.

With the destruction of religious unity and the introduction of widespread differences of belief into Western Europe the civil power naturally preponderates. There came a 58maximum when the civil power might almost be said to have obliterated its rival during the nineteenth century. But it is pretty clear to people who know their Europe that something of a turn of the tide is already apparent.

What the future holds in the matter we cannot see; but it is plain detailed History of the most glaring and obvious sort that during these known two thousand five hundred years, there has been no regular process one way or the other. There has been no gradual fading away of Priesthood in the growing light and its replacement by an anti-Priestly, “progressive” civil power. What has actually happened is what a sound intelligence, shy of too easy theories, would expect—a complicated, eddying, series of changes, swelling gradually up towards maxima of strength on the one side, and then to maxima of strength on the other.

It is here as everywhere. When Mr. Wells touches on the point of religion, even when he has recorded History to go upon, he at once begins to repeat the popular theories of the anti-Catholic world and to repeat them crudely and in a fashion convincing only to those who had already been told what he tells them. What is more interesting for the Catholic reader in this kind of thing is to remember out of what an atmosphere it arose. Put in a different dress, it is really nothing more than the old cry of “Priestcraft,” which the more provincial sort of anti-Catholicism perpetually repeated though with failing accents during the middle third of the nineteenth century.

It is no safeguard against this for Mr. Wells to say—and he says it quite sincerely—that the Priests in some measure, some of them, believed what they taught. That is only part of the urbane tolerance which is used as a sort of oil to smooth the downward passage to destruction of such outworn things as the Faith. When they know our strength we shall have less of such courtesy.

Of two things, one: either Priesthood being a normal function of religion, like Veneration, Sacrifice, Sacrament, Shrines, Ritual, and the rest, will be found present in a true religion and is no argument against the truth of that religion; or, there being no true religion, Priesthood began as a man-made cheat, like all the other functions of religion—since (by this theory)—all religion and all its attendant functions are wholly illusion.

There cannot be in the nature of things any recorded evidence to decide between the two positions. Faith asserts that one religion is true, is of Divine origin, has authority to affirm the only things really worth man’s knowing. From that position it is rational to expect as a rule in all religions, vague or precise, amiable or detestable, the concomitants of what will also be found in the one true religion. The Catholic is not disturbed, but confirmed by the discovery of parallels to his own practice in contemporary or past Paganism. On the other hand, Un-faith affirms that all these things are shams; that Priesthood, along with the rest, is part of the sham and must be rejected.

But there is this great difference between the two positions, and it is one to be particularly noted in the great quarrel of the modern world.

The Catholic argues out his position, knows what his own first principles are, distinguishes between Faith and Science, does not pretend to prove that for which proof is not available, does not confound the possible with the probable, or the probable with the ascertained. Above all, he does not confound first principles which are beyond proof with things known by deduction or by observation.

There was a time, not so long ago, when general intelligence was on a higher level; it was a time in which our opponents met us as equals.

Nowadays they do not. We are compelled to meet them as inferiors. They put forward arguments in a circle; they assume their own conclusions. They are not aware of their own first principles. They take it for granted that their own first principles 59are accepted by their opponents. They generalize from instances not only few, but often actually abnormal. They compel fact to meet theory instead of basing theory upon fact. Above all, have they that especial mark of unintelligence, the hunger for over-simplicity, the determination to be quite sure of everything and to make everything fit in with a mechanical formula.

It has been well said by the greatest of modern Spanish artists that the chief need of the Catholic Church to-day is an opponent worthy of her stature. She has hardly found one in Mr. Wells.

The general survey of recorded antiquity continues to be very well set down in the Outline of History in every respect where the author is dealing with known facts.

Of all parts of the book this is perhaps the most successful: I mean the setting down of what we know of Man between the origins of record and the growth of the Roman Empire. But even in this well-written and straightforward section, Mr. Wells falls into that common fault of the modern book-led townsman: the acceptation of something he has seen in print against the evidence of his own senses.

This is particularly noticeable in his account of the Jewish people. Theories as to the early history of Jewish thought remain mere theories, and their statement as fact, though very common nowadays, is unhistorical; as is, for that matter, the great bulk of what is called “the higher criticism.” But the statement that the Jews are not a race but a religion, is a statement which flies in the face of ordinary experience. It is a statement constantly met with, for it has a very obvious motive on the part of the Jews, the motive of a people in peril who seek protection through concealment. But as History, i.e. statement of fact, it is nonsense. What proves it nonsense is the simple fact that when a Jew comes into the room, everybody knows that he is a Jew, and nobody either knows or cares what his religion may be. The Jews are not a religion; they are a race and nation: and a race and nation very distinct indeed. Though it should be reprinted twenty thousand times in twenty thousand popular textbooks that they are not a race, no sensible man would be convinced; for sensible men prefer the evidence of their senses to the authority of print.

The account of early Greek civilization is also well done, with only a little admixture of modern myth, including, unfortunately, one very stupid statement quoted from Jung, to the effect that human thought before the Athenians was a mere jumble of emotions. Human thought at all times was human thought, and was always clear or muddled according to the intelligence of the individual at work.

If Mr. Wells had dealt with ancient Asia as he has dealt with ancient Greece, one would be able to say that, save for certain characteristic swallowing of guesswork without criticism, and for rather comic personal animosities (such as a passionate dislike of soldiers which makes him furious with Alexander the Great!), it is well enough; and, in proportion, selection and accuracy, not merely well enough, but admirable.

Unfortunately, in the Asiatic section he inevitably comes across that kind of matter which always arouses in him an unbalanced anger: matter relating to the existence and 60quality of the Catholic Church. For in dealing with Asia he has to deal with Buddhism—and Buddhism has been used now for at least a hundred years as a stock example with which to attack the Faith. Not that the Europeans who profess such a strange and sudden affection for what is alien and inferior love Buddha, but that they hate Christ and His Church.

I say that a use of Buddhism as a stick with which to beat the Christian is a stock trick of the anti-Christian, and therefore it was bound to appear in Mr. Wells’s Outline with all the other old properties of the trade. And appear it duly does.

The reason for this old trick is that Buddhism presents two features, both of which necessarily provoke the anti-Christian to a simulated friendship for it.

In the first place, Buddhism is philosophically the negation of the Catholic idea, for it makes Personality an illusion, denies God, and reconciles man to life through despair. The Church, on the other hand, affirms Personality not only in ourselves but in God, Whom she proclaims and glorifies. She reconciles man to life not through despair but through hope.

Now Buddhism, justly repugnant to the high life and intelligence of the West, is none the less a powerful instance to bring up against us.

Affecting as it does something like one-third of the world, Buddhism can be set up as a rival to the Faith. It is not, like Mohammedanism, a heresy grafted upon the Catholic stock. It is a separate thing; and the hater of the Church cannot resist the temptation of saying, “Look! how much better than the Faith”!

In the second place, Buddhism has acquired a well-developed system of ritual and organized veneration, with all the natural accompaniments of that human function—vestments and ornament and light, communal worship, and all the details wherein the body may sacramentally act with the soul.

There again is an irresistible occasion for our anti-Christian: though, with characteristic muddle-headedness, he does not see that he is using it in contradiction to the first opportunity. Just as Buddhism is an obvious weapon to use against the Catholic Church on the lines, “Look what a much better thing the rival religion is”! So it can be used the other way about, “Look at this degraded religion, and see what a lot you have in common with it”!

The contradiction is resolved, of course, by the very simple dodge of saying that the good Buddhism which is so superior to the Faith of civilized men, the maker of Europe, is “the simple, pure, original Buddhism”—in plain English, the Protestant Buddhism—while the developed Buddhism is the naughty, “ritualist,” Buddhism. And as the original Buddhism seems to have differed in doctrine and idea from the later Buddhism, the opportunity of saying “Modern Buddhism is a corruption of a simple original: therefore Catholicism is a similar corruption,” seems too good to be missed.

Mr. Wells (as we shall see in a later article) shirks the essential point, whether the Catholic Church is as a fact of different substance to-day from what it was at its origins. He prefers to put forward the false Buddhist parallel, and let it work in minds as ill-instructed as his own.

Thus we poor Christian remnants catch it both ways. “Buddhism is a degraded man-made thing, full of ceremonies and perverse human imaginings—look how like it is to the Catholic Church, and judge from that what a perverse, man-made thing is the Catholic Church also! At the same time, Buddhism is a supremely noble doctrine, especially in its denial of a personal God and of the immortality of the human soul. Judge from that how degraded you Catholics are with your absurd ideas of a personal God and of the immortality of the human soul”! The reader who turns to Mr. Wells’s chapter, “The Rise and Spread of Buddhism,” in Book IV (beginning with page 237), will appreciate what I mean.

Within a brief twenty-three pages, more than half of which, I think, are illustrations, he manages to put the whole anti-Catholic 61emotion (by innuendo) in the fullest fashion, and not only to do that, but to sacrifice common sense (as fanaticism must always sacrifice common sense) in the process.

On page 241 you get the note of the whole thing, “the teaching of History, as we are unfolding it in this book,” says Mr. Wells, “is strictly in accordance with this teaching of Buddha”: that is an example of what I mean. It is childish, not only as vanity in the Author, but as praise of a great, though perverted, philosophy.

Mr. Wells’s Outline of History is not a Buddhist magnum opus; it is an ephemeral popular book written by a simple Protestant Englishman who has lost what relics of doctrine he once possessed but still preserves a fine dislike of the Papacy. His attraction to Gautama Buddha as much resembles that of an Indian mystic as his style resembles the prose of Voltaire. When he tells us with approval that Buddhism regards the desire for Immortality as an evil and the loss of being (for impersonal being is not being at all) as a good, he tells us what is undoubtedly true: though in the strong light of Western thought, obviously a muddlement—for there must be being, and conscious being, and discrete being, if there is to be the sense of joy or of good. But however much Mr. Wells pats Buddha on the back he will persuade no one that he is a Buddhist with a yearning desire to have done with notoriety and the flesh.

What of Mr. Wells’s desire (which he earnestly presents to his readers) to be rid of Mr. Wells’s own immortal soul?

It is pretty clear on page 242 what he feels in the matter of Immortality. He praises the Buddhist Atheism in this particular, because he dislikes “an endless continuation” of his “mean little individual life,” which in his judgment is man’s conception of Immortality, whether in the Egyptian whom he mentions by name, or in the Christian whom he really has in mind.

Now there is in this profession of dislike for the doctrine of Immortality, and ridicule of it, a positive element beyond the negative element of mere opposition to Catholicism and to the high tradition of Europe. The positive element is the very natural distaste for following on the dreary round of suburban life in London or New York; and in this our Author is to be applauded. But it is characteristic of him and of the time and audience in which and for which he writes, that he should have had any such appalling conception of the profound and majestic dogma of Immortality.

It exactly corresponds to what the same type of thought produces when it demands Immortality instead of denying it. The present-day English Modernist, who writes a book saying that he has had communication with his son killed during the War, and that the son is drinking whiskies and sodas and smoking cigars in Purgatory or Paradise (whichever you like to call the fashionable idea of the next world), is in exactly the same mental state as Mr. Wells. Certainly, if the dogma of Immortality (that very summit of the dignity of man and characteristic of all our race and its achievements) meant an endless succession of going up by train to the office and reading the Daily Howl on the way, we should be better without it. But it does not mean that, Mr. Wells; I assure you it does not. There is far more glory about Immortality and far more elbow-room—and far more peril.

There is, by the way, in this panegyric of Buddhism as a beautiful model (to the shame of the unmentioned Catholics) one little gem which I cannot pass over, though it has nothing to do with the subject. I mention it because it is so characteristic of the whole book. It is on page 243, and runs thus:

“Modern science has made clear to us that there is no such exact recurrence as we are apt to suppose; every day is by an infinitesimal quantity a little longer than the day before; no generation repeats the previous generation precisely.”

If a man wanted to take a sample out of this book to show the futility of its Author as a thinker, I do not think he could get a better six lines. Only look at the mass of false statement and confusion of thinking packed into this little space!

62First of all, there is the assertion that we—you and I—are apt to suppose exact recurrence in human affairs. When on earth was there any human being who imagined any such thing?

Then we have the alarming folly that this imaginary idiocy is corrected by a God called “Modern Science.” It would be corrected, if ever it arose in the mind of a lunatic, by simple daily experience; it is so corrected, or rather prevented from ever arising, in the mind of every man or woman, learned or unlearned.

Then there is the statement that “modern science teaches us that every day is slightly longer than the day before.” That again is characteristic. No “modern science” teaches us anything of the kind. On the contrary, the theory of tidal drag and of a gradual lengthening of the terrestrial day, for which there is a good deal to be said, has provokingly failed to furnish sufficient proof. It looks probable, on the face of it, and we have the moon as an example where apparently the thing has worked itself out. But when you come to the establishment of concrete definite proofs, that the day is longer by such and such a fraction than it was for the Alexandrian astronomers, you do not get it. You can find arguments for and against. Nothing is yet decided. One new discovery might destroy the whole hypothesis—and hypothesis only it remains. It is the very opposite of science. It is probability, and an interesting hypothesis. Science it is not, and it will not be science until the day when conclusive proof is advanced.

Then there is the characteristic fact that Mr. Wells, who here affirms as scientific fact that interesting (but unimportant) statement of the possible lengthening of the terrestrial day, on an earlier page was more cautious.

Lastly, we have the monumental phrase: “Modern science has made clear to us that no generation repeats the previous generation precisely.” You might just as well say that “modern science” has proved to us that the weather on Tuesday is never exactly the same as the weather on Monday.

This is a digression, but a digression worth making, for it is a most illuminating example of the sham culture I have to deal with.

But to return to the use of Buddhism as a stick to beat the Catholic Church with. After the glorification of the pure doctrine we get the “awful example” business of the ritual. First we are told (on page 244) that it was the fate of Gautama to have marvellous falsehoods told about him—as has been the fate of “most religious founders” since his days.

That word “most” means, of course, Jesus Christ. There have not been a crowd of religious founders since 500 B.C., and all this innuendo in the description of Buddhism is an innuendo delivered at the Faith.

On the same page, a little further on, there is the sneer, “of course it was impossible to believe that Buddha was the son of a mortal father.” That is a sneer at the Incarnation, as is the sentence a few lines further on, “a theology grew up about the Buddha. He was discovered to be a God.”

Then on the next page there is the familiar taunt against the titles of affection and veneration given to Our Lady. A certain Eastern goddess is Queen of the Sea, so Mr. Wells must put in quite gratuitously and out of place the words “Stella Maris,” which some very learned man has told him means “Star of the Sea.”

Then there is a completely misleading quotation from Huc. The misleading is no doubt unconscious, for I very much doubt whether Mr. Wells has ever read Huc; he is probably depending upon what he may have heard vaguely on the matter in conversation. At any rate, the grossly misleading character of the passage must be pointed out.

He quotes Huc’s interesting description of the similarities between Christian (or Catholic) and Buddhist liturgical details, and puts the whole thing in a completely false light by using the word “perplexing.” He says, “We read in Huc’s travels” how “perplexing” he found “all these things,” the innuendo being that Catholics regard ritual as the soul of their religion and are disturbed in their Faith on finding foreign analogies to it.

63No doubt Mr. Wells was told by those who coached him that the Abbé Huc was thrown into an agony of doubt by finding Buddhist ceremonies so like our own. But he would have done well to verify the point. It was foolish in him not to do so.

I know the passage well: there is not a word in it about Huc being perplexed. Why should he be? There is not an indication in Huc’s style or tone in the matter that he was perplexed. He noted with great interest the very exact correspondence between many details of ritual—down to such a tiny point as the chains and cover of the Thurible—and he gives a lucid, probable, learned and very rational account of when and how the later Buddhism may have copied such things (p. 112, Vol. II, of the third edition).

Mr. Wells ends this excursion against the Catholic Church (for that is what his new-found enthusiasm for Buddhism really means) by a passage on page 250 in the very best traditions of the “No Popery” lecturers of my youth. Buddhism caught “almost every disease of corrupt religions: idols, temples, altars, and censers.” It is a funny list, with a horrible bathos on the word censers. Idols mean images; altar means altar all right; temples mean buildings put up with care and made as beautiful as possible—or at least what the putter-up thinks beautiful—in honour of the thing worshipped. But censers are only things in which you burn incense; and though they are an excellent adjunct to liturgy, they really have not the importance which Mr. Wells, in common with most Kensitites, attaches to them. I assure him I could get on perfectly well without incense. On the other hand, I could not get on without an altar; and a lack of images in a Christian church would seem to me very deplorable: a sort of empty, hungry, mean, absence of a very proper and natural religious function which, if there be a true religion, would certainly be found attached to that religion.

Then we have, just before the end of all the affair, the weary old business copied from Gibbon, and much older than Gibbon, “What would Christ and His apostles think of High Mass at St. Peter’s”? (By the way, Low Mass in Huddersfield is just as much to the purpose as High Mass in St. Peter’s.) Only here it is not High Mass at St. Peter’s shocking the Creator of the Catholic Church, but a Buddhist ceremony shocking poor Buddha.

But more important than his ignorance of Huc’s testimony of other special points is his complete failure to set down the prime contrast between Catholicism and Buddhism: that the latter is founded on Despair. That is the whole point. It is that which makes between the living Church which Jesus Christ founded and the negative philosophy of Asia a difference of day and night. Mr. Wells does not omit this essential point from malice: he does it from ignorance. His whole account of essential Buddhism takes for granted that it is the religion he himself holds—a highly rarefied Protestantism.

But to fall into such an error as that is like taking vitriol for water.

When we pass from the Life of Our Lord itself to the formation of the Church as He founded it and as it was and taught immediately after His Ascension, we find Mr. Wells (as we might expect) pursuing this same highly emotional, unintelligent, Modernist method, but with this difference: that he is now free to attack everything at random. So long as Our Lord is still present in his pages, the confused but powerful emotions he inherits from the older and more intelligent doctrinal Protestant world of his forbears would not give him a free hand. He had to talk of Our Lord’s “inimitable greatness,” of the “giant measure of the Kingdom of God,” and so on; but when he has only to deal with the Apostles and their successors, he is under no such emotional obligation.

We may discover in his way of treating the early Church, its doctrines, and its organized form, two clear marks, both exactly consonant with that insufficiently cultured Modernist type of which he is the exponent.

Firstly, he is devoted to the old principle: “The Bible only.” He does not understand the factor of tradition in History, and, as for documents, he writes as though the sub-apostolic writings did not exist, which, for him, they probably do not.

Secondly, he follows the fashion which became prominent in the Protestant world over fifty or sixty years ago, and is still powerful, of ascribing pretty well everything in Catholic doctrine to the unscrupulous invention of St. Paul. He repeats the German phrase that “Paul” found the 73Christian community possessed only of a “way of living,” and left it with “a belief”: the doctrine of the Atonement, the Mass, the whole affair, must spring from the unbridled (and strangely unchallenged!) imagination of a man who never came across Our Lord during His ministry on earth, who knew intimately those who had been constantly with Our Lord during that ministry, who (according to this impossible theory) contradicted all their experience, and yet who appealed to that experience as the authority for everything he said.

Posterity will smile at this way of getting out of an historical problem. But it is still so largely followed that Mr. Wells is in no way inferior to those whom he merely copies, so far as the general thesis is concerned. He is in very good company. Where he is inferior is in not appreciating, as the great scholars who are our opponents do, two points: Firstly, that one must never in History state as definite fact, or present as a picture, something which one has made up out of one’s head: Secondly, that the Catholic side has a body of historical evidence to present. He makes up pictures in support of his thesis as though he were writing fiction instead of History, and he leaves out, presumably because he has not heard of it, the counter evidence with which he ought to deal.

For instance, he gives us this sentence: “We know very little of the ideas, or ceremonies or methods of the Christian communities in the first two centuries.”

If he had said no more, that sentence could have stood; for “very little” is a vague phrase, and it is true that we have for the second century few documents compared, say, with the documents of the third century. We have far more documents than we have for the two centuries of English history between 400 and 600, but we have less-connected ones than we have for the two centuries of English history between, say, 700 and 900.

On the other hand, “it is clear” (to use one of Mr. Wells’s own favourite expressions) that he does not know what the “very little” is. He does not know the testimony of St. Ignatius, of Justin Martyr, of Papias, of Irenæus, of the Earlier Apochryphal Gospels (especially the Proto-Evangelion), of the authentic Clementine, of the inscriptions, of the Didache, of the Hermas, and so on. If he did, he would know that the “very little” (and it is very little) is quite conclusive on such essentials as affirmation by the Church, in that very early time, of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Veneration of Our Lady, and of the Saints who have passed; of Episcopacy, of a sacramental Priesthood, of the Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, of firm insistence upon orthodox unity and the excretion of heresy—and so forth.

It is “very little,” but it witnesses to all the essentials. The evidence is not conclusive of the spiritual value, or the truth, of any of these things; but it is conclusive upon the fact that they were believed from the beginning.

St. Ignatius stood to the Apostles and to all those scores and hundreds of people who had seen Our Lord—and many of whom had talked with Him, in a highly civilized time, full of continual travel and criticism and sceptical enquiry—he stands, I say, to that generation contemporary with Jesus Christ as Mr. Wells himself stands to men like Huxley or Matthew Arnold. St. Ignatius was a lad in his teens when the younger witnesses, such as St. John, were not more than fifty or so. What he heard about Our Lord’s teaching and foundation and commands, what he heard about those miracles which are so incredible to people fed upon the Daily Press, what he heard of the Resurrection, of the affirmation of the Incarnation, and the rest, is on a par with what Mr. Wells and I have heard of Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species, and of the effect it created.

Justin Martyr, our next chief witness (giving the earliest surviving account of the Mass), stood to those contemporaries as a man just old enough to have fought in the Great War stands to those who had fought as subalterns in the Crimea or as a young 74American of to-day stands to Lincoln. St. Irenæus, with his explicit witness to St. John and to orthodoxy, stood to that generation of eye-witnesses much as a child born in the last year or two will stand to the mid Victorians.

That is the kind of thing which the school Mr. Wells follows has got to get over. Such proximity may not be evidence as to the truth of what the contemporaries of Our Lord said they had heard from His Own lips, but it is excellent evidence that they heard it. You may ridicule the story that Peary reached the North Pole, but if you deny that he said he did and that companions of his believed him it is yourself you are making ridiculous.

The great anti-Christian scholars of a past generation knew all that. Mr. Wells doesn’t. He follows them simply, in the innocence of his heart, because he thinks it is all plain sailing with no snags. He knows no better. But the more a serious student appreciates the character of the Roman Empire in the first century, and the actual limits of time involved, the more certain he becomes that the main Christian dogmas, true or false, belong to the very origins. The idea of a complete change in doctrine and method and tone within the known dates of the process becomes impossible to him in proportion to his historical knowledge.

This argument applies, of course, with special strength to the tottering tale that St. Paul invented the Church.

If you accept even some main part of what are traditionally St. Paul’s writings as authentic, you can discover him insisting to distant converts that he is adding nothing, that he has imagined nothing, that he is but conveying and spreading a doctrine which he had received.

Again—to develop a point I have but mentioned—if St. Paul was making up a fantastic new scheme of his own, why was there no resistance? Why is there no hint or tradition or echo of universal indignation against such monstrous innovations?

It is no good saying that the evidence for any such resistance has been destroyed. In the first place, it could not in the nature of things have wholly disappeared. There would have been a violent quarrel affecting the whole story of the early Church. And in the next place the most emphatic testimony is allowed to survive of a very grave difference of opinion—to wit, whether the Church should include Gentiles or not, whether the converts should conform to Judaic ceremonial laws.

Mr. Wells suggests that the doctrine of the Atonement, of a Victim offered to God, was due to St. Paul’s previous attachment to the mysteries of Mithras. He does not here actually descend to mere fiction, as he is too fond of doing (for instance, when he follows the high authority of Miss Marie Corelli upon the motives of Judas), but he does in that sentence on Mithras show that he is away back in the dear old Renan Period of his youth, and that he prefers an utterly unsupported guess to known fact.

The mysteries of Mithras do not turn on a human victim: contrariwise, the victim is a bull. The man gets much the best of it—with a knife.

The idea that Mithraism was ever a serious rival to the Catholic Church is an old-fashioned piece of guesswork, which every succeeding year of research has done more and more to discredit.

Mithraism was in no way universal. It was mainly a soldiers’ superstition, its relics are not numerous as are those of the main popular deities.

There is not a shred of evidence, nor of anything that can be twisted into an implication of evidence, that St. Paul had ever heard of Mithras. To suggest that St. Paul got the dogma of the Atonement from the mysteries of Mithras is as though I were to suggest that Mr. Wells got his doctrine of Natural Selection from the Contrat Social; for (1) I have no proof that he has ever heard of the Contrat Social; he probably never has. And (2) the Contrat Social has nothing to do with Natural Selection.

As for the added remark that the idea of a human victim offered for the whole human race to God as a complete propitiation 75“haunted the black-white races” (which is Wellsian for the Italians and Greeks), that again is historically nonsense. We have individual sacrifice, of course, but no universal one. The Mediterranean peoples other than the Semites were singularly free from such ideas. We seem to have some hint of them in the barbaric North, but very vague.

As to the pivot point of the Resurrection, Mr. Wells cannot, of course, lay the burden of that corruption upon the shoulders of St. Paul; and for this we should be grateful. But his handling of the subject is very poor. Here it is: “Then presently came a whisper among them and stories, rather discrepant stories, that the Body of Jesus was not in the tomb in which it had been placed, and that one, then another, had seen Him alive. Soon they were consoling themselves with the conviction that He had risen from the dead and shown Himself to many.”

There is a very good example of the woolly way of writing which carries conviction to the man who is already convinced. Legends and falsehoods arise continually in History, but they do not arise like that. You may say of such a story that you disbelieve it: then it will have arisen by any one of the four known ways in which false stories of the marvellous do proceed. (1) Hearsay, with no witnesses available. (2) Conspiracy and falsehood. (3) The substitution (in a considerable lapse of time) of affirmation for what was originally metaphor, and definite statement for what was originally poetic expression. (4) Hallucination, individual or collective. But the idea that “stories getting about” transform themselves into a group of living and contemporary sincere witnesses is psychologically impossible.

And who were these witnesses?—according to the only accounts we have, they were Peter, the authority for Mark; John; later all the Apostles. One can say the story is late, or madness, or a lie, and each hypothesis is arguable. But Mr. Wells’s hypothesis that the witnesses did not witness a highly definite, most extraordinary event repeated over many days, and then were persuaded they did witness it, is not worth arguing; he only puts it in from a Modernist fear of shocking himself or his readers by ridiculing venerated names.

The best example we have of a false legend in our time is that of the Russians in England during the early part of the War. You can get myriads to say that they were heard of, but I (who received sheaves of letters written to me at the time by people who believed in the story) have never met a single individual who said he had himself seen them. Indeed, I have only heard of one such, and he turned out to be a practical joker.

Had Mr. Wells not been fettered by his Modernist necessity of treating the story of Our Lord with a veneration due only to His Divinity, he would boldly have said what the stronger and more intellectual sceptics have always said: that the story of the Resurrection is either contemporary falsehood or a piece of hallucination or a later legend; he would not have tried to rationalize it in this ludicrously insufficient fashion.

I have no space to make a full catalogue of Mr. Wells’s lack of sufficient reading for his purpose. It needed no great amount. Even a few days among those Encyclopædias with which he is acquainted (and the articles in which are as anti-Catholic as he could wish) would have enlightened him. But he never spent those few days. He has copied the conclusions of the more commonly known anti-Christian writers of his youth as those conclusions have been presented in popular rationalist tracts, but he does not know how those scholars worked nor what has been said since their time.

He brings in the old tag from Gibbon of the contrast between Mass at St. Peter’s and the state of mind of St. Peter himself. He brings in the fifth-century sneer against Our Lady, identifying her with Isis (and here there is clearly no knowledge of documents illustrating the veneration of our Lady as Mother of God and going back to at least the second century). He has the old error which, I suppose, one may still find surviving 76in certain remote conventicles—that sundry minor Catholic practices, such as the offering of candles, take the place with us of spiritual action. He even seems in one place to be under the extraordinary delusion—it may be no more than confused writing—that we sprinkle ourselves not with holy water but with blood! (Where on earth did he get that?) He knows nothing of the way in which the early morning Sunday Mass at dawn followed naturally on the Jewish Sabbath, and of which there is evidence as late as St. Ambrose; instead of appreciating that concrete piece of historical evidence, he makes a vague guess at the “Sunday” of Mithras: for Mithras is his King Charles’s head.

He ends up by the wildly unhistorical statement that the idea of orthodox unity was imposed by Constantine in A.D. 325, imagining it to be unknown to the whole body of the first three centuries!

I marvel that those to whom he went for information did not warn him. There is—to quote from memory, at random, only the instances known to all men of average culture—St. John’s attitude towards Cerinthus (c. 70–90). The Clementine Epistle to the Corinthians (c. 90). The whole story of Marcion (c. 150–160). The Montanists a lifetime later. The tremendous De Unitate of St. Cyprian (A.D. 251).

The whole note of those three centuries before Constantine is a story of the expelling of heresy and the maintaining of unity. Yet Mr. Wells thinks Constantine invented such things! Moreover, he calls such unity “the stamping out of all thought” (my italics).

But I think the most revealing piece of ignorance is what he says about the Arian creed of the late federate troops of barbarian extraction.

He thinks they were Arian “because their simple minds found the Trinitarian position incomprehensible.” He thinks Arianism to have been a mere affirmation that Our Lord was only a man; and he has no knowledge of the plain, historical fact that most of the federate Roman troops, other than the Franks, got their complicated and highly metaphysical heresy from heretical missionaries at a moment when the official powers at Constantinople favoured heresy. He has no grasp of the peculiarly subtle—indeed, over-subtle—Arian position.

How surprised Mr. Wells would be if someone were to take him through the outline of that affair: “The Conditioned Procession of the Logos,” “The All-creative no part of the Ingenerate,” etc. Talk of simplicity! You might as well say that the London Sunday newspapers boomed the Einstein theory in its day because it was “so simple.”

But what a revelation of this writer’s ideas on the Faith in antiquity—and how typical of the second-hand, the popular, the half-educated attitude towards the ancient and enduring religion of Europe.

Mr. Wells’s Outline continues in good proportion and lucid in his general description of what we call, in Christian history, “The Dark Ages”: that is, the period between the first spread of the Mohammedan disaster (which he, of course, regards as a benefit because it destroyed or wounded the Catholic Church in the areas occupied by Mohammedans) and the German capture of the Papacy towards the year 1000.

The general tone is that of the ordinary textbooks written in the anti-Catholic vein; although there is a rather more violent irritation than usual against the Faith in Mr. Wells’s general position and occasional references, it occupies little of this division. To the errors I will allude in a moment, but I must first point out the merits of this passage which brings us up to the eve of the Crusades and takes us from the end of Book V to the midst of Book VI.

Apart from his general lucid and vigorous presentation of a long period very difficult to summarize, there is an excellent metaphor upon page 396 comparing the fragmentary cohesion of society in the Dark Ages, and the gradual formation of feudalism in their most disturbed period, to the physical formation of crystals. The author is naturally a little confused about his general dates, because he has not had occasion to read History seriously. Thus he strangely considers the Fourth and Fifth(!) centuries to have been particularly chaotic in territorial arrangement, and immediately afterwards uses the term “Feudalism.” That is, of course, a complete misunderstanding of comparative dates and a misapprehension of the length of the period and the great changes which took place in such a length. In the Fourth century the Western world was entirely united and ordered from Rome, though there was the usual heavy local fighting and difficulty in guarding the frontiers from irruption. In the Fifth century there were armed bands raiding across the frontiers in not very large numbers, and accepted as soldiers of the Empire, one very bad Asiatic invasion en masse, which was beaten, and, at the end, the disassociation of the Western part of the Empire into separate vast regional governments under local generals.

Feudalism was an altogether later thing; as much later as we are later than the Wars of the Roses. It was a thing which became established in the Ninth century, though you can already see it forming (unconsciously) in the Eighth. It was the break-up of society into a mass of local governments, very unsystematic and held together only by personal bond of overlord and vassal. To talk of it in connection with the Fourth and Fifth centuries is like talking of industrial capitalism in the same breath with the peasants’ revolt of 1381.

Nevertheless, though the centuries are wildly wrong, the metaphor of crystals as applied to feudal groupment and regroupment is very good, and is an excellent 85example of Mr. Wells’s powers of analogy and illustration.

I should not quarrel either in this commentary upon Mr. Wells’s general acceptance of the old-fashioned History which is still conventional in most of our official teaching here in England, although it is already badly out of date. Were I writing a commentary upon the book treated seriously as an essay on European history, I should be more severe upon this simple acceptation of stuff on which most of our students are still fed, but which, in the light of modern scholarship, especially of French scholarship, has the effect of Crinolines and Pegtop Trousers.

I am concerned here with the much more important business of Mr. Wells’s anti-Catholic motive in writing, and though the false conventional history which we are still largely taught in England is ultimately anti-Catholic in motive, yet it is so largely accepted, and the connection between it and the ultimate religious motive behind it is so much disguised, that it would hardly be fair to ridicule an old-fashioned statement save where it is so thoroughly and admittedly out of date that not even a best-seller ought to admit it into his popular writing.

For instance, one cannot be surprised to find this popular history, written in England and depending upon English encylopædias, talking of an Anglo-Saxon conquest of this country at the beginning of the Dark Ages—nearly all educated Englishmen even now still speak in those terms, and have a vague idea at the back of their minds that a number of Germans, called Anglo-Saxons, came over the sea in boats, centuries ago, killed all the people who then lived in England, and started everything over again. And there is a great deal to be said (though I think it is wrong) for the conventional derivation of Viking from the word for “bay.”

I will even admit that writing of Charlemagne as speaking Frankish (that is, a sort of Flemish) as his habitual tongue is not a thing to carp at in a popular history, though it is almost certainly wrong. All the last generation believed that kind of thing, and it is still conventional teaching in England and Germany. Mr. Wells also has the imagination to see that Charlemagne must have known the Latin tongue as well, and admits that his talking literary Latin is “open to discussion.” A more detailed knowledge of the period makes it clear that a man in Charlemagne’s social position must have talked and thought in Latin, though it is true that a writer of the time talked of the old Frankish speech as being the “ancestral tongue” of that great man.

In the same way the description of the changes in the Papacy of the tenth century is the conventional description of from one hundred and fifty to fifty years ago—a virtuous German reform of wicked Italians—and it is natural that the modern scholarship which shows the real struggle to have been between an attempted renewal of Byzantine influence and the counter Western Imperial influence should never have been presented to our author.

All that, though out of date, may pass. But there are certain extreme statements in what I have called this “old-fashioned conventional history” which really are too much out of date to go without notice.

For instance, Mr. Wells quotes, quite innocently, as though it were history, the ridiculous sentence from some other popular history or other, that “to practise medicine was forbidden by the Church, which expected cures to be effected by religious rites.” He probably means that the strong general feeling of the day against dissection of the dead had clerical support. But to think that there were no doctors in the Dark Ages is really going a little too far in old-fashionedness: it is not even 1850. It is 1820.

In the same way the idea that Austrasia and Neustria were the German and French speaking halves of the Frankish dominion is really too antiquated. The people who believed that kind of thing and yet could claim to be scholars have been dead, even the longest-lived of them, many years since, and to use such language is rather like talking (as some people still do talk) of the 86United States as though they were a colony of Englishmen. The truth is, of course, that the two divisions were purely administrative, an eastern and a western; the area being too great for permanent single rule. They were obviously made without any consideration of language. Who cared about language in the seventh and early eighth centuries? They were designed to give fairly equal burdens and resources. The majority of people living in Austrasia had probably never heard German speech. The only thing in Austrasia that was German was the broad Eastern fringe, very ill-populated, with no cities that were not Roman, and with all the culture and the wealth—save Alsace and the Cologne-Aix, Rhine and lower Moselle region—romance in speech. After all, Rheims was in Austrasia, and perhaps its most important city.

In the same way, to talk of the “subject population” after the defeat of Syagrius by his fellow-general, Clovis, is beyond the limit of what is tolerable in the way of exploded mid-nineteenth century convention. Everybody knows, since Fustel, that there was no trace of a conquering and a subject race. The Gallo-Romans, the Flemish-speaking Franks in the very beginning of the business, sundry German-speaking adventurers and nobles, chance soldiers from the extreme East, a great many from the South of Gaul, a mass of clerics, made up that society. It was never divided by race at all or by speech. That was the quite gratuitous assumption of people who thought noble Protestant Prussia to be the modern example of Franks, and decadent Catholic “Latins” to be the modern example of Gallo-Romans. It has no relation to reality. The social divisions of the sixth and seventh centuries were between free and unfree, between those belonging to the Curia and those governed by it, and (much the most prominent division of all) between Christian and non-Christian.

This impossible old idea about a German Austrasia has serious consequences in Mr. Wells’s History, for it makes him still talk of the two divisions as the origins of modern France and Germany; just as they used to talk in 1870! Nowadays that kind of thing won’t do.

Nor is it tolerable to speak of Mercia as “holding out stoutly against the priests and for the ancient Faith and ways.” We leave all that kind of thing to John Richard Green. The conversion of Mercia naturally came later than that of Kent and Northumbria because it lay further inland, but Penda of Mercia marched with the army of Christian Welsh Princes, and Sussex and the Isle of Wight were evangelized much later than Mercia.

To talk of Pepin of Heristal as “conquering Neustria” has been inadmissible for the better part of fifty years. And it is still wilder to speak of “but small racial or social difference” between the “Anglo-Saxon, Jute, or Dane.”

The civilized Christian England of the Dark Ages was utterly different socially, and very different racially, from the Pagan, Saxon or Scandinavian; it felt so and it said so the whole time. The languages were similar, though the similarity can be exaggerated: the mind was different. As for the “Normans,” if the word is used in the sense of the Northmen of the old pirate raids, then they were simply Scandinavians; but used as it is on page 400, after mention of the Conquest, it is quite wrong. The Norman of the Conquest was a Frenchman, much like any other—short, stocky, round-headed, and with all the French violence, all the French vice of partizanship and fighting against one’s neighbour, all the French instinct for simple mechanical order in building and measurement and legal system, and much of the French fun. Even the families of known Scandinavian origin were by that time French. William the Conqueror himself had but one-sixteenth of Scandinavian blood.

Still, these bad errors are after all no more than errors of the conventional old textbooks, written in the days when all History had the Protestant air, and any man who has to fill up a popular history in a hurry from our enyclopædias will naturally be behind the times to that extent. What is 87less excusable is a series of chance sentences which show real ignorance of essentials on which not even the popular textbooks would go wrong. For instance, the Comitatus of which Tacitus speaks as surrounding a German chieftain has nothing whatever to do with our words “Count” and “County.” These come from the Roman official, the “Comes.” Or, again, to talk of the Roman roads (p. 395) as being “destroyed” as early as the eighth century, is to show that the writer knows nothing of the lines of marching or even the sites of battles. The Roman roads remain the great means of communication much later than that. Take a map of Roman roads in Western Europe, put pins in it for the sites of the great religious foundations, the new markets, and especially for the battles up to, say, 1200, and you will see what their meaning was.

In the same way, to talk of the Scandinavians “becoming bolder and ranging further at sea from the Fifth century” is absurd. We know nothing appreciable about them as pirates or long-voyage men until the end of the Eighth, and the very fact that we know nothing about them is proof that they did not early or regularly take these very long voyages.

The worst and most inexcusable direct error is again here in connection with the Filioque clause, on which, as we saw in my last chapter, Mr. Wells quite uncannily specializes in mistakes. He seems to think that this clause was put into the Creed through a sort of personal private whim of Charlemagne in the Council of Aix, and he compares that decree to some vulgar fancy or other of the “late Emperor William writing operas or painting pictures.” He knows that the Spaniards were the first to put it into the Creed, and he knows that the Pope delayed doing so; but he does not know apparently what the reason for the Doctrine was, nor does he appreciate that the vital point at issue was the question of unity. The Greek-speaking half of the Church had never worried very much about the Procession of the Holy Ghost. The fact that the Procession was defined in the Creed as coming from the Father had nothing to do with the idea of excluding the double Procession. The Procession from the Father was only specifically stated in the Creed as against certain heretics who had denied that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father; and the real point about the schism is this: the Universal Church of the early Councils accepted the Primacy of Rome: of that there is no more doubt than of the Battle of Waterloo. But the official and State-ridden Church of the East tended to protest more and more against that Primacy as it developed into the strong Papal idea of the later Dark Ages and Early Middle. That is really the whole affair; and the Filioque was but a pretext.

There appear, of course, those phrases deriving from Mr. Wells’s own anti-Catholic theology, on which it would be tedious to linger after so many earlier examples. Thus the Nestorians—because they are anti-Catholic and far more heretical than the Byzantines—are called “more intelligent and active-minded than the Greeks,” and, of course, “on a much higher level of general education than the Latin-speaking Christians of the West.” Theology, when in a Catholic form, excites nothing but ridicule in minds of Mr. Wells’s level of culture—but when it is Persian—and, best of all, Pagan Persian—it becomes “intense” and “subtle.” The Blessed Trinity is something of which one “cannot make head nor tail,” while an obscure Eastern Heresy is respectable.

But the worst mixture of ignorance and sneering at Divine things combined is on page 386. It is something which I hope it it not too disrespectful to call balderdash. Because certain Mohammedans seem to have wondered whether the Koran had been always in the mind of God (I suppose it was—as all things realized have been in the mind of God), Mr. Wells immediately makes up out of his head an imaginary Christian convert to Islam who is introducing to that world the Gospel of St. John; he actually puts forward the phrase “The Word was God” as meaning that the Bible was God!

88I confess I am bewildered. Mr. Wells cannot be ignorant of the term Logos—he cannot possibly be as ignorant as that. And yet here he is plainly thinking that Logos means Holy Writ. Ignorance is ignorance and muddle-headedness is muddle-headedness; but when they mix and reach that degree criticism must be silent.

There runs through the whole of this division the nineteenth-century idea of “progress.” It is taken for granted, in all its crudity, all its tautology, all its unproved and untrue postulates, and all its flagrant contrast with reality—for of all forms of mystical enthusiasm that of “progress” is the stupidest.

Here is an example from page 385. “Politically, Islam was not an advance, but a retrogression from the traditional freedoms and customary laws of the desert.” Retrogression towards what—in the name of Heaven, common sense and the rudiments of education? If I say a motor-bus is not an “advance” but a “retrogression” from the old horse bus, I must mean, I suppose, that I like the old horse bus better than the motor-bus (which I do). Does Mr. Wells mean that the Arab of the desert, unorganized, and doing what he liked, is his ideal? Then why does he give us his whole idea of progress as that people should get more and more together, and regard the stricter unity of mankind as a thing at once good and inevitable? What does he mean?

I doubt if he knows himself what he means. He had a vague feeling for the moment, as he wrote the sentence, that it would be jollier to be a free Pagan Arab playing about than an Arab bound down by a religious system. Instead of saying that the change was a change towards the “less jolly,” he calls it a “retrogression”—which simply means that he thinks the word “progress” means nothing more than “getting towards the kind of thing I like.” In this, though he may not know it, he is perfectly right—that is about the only meaning the word “progress” has in the mouths of its faithful flock. But then, to use Progress as a universal philosophy is essential nonsense. For different people will always like different things. Until you have a rational and firm faith (or philosophy) as to what is best, you have no way of distinguishing between going forwards and going backwards.

I will not disappoint the reader if I quote, as a savoury, the most extravagant example of “progress” in this division. It is on page 393, and runs thus: “Hitherto men of reason and knowledge have never had the assurance and courage of the religious fanatic. But there can be little doubt that they have accumulated settled convictions and gathered confidence during the last few centuries. They have slowly found a means to power through the development of popular education and popular literature, and to-day they are far more disposed to say things plainly and to claim a dominating voice in the organization of human affairs than they have ever been before in the world’s history.”

So now we know that the anti-Christian of the best-seller, of the sexual novel, of the star article, and the cheap textbook, is about to take over the governance of mankind. God help us if he does! But he won’t.

As we approach the break in Christian Unity, generally called the “Reformation,” I look with interest at Mr. Wells’s work to see whether his combined intelligence and instruction will stand the strain.

He writes, of course, as a local and intensely Protestant man who has lost the doctrine of his immediate ancestry, but preserved most of their catchwords and all their odd isolated philosophy. Nevertheless, his mind is alert, his intelligence, as always, conspicuously sincere, and his power of visualization quite exceptional.

Therefore, I hoped that he would, when he came to this critical test, rise superior in some degree to his limitations. But he has not done so. On the contrary, he has failed here more conspicuously than in any other department of his work with which I have hitherto had to deal. And the reason is this, that he is here right up against the Thing that distracts him: the Faith.

His other blunders are, as a rule, no more than his repetition of old errors which he did not happen to know had been exposed by modern scholarship, coupled with his sporadic outbreaks against the Church. But when he comes to approach the Reformation, we have something very different. We have an ignorance of (or aversion from) the fundamentals of the position, which ignorance (or aversion) is fatal to his History.

For to understand modern times (which have drawn all their trouble from the break-up of Christendom that followed, and all their energy from the renewal of discovery that preceded the Reformation), one must understand what the whole thing was about. A man who merely repeats the old Protestant formulæ is useless; and that, unfortunately, is exactly what Mr. Wells does. He misappreciates the quality of the problem. He goes wrong here on the main outline more than he does in any other department of his work, and he goes wrong because he is in the “No Popery” tradition. To exemplify this I will quote.

In the first place he always speaks of the Catholic Church as something separate from Europe, something, as it were, imposed upon Europe like an alien conqueror; a man who thinks in those terms of Europe before the Reformation manifestly ignores the nature of all our History. A man who thinks in those terms is like a foreigner talking of England as an aristocratic tyranny grinding down a mass of rebellious people. Many Frenchmen have talked of England in those terms, and have made themselves laughing-stocks by 94doing so. They have not understood the aristocratic state. So does a man who speaks of united Christendom as a thing to which the Catholic Church was an external, alien thing make a laughing-stock of himself. The Catholic Church was Europe and Europe was the Catholic Church. In so far as the break-up of Christendom succeeded, in that degree has Europe lost its unity and therefore its being. Nor shall we recover our being save by a reunion in religion.

Let us look at the phrases which betray this ignorance of the European past.

“Though it is certain that the Catholic Church opened up the modern educational state in Europe, it is equally certain that the Catholic Church never intended to do anything of the sort. It did not send us knowledge with its blessing; it let it loose inadvertently.” “Us”! “It”!—but “we” were “it.”

Again:

“At first the current criticism upon the Church concerned only moral and material things.” Criticism whence? From those who were themselves of the Church!

Again:

“The Church was losing its hold upon the consciences of Princes and rich and able people. It was also losing the faith and confidence of common people.” But Princes and common people were the Church!

Again:

“The revolt of the Princes was essentially an irreligious revolt against the world rule of the Church.” It was a scramble for loot of Church Goods undertaken by avaricious men within the Society of Catholic Europe—not by men from something outside.

I might quote many such sentences which we come across by the hundred in the sort of textbooks upon which Mr. Wells and the vast bulk of his readers have been brought up; they are all (to the historian) lamentable.

The Catholic civilization of Europe broke up from within, because the evil will of men was, at one moment, too strong for their conscience of good, and the opportunity for loot too strong for man’s underlying knowledge that the Church was the salvation of mankind. To talk of criticism of the clerical organization and its abuses as an attack on “the Church” is unhistorical. It is thinking of the past in modern terms. To contrast Catholic Christendom with some ideal, impossible (and unpleasant) system, of vague, enthusiast religion, and to imagine the latter suppressed by the former is, historically, unreal. One might as well imagine English cricket rules persecuting an imaginary ideal cricket in which there were no rules. The Catholic Church, in any society which is Catholic, no more stands outside the community as an odd tyrant than the social habit of the Londoner stands outside the Londoner as a tyrant, or than the public school system stands as a tyrant outside the man trained under it. The whole thing is one.

That unity may suffer attack. It may break down. It may suffer the loss of certain portions while maintaining the rest intact. But to regard any vital principle (such as the Church) as something outside the body which it vivifies, is bad history. It is exactly the sort of bad history written by anyone who doesn’t understand the personality, the identity, the spirit of his subject. Mr. Wells and his readers (and those who wrote the textbooks on which he has been trained) are not themselves Catholics; but cannot they exercise enough imagination to call up a world in which their ancestry and their blood were Catholic? Apparently they cannot; and in so far as they cannot, their history is worthless; for they miss the main fact that Catholic Europe was still Catholic while the disruption was proceeding, and that the idea of the Church as an alien thing was only possible after the full effect of the break-up.

So much for the first piece of bad history. This obsession of the Catholic Church as an alien tyrant of Catholic men.

Now for a second more detailed point. Mr. Wells is obsessed, as the less intelligent part of Protestant society was obsessed a lifetime or more ago, with the extraordinary conception that the Catholic Church restricts 95the powers of reason and the action of the human mind.

A man who writes that of the Catholic Church is like a man who should say (and indeed there are nowadays some men who do say it) that a formula in mathematics restricts the freedom of the human mind.

Here you have a popular novelist dealing with what he himself has vaguely heard to be one of the great phenomena of History, and what every educated man knows to be the greatest phenomenon of all History, the Catholic Church; and yet, in attacking it, he does not know what it was. A little while ago the greatest purely political phenomenon in the world—it is still, perhaps, the greatest—was the sudden expansion of the British Empire; with its unique bond of a nominal crown, its vast territorial extent, its exceedingly rapid growth. What should we say of a foreigner who, writing of this phenomenon, should judge (because he hated it) that it was all due to tyranny?

We should say of him exactly what I say of Mr. Wells. He does not know what he is talking about.

The Catholic Church propounds certain truths, and those who accept her authority accept those truths. They do not accept Her authority by discovering the truths and piecing them together. They do not accept Her authority like your modern reader who accepts whatever he reads. They discover Her authority by Her character. Then, and only then, and as a consequence, not a cause, of such recognition, they accept Her teaching.

Those born into Her society inherit that knowledge of truth and have it taught them in childhood, as other truths are taught; but it remains knowledge of truth none the less; not meaningless suggestion. The Faith is not imbecile acceptation of something heard before the age of reason; on the contrary, it is the highest act of the intelligent will. Mr. Wells seems to be sincerely of the opinion that Lacordaire and Newman accepting the mystery of predestination and free will, did so through some base itch for obeying blindly. It is as though one in admiration of the Heavens and Earth were told he was but repeating an art critic’s essay.

Here is Mr. Wells telling us with wearisome reiteration that at the end of the Middle Ages the common man began to “think for himself.” The Church, he tells us (p. 464), had for its object the “subjugation of minds.” Again, in the thirteenth century, “a new arbitrator, greater than Pope or monarchy, had come into the world.” “Public opinion.” (P. 465.) John Huss is a martyr “not for any specific doctrine, but for the free intelligence and free conscience of mankind.”

And so on: all the tags of a long lifetime ago, as they ran current once in Exeter Hall.

It is a hopeless thing to argue with those who do not know the nature of their material. Perhaps I can best put it thus: Does Mr. Wells himself (as does certainly his great uneducated public) believe that the Catholic has not examined his own first principles? Is not interested in intellectual discussion? Does not perpetually criticize, weigh, and judge? Does he think that there are two kinds of men: (1) the Catholic—say Pascal—who is forbidden to think and can produce nothing intellectual; (2) those who, like Mr. Wells himself, have reached the summit of intellectual achievement through an exceptional intellectual freedom and power? I suppose he does. But the sight of such a man so complacent is a dreadful eye-opener on universal free laical compulsory education in elementary schools.

Does he think that St. Thomas Aquinas shirked the use of the brain?

Does he think Suarez merely repetitive? Lanfranc a parrot? Augustine a repeater of set phrases? Does he think that they are still shirking intellectual problems at Louvain, in Paris, in Lyons, in Angers, in Maynooth to-day? Apparently he does.

I have done Mr. Wells the justice of saying here and elsewhere, that in the matter of detail, date and incidental points he is remarkably accurate. But here, in the matter of the period before the Reformation, even his literal accuracy, his chief merit, breaks down. The reason is that here his 96passion runs away with him, and he will not be patient to discover even from common books of reference, what might clash with Protestant legend. For instance, having got into his head that chastity was in some way horrible to an imaginary thing called the Nordic race, he tells us of “the peculiar bias of the early Anglo-Saxons and Northmen against the monks and nuns.”

This is wild. Of what the pirates in the fifth century did against monasteries we know nothing, absolutely, and for this good reason: that monasteries had not yet been founded in Eastern Britain. We do know that the specially Teutonic belt—the North-Eastern coast—was devotedly and splendidly monastic beyond any other part of Anglo-Saxon England.

What the Scandinavian pirates did, we know too well. They attacked the monasteries because they were full of wealth, because they were comparatively defenceless, and because they were centres of civilization. But immediately after conversion they revere and endow the monastic institution even more than does the South. And if there is one thing more clear in history than another it is that the moment men accept our civilization they show a respect for its signal monastic institution.

It is incredible to me that a man professing to write even a cursory popular history such as this should not know that the monastic institutions especially flourished in the ancestry of those to whom Mr. Wells applies the term Nordic (which simply means modern Protestant). It does not flourish among them now; but to imagine that the past was like the present is the very test of historical incompetence.

Or again, take what he says about Wycliffe and about Huss. These two worthies fill the greater part of a whole page (466), and they might be taken straight out of a Kensitite tract. He repeats the ineptitude that Wycliffe “translated the Bible into English in order to set up a counter authority to that of the Pope.” He appealed to the Bible, of course, and he and his followers certainly translated the Bible (though their work has probably disappeared), but can he be so ignorant as to think that Vernacular Scriptures were unknown to the fourteenth century? I suppose he is thus ignorant. If that is so he ought not to attempt history at all.

Wycliffe wanted a Bible as a textbook out of which to cite particular quotations against developments later than the Canon. But he was not speaking to a society ignorant of the Canon. He wanted to make an idol of the existing Bible—but he did not fashion that idol. Probably he put in particular phrases and interpretations of his own, as all heresiarchs have; but what they were we shall never know, for they have disappeared.

And there is more. Mr. Wells imagines that Wycliffe started the heretical doubts on the Blessed Sacrament, making them the principal part of his teaching. What lamentable history! It is as though I were to say that Mr. Snowden started Socialism in Europe and made it the great message of his glorious career.

Wycliffe’s main doctrine—the only thing that really counted in the mass of contradictory things which he put together—was a doctrine which he got from people of a century before, the doctrine that the right to holding property depends on our being in a State of Grace. What he thought about the Blessed Sacrament I defy Mr. Wells or anybody else to elucidate. He never touched upon the matter until quite late in his career, and it was more as a piece of intellectual gymnastic than as anything else. But because, generations later, the main attack was upon the Blessed Sacrament, Mr. Wells imagines that Wycliffe was in the same case.

He shows the same fundamental ignorance about the Hussite movement. He thinks of it lovingly as Kensitite. The Hussite movement was a Slav anti-German movement, for which heresy was but the pretext. It was not a heresy which happened by some strange accident to be coincident with the Czech dislike of Germans. I even find here the hoary howler about the “safe conduct” of Huss. Huss never had a safe conduct 97guaranteeing him against trial and condemnation. I should have thought that by this time everyone knew that. Huss had a safe conduct to attend the Council, i.e. to pass through the territories leading to Constance; as a rebel he would naturally have been arrested or killed save for such safe conduct, but he was never given a guarantee against trial. He arrived for the purpose of trial.

But though I quote these startling examples of ignorance in detail, I think they are quite unimportant, compared with the inability of the writer, whether from lack of opportunity, or from anti-Catholic enthusiasm, to understand what he is dealing with.

The distinction between the good and the bad historian is the power—or lack of power—to survey things detachedly from above. A bad historian can only write in terms of his present experience; the good historian, or even the tolerable historian, writes from his fullness in the past.

Mr. Wells intended, quite honestly, to write history. He has failed, because, naturally opposed to the Catholic Church by training and social circumstances, he did not know the nature of what he was opposing.

So much for the Preliminaries: now for the Reformation itself. The Reformation is the most important incident in the history of our race since the Incarnation; and that for this reason: That Christendom disunited is wounded; that the unity of Christendom was broken by the Reformation after a different and more lasting fashion than in all the breaches which had hitherto occurred.

The separation of the East from the West was mainly a political separation and is mainly a political separation to-day. Such doctrinal differences as were pleaded, are an excuse, not a cause. The great heresies one after the other (of which the Arian was much the most important) did the harm they did and rocked the ship of Peter, but they never created what may be called a “separate realm” in Christendom; a whole with its own heretical traditions, its own roots in its own soil, and producing evil fruit.

Any one of them might have done so, and the Albigensian very nearly did so. Had not the Albigensian Crusade been tardily but successfully fought, and had not the Battle of Muret (which English boys are never allowed to hear about in their textbooks—it was as important as Marathon) saved European culture, the Albigensians would have swamped us all. At an enormous expense of energy and by a Providential good fortune that disaster was avoided.

But the general attack from many sides delivered in the sixteenth century was not repelled in time. There arose from it a division in Christendom, a wholly new culture, in which the ancient doctrines were but partially held, had but a partial effect upon social life and, by the very principle of the new departure, were destined slowly to be dissolved; so that to-day one may fairly say that nothing of doctrine remains for the mass of Protestant men and women save a certain respect for the personality of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity—regarded of course as only a man—some vague conception of a personal God, and some vague idea of a future life: but on condition that it shall minister to the individual’s certitude that so fine a fellow as he is bound to be happy in the long run.

It may be objected that the great heresy of Islam (for, I repeat, it was a heresy, not a new religion; it drew all its life and all its true doctrines by selection from the Catholic Church) had an effect as permanent or more permanent, than the Reformation: effects often similar to Protestantism, as, in its contempt of Sacraments and of Priesthood, of symbol in imagery and of all the best part of the supernatural; and its distaste for having to think hard and to appreciate Mystery.

But I distinguish between the two, and I call the Reformation the much greater event because it happened in what is at once the head and the heart of the world: Europe.

The Reformation broke up and degraded that culture of our race which has the leadership of mankind: Europe. Islam did not do that. It ruined whole provinces. It destroyed our complete hold upon the Mediterranean. 98It spread its blight over the edges of our civilization, Roman North Africa and the Greek East; but it did not set up a parody of Christian tradition. There came a time when it desired to destroy Christendom as an external thing, whereas the heirs of the Reformation have always attempted and are still doubtfully attempting to destroy it from within.

It may well be that we have lived out the disease. It may well be that we are on the threshold of a time when we shall be immune to it, and when Catholic unity shall return. Certainly that is the only hope for our civilization. But on the other hand there is a possibility of yet greater peril, of a yet increased decline in our culture. In that case the high tradition of Europe will have to stand at siege again, as it did in the Dark Ages: restricted to some small body which shall still maintain the unbroken Catholic culture.

One of these two futures lies before us.

At any rate the huge upheaval of the sixteenth century, ending in the final breakdown of the seventeenth, is what I have called it: the chief event in human history since the Incarnation. It may be compared to some geological upheaval in which the whole countryside bursts up into flame, eruption, and chaos, but instead of settling down again into one landscape as it was before, breaks asunder, leaving an impassable gulf between two now wholly separate districts.

Now Mr. Wells does not appreciate what the Reformation was, because he does not appreciate what it destroyed.

Those little sneers at the united Catholic civilization, that perpetual Tin Chapel talk about the “Teaching of Jesus of Nazareth,” that ceaseless use of the word “Christianity” in the sense of whatever is common to the Protestant sects of his acquaintance—as though the test of Being were not Unity!—all this shows that he does not appreciate what he is dealing with. He never sees the Catholic Church as a unique Institution, and a unique historical phenomenon.

He is always putting it (as do the most of our textbooks) into sham categories confused in a sham similarity. The Catholic Church is to Mr. Wells (as to all his kind) one religion out of many religions. It talks (he thinks) of but one Incarnation out of many incarnations; it has (he thinks) but one sacrificial system out of many sacrificial systems—and so on.

But the whole point of the Catholic Church is that, true or false, it stands quite apart from anything else in the history of our Race. It assumes as no other system ever did a universal Divine and absolute authority: and that authority not vague but detailed, specialized, insistent, manifold, covering all human life.

The Catholic Church says “I am of God, none else is of God. God (made man for our sake) intended and created me. By His voice in me are you at unison with all God’s works, and so with your own end and nature. I am; and I bear witness for ever.”

The claim may be true or fantastic: but not to know what it is nor what a hold it had (and has) on men, nor how it made Europe, is the prime cause of Mr. Wells’s inability to grasp the history of his own race.

The history of other races he can deal with better. All that he has to say on the Mogul Empire of India, for instance, is admirable, save, of course, when he tries to think; as, for instance, when he pronounces that education is information upon “realities”—without having, apparently, heard that, upon what philosophy you hold, depends what you call reality—and upon your scheme of values what is worth teaching.

He is excellent in his little sketch of the gypsies on page 457. He is picturesque on Tamerlane. But when he comes to the contact between Asia and Europe Giant Pope appears again. He thinks the conversion of Asia to have been a very simple matter, merely missed because Giant Pope was trying to save that imperilled Europe of his instead of talking at large on “Jesus of Nazareth.”

The second point in which Mr. Wells fails to understand his task is in his idea that the 99Reformation was an inevitable event. It is the curse of nearly all our modern popular writers (who are most of them inferior to, and outside the Catholic culture) that they read history in terms of that physical science which is the model for all their thought. They cannot understand the effect of Free Will: they cannot understand that spiritual good and evil come to men, not of fate, but from their own choice.

Europe was not shaking and breaking up before the Reformation. Europe was imperilled before the Reformation, as it had often been imperilled before, but it might easily have been saved. Only a very few political incidents turned the scale against the recovering of unity, and produced the trouble from which we are increasingly suffering to-day. Each of these events depended upon certain perverted human wills. The folly of looting the Church lands in England came from the immediate impulse of greed in a few, and that was what, sorely against their bewildered hearts, stole the Faith from the English. The principal incident in the tragedy, without a doubt, was (let me repeat) the policy of Richelieu, of which, so far as I can make out, Mr. Wells has not heard. Had Richelieu backed up the Empire, the whole of Europe would be Catholic to-day.

It is worth remarking that Mr. Wells on account of this defect in his historical vision (which is a defect of Provincialism) does not appreciate the fact that the Catholic Church still carries on.

I have already pointed that out to him. You can say that the unity of Christendom was wrecked, but you cannot say that Christendom was wrecked. The Divine Authority is not now universal over Europe, but it is universal over its own very wide, exalted, and increasingly active department of the European mind. We are still numerically the majority of Western Europe and, in intellectual weight, the centre of gravity lies within our sphere. The intellectual centre of gravity of Europe to-day does not lie within the culture of Britain and North Germany aided by the moribund French anti-clericals and Scandinavia. It lies most certainly in those who have always accepted, or are now again beginning to reaccept the full doctrine which made the culture by which we live.

I have not the space to quote at length sentence after sentence in which the inability of the writer to deal with this prime matter appears. But take such a sentence as “Cease to be ruled by Dogmas and Authorities!” Mark the underlying conception that Authority merely means force and that Dogma is necessarily a falsehood; mark the characteristic inability to grasp what should be, to the thinking mind, an obvious truth: that all teaching is dogmatic, all acceptation of all truth necessarily under some authority, of reason, of judgment, of sense, or of accepted experience in others.

Perhaps Mr. Wells’s most characteristic error on the Reformation (for it is a common one) is the conception that there was in the early sixteenth century (and earlier) a great popular movement—a sort of tide—against Catholic doctrine. There was nothing of the sort. I know this statement sounds too strong and exaggerated in the ears of many of my readers, because the myth of such a popular tide of protest against the Faith is taught on all sides.

But my statement is true. There was no popular uprising against the Faith. There was popular indignation against indifference and corruption in the administration of the Faith.

There was a small enthusiastic and sincere minority arising in the late Middle Ages against abuses. There was no general movement against doctrine. There was nothing remotely resembling a great popular feeling such as the great popular feeling against capitalism to-day. It is a myth. Here and there a few fanatics, here and there a few extravagances (all of them due to reaction against abuses in the use of Sacerdotal power) were apparent. Of widespread popular feeling against doctrine there was none. On the contrary, where doctrine was attacked at last by a few highbrows, the populace was its defender.

100To men of Mr. Wells’s intellectual furnishing it seems mere common sense that sooner or later people should wake up and say, “After all, can this doctrine of the Real Presence be true?” or, “After all, can this mystery of the Incarnation (or of the Trinity or what not) be anything but a fairy tale made up by men”? This was not the attitude of the mass of our fathers.

Scepticism upon the supernatural was current in the Catholic Culture from the beginning, and is current to-day. It was not peculiar to the sixteenth century—the Middle Ages were full of it. What was special to the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century was what may properly be called a political reaction against the sterilization, the fossilization through the process of time, not only of the Ecclesiastical, but of the lay social machine.

Mr. Wells is perfectly right when he repeats the commonplace that the annoyance of the people with the Papacy was not that it governed religion, but that it did not govern religion enough: that it was not religious enough. But he is perfectly wrong—I mean historically wrong, writing bad history—when he prints (upon p. 497—writing of the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth century) that “only the Spaniards, fresh from a long and finally successful religious war against Islam, had any great enthusiasm left for the Church.” He does not know the time.

The bulk of men all over Europe had any amount of enthusiasm for the Church, and any amount of vigour to react against those new pedantic subtleties which powerful men caught at as an excuse for plunder, but which the instinct of the masses taught them to be poisons, destroying the freedom and happiness of the common man.

Has Mr. Wells never heard of all the great, though unsuccessful, popular rebellions in England under the late Tudors, or of the much more violent and successful rebellions of the populace against the threat of Huguenot domination in France? He must know them, because they are in every cinema show. But he certainly has no idea of what they were. These popular rebellions were furious protests under arms against the murder of that Catholic culture which was not only necessary to the scant happiness of the poor on this sad earth, but felt also by them to be Divine.

I find another piece of ignorance on page 502: “Luther had taken,” says Mr. Wells, “to reading the Bible.”

Of course, the setting of the Bible up as an authority against tradition was a necessary part of the sectarian movement. Stated thus, you have an historical truth. But the idea that a cultivated man of the early sixteenth century did not know the Bible, or (for that matter) the idea that the rudest peasant of the sixteenth century did not know what was in his Bible, is as unhistorical as would be a Russian’s idea that knowledge of racing in England to-day was confined to rich owners of horses.

Mr. Wells is perfectly right when he says that the Princes made a political reformation; but he is perfectly wrong when he imagines a great popular repudiation of religion to have been going on at the same time.

There were mobs, as there always are in times of disturbance. But they came after political rebellion against the Church: not before it. They followed the rich. They did not urge the rich. There was popular rising against the pressure of the wealthy and the inequalities of life—as there always is when the organization of society is shaken. But there was no popular rising against doctrine; only a few “intellectual” cliques. There was no protest of the “common man” of Europe against the only food whereby his soul may live. On the contrary, it was the Common Man who saved the Catholic Church in spite of the nobles and the princes and their dependent apostate priests, the Luthers and the Knoxes, and the rest—who would never have gone down to fame but for the use their atheist and glutton masters made of them.

I may put the whole attitude of our Author towards the Reformation in the simple but true phrase that he does not 101describe what took place; he does no more than repeat the stories of his childhood.

To read him one would imagine that the Catholic Church broke up and disappeared, that it broke up and disappeared under a popular uprising, and that the popular uprising was due to the quarrel of plain sturdy fellows, like himself, with theological dogma. Indeed, he uses the word “theological” and the word “dogma” as though they connoted something irrational. What would Mr. Wells write down if you asked for a strict definition of the word “theological” and of the word “dogma” He uses them as mere terms of abuse: yet they have a meaning for educated men.

What is at the back of his mind when he says that the Emperor, during the Reformation, “seems to have taken the religious theories as genuine theological differences”? What can he mean if he has any conception, however vague, of the meaning of the word “theological”?

If one set of leaders take up arms under the principle that individuals, and not a corporate authority, are the recipients of revelation, that is what educated men call a theological position. When the streets of Paris were placarded with posters saying, “Your Sacrament is but bread, and we will throw it to the dogs,” that insult to devotion for the Real Presence (it was one of the many things which exasperated Paris into the St. Bartholomew) is said in educated language to have a theological connotation.

Throughout all the rest of this Book VII and on into Book VIII the same false historical ideas run, and particularly the idea that the Catholic Church was, in the sixteenth century, destroyed.

It is not easy to state in clear terms what is going on in an unclear mind, though it is a most useful thing to attempt the criticism of such a mind; but I fancy if one could unravel the underlying idea of Mr. Wells’s confused thought in this matter one would find something like this:

“The Catholic Church is dead. No one who counts nowadays accepts its authority. Those who pretend to do so are only playing a game. The old sincere attachment to it was based upon ignorance and the lack of newspapers, Board Schools, Typewriters, Railways, Broadcasting, and Best-sellers. To-day you only have the old sincere Faith in a few very backward, uneducated peasant districts.”

But is it not manifest that a man making such an enormous error upon the modern world must be incapable of giving an outline of the past?

That is what makes him misunderstand, for instance, the struggle in the Netherlands. He talks of the populace as bitterly Protestant and the nobles as only reluctantly following them. The truth is exactly the opposite. The majority, the large majority of the Low Country populace was strongly attached to the Faith and still is. It was the nobles here, as everywhere, and the great merchants of the towns who broke away—for loot.

That is what makes him wholly misunderstand the action of Alva. He has read nothing but the old diatribes of Motley. The marvel was not that Alva failed. The marvel was that he was able to keep his end up at all with such small forces, with all the wealthy against him, and with his supplies seized at the critical moment by Cecil.

That is what makes him misunderstand (to give a very small example) the nature of Charles V’s great renunciation. Because that great Christian remained in his retirement attached to his old habits of food and drink, therefore he must be ridiculed.—Why? Because Mr. Wells has read nothing but Prescott, if that, and Prescott ridicules Charles.

After doing one of the finest and most significant things that ever a man did when he handed over power and betook himself to contemplation, the great Charles must be sneered at because he preserved his common (and excellent) habits of life instead of turning full monk.

But it is always so. The same men who ridicule the ascetic ideal demand it of those whom they confusedly imagine—because 102they are Catholic—to have devoted themselves to it. Charles V was no monk. He had not vowed himself to the renunciation of common life.

What he did do was to leave a fine example for ever to men, as did the Pagan Diocletian, of how little the value of power is in the general sight of Heaven. Power—too long held—is evil or worthless at best to the soul. At the worst it is damnation. Charles V knew that. Mr. Wells does not.

It is so throughout all the description of the Reformation by Mr. Wells. The vast continuing quarrel of modern history is put forward as having ended all over the world, when it seemed to have ended in England. Mr. Wells is so ignorant of the modern world—outside his narrow reach—that he has no notion of these two powerful opponents, Faith and Anti-Faith, facing one another as they do to-day throughout Europe. He thinks and writes of the Reformation as a mere breakdown in a thing once called the Catholic Church, a thing of the Middle Ages, now disappeared.

All attempt at outline disappears in his No popery. The whole story falls into a mush, with long quotations on quite unimportant points, taken out of Protestant authorities, who wrote with a special propagandist motive in quite narrow fields such as the abuse of Spain or mere cracking up of the Dutch Commercial Oligarchy. There is not a word upon the tremendous business of the central arena upon which the whole undecided issue was fought: I mean the French field in which the Huguenots nearly changed all our civilization, then in turn were nearly destroyed by popular anger, but in which, at the end, the two parties were left undefeated, and facing each other as they still face each other to-day.

There is not a single quotation in Mr. Wells from any one of the Authorities writing under the Catholic Culture, not even from any one of the anti-Clericals among them. It is all Giant Pope.

To put it very plainly, Mr. Wells does not know what happened. He writes as one of his own type in a foreign country might write about the English industrial revolution, proclaiming that it destroyed English national feeling and tradition, and substituted democracy for aristocracy. He cannot see the gigantic religious cataclysm of Europe in its main lines: the first sweeping tide, then the ebb, then the crystallization of the offensive and defensive positions after one hundred years of armed struggle throughout the Continent.

I do not think the subject is too big for him. I think that he has not taken upon it even enough trouble to grasp the main structure.

If he had written with great contempt, or, better still, with great anger, of the saving of the Catholic Church in spite of the storm, he would have been historical, though an opponent. Not understanding that it was saved, and that, having been saved, its fortunes of success or failure will make up the future story of our race, he must, in what is left of his history, blunder still worse than he has blundered before; for he will have to account for modern Europe as though the Church were not there, and to do that is a little like trying to account for modern England as though the English climate were not there.

In this exposure of such nullity in the chief event in modern history I have had little time for the praise which is Mr. Wells’s due in lesser matters touched upon during the period of the great change. I owe it by way of postscript.

Thus the summary of the literary and artistic Renaissance, though a little dull from cramming in much detail (a fault, as a rule, conspicuously absent from Mr. Wells’s, who excels in economy of words) is accurate and sufficient. He appreciates thoroughly the greatness of Magellan’s heroic adventure. The pages upon Columbus (492 and 493) are good and sufficient.

There is only one foolish note in all this rapid sketch of Springtime of the Arts, and that is where Mr. Wells has the folly to say of Shakespeare that he was “happily” without the Classics. It is an idea which obsesses our author. Because gentlemen are trained 103in the Classics, therefore, he cannot believe that the Classics have any value.

But Mr. Wells, in spite of his violent antipathy to culture, is right by power of vivid imagination and original use of brain in many points where his fellow popular writers are wrong. For instance, he does not make out Francis Bacon to have invented a new philosophical method. He knows that printing was of gradual development (though he hardly understands what ill effect it had upon the mind as well as what good), he is original and interesting on the effect of the coming of paper into general use—though naturally materialist in his exaggerated judgment of its effect.

I could quote a dozen little touches of the sort, in all of which he is to be congratulated. They do not make up for the lack of acquaintance with the main matter of his discourse, and that lack of acquaintance is not to be remedied by any amount of reading. It is not lack of scholarship; it is lack of appreciation and judgment. He knows no more of the Catholic Church, which made Europe and still sustains Europe in its peril, than he does of the other things which infuriate him, such as the Gentleman.

I may sum up by saying that the whole of this attitude towards the Catholic Church, and even towards the religious sense as a whole, reminds me of an incident in my own life. A certain commercial traveller in the town of Lichfield confided to me his conviction that “all this talk about wine is great rot. One wine is much the same as another; and, anyhow, it’s all sour, nasty stuff, as everybody would admit if people weren’t afraid of their neighbours.”

With the Reformation the chief motive of my examination disappears and the main matter of it. For I set out to examine whether Mr. Wells were competent as an historian to attack the Faith of Christian men, and the matter to my hand was his attitude towards the main doctrines of Faith and his acquaintance with the rise and character of the thing he hates so much.

The essential work is over when we come to the end of the great disruption which broke up the Unity of our Civilization and has bred the increasing ills from which we suffer.

I shall, therefore, do no more in this, the close of my book, than very briefly survey Mr. Wells’s competence to deal with the modern world since, say, 1600: testing that competence by one or two special points. I shall conclude with a Summary.

Since the Reformation Western Europe has stood divided into a Catholic and a Protestant culture. This does not to-day mean a division into two groups of opposing religious profession. It means two whole social developments proceeding from original Religious differences. Your Atheist of the Protestant culture is a different man altogether from your Atheist of the Catholic culture.

Mr. Wells writes in the midst of the Protestant culture. He knows nothing of the Catholic. He understands the motives and general character of that Protestant part of our civilization to which he himself belongs. He understands it more or less when it is Prussian, better when it is English, and best of all when it is of the neighbourhood of London. When he is dealing with such things he does his job reasonably well. With the other part of modern Europe and the 104Catholic part of all Europe he deals ill; for it thinks and talks in what is to him spiritually a foreign and unknown language, and he even deals ill with that part of his own region—e.g. the new English Aristocratic State produced by the Reformation—which requires a feeling for tradition.

I select three points. First, an examination of what may be called the wind-up of the Reformation in England; to wit, the destruction of the English Monarchy in the seventeenth century and its replacing by an oligarchy of the well-to-do; for by the way in which a man treats that development, his general culture in the field of modern European history may very well be tested. Secondly, the corresponding Continental modern movement, ending with the French Revolution. Thirdly, what he has to say (and he says it very badly) about the effects upon the European mind, and particularly upon religion, of our physiological and biological discoveries, theories and blunders in the nineteenth century.

First, then, to the victory of the governing classes in England over the Crown, which was the final effect of the Reformation here.

Mr. Wells repeats upon the origins of Parliament what may be called the elementary-school-textbook legend. It is, of course, erroneous, and it is a type of those errors which, though apparently unconnected with error in religion, are really dependent upon such error. For it proceeds from a lack of comprehension of that united Catholic Europe of Middle Ages from which we all spring.

He tells us, to begin with, that monarchy in England was surrounded, after the breakdown of the Roman Empire, by Magnates who watched the common interests and modified the power of the monarch, but he adds that this was due to the presence of northern and Germanic blood. This is, of course, mere repetition of what is still written in a great many of our popular textbooks. It is, therefore, natural that Mr. Wells should repeat it. None the less it shows ignorance of essentials. It contains, like so many popular myths, a truth and a falsehood combined.

Local governments, after the breakdown of central rule from Rome, were invariably a combination of the local general and a group of Magnates round him. That is true. But the second statement—that one of the two which is important—is quite false. So little had this grouping of Magnates round the king to do with Germanic blood, that you find it everywhere the same throughout Europe, and actually weaker in the Germanies than anywhere else.

Moreover, the group of Magnates is hardly apparent at the beginning of the business when many of the local Roman generals, such as Theodoric, were of still unmixed Germanic blood. The Magnates only become strong much later in the centuries, and by that time the Germanic blood in the West had disappeared.

People of Northern Germanic blood have never shown any particular dislike to being governed absolutely by one man. Indeed they have been rather more docile under such a political condition than Southern people and Western people during and since the Dark Ages.

What made the gathering of Magnates round the Government a necessity during the Dark Ages was the return to primitive conditions, the comparative difficulty of communications, and the continual armament of a free society, which was perpetually in conflict either domestic or through resistance to the Mohammedans and the heathens. You do not find absolutely centralized monarchy anywhere in the Dark Ages. You find it no more in Ireland or in Brittany or Galicia than you find it in the Rhine Valley or in Scandinavia; and the reason that you do not find it is that, under primitive conditions, such a thing cannot exist. Absolute monarchy, to be exercised over great numbers, needs high organization.

Mr. Wells is right in saying that the presence of Knights of the Shire gave the British Parliament a special character; but he is quite at sea as to why they gave it a special character. The special character of 105the English Third Estate did not lie in the calling up to the King’s Council of men representing the smaller gentry. That happened all over France and Northern Spain, and it began abroad long before it began in England. The first parliaments of Europe were in the Pyrenees.

The special character of the English Commons House lay in the fact that the smaller gentry elsewhere sat in a house of their own, but here sat with the merchants of the towns; and this made at last an organized unit wherein the combined wealth of the country could act against the King, who was the common guardian of all, rich and poor. In other words, the special constitution of the English Third Estate was one tending towards aristocracy.

But England would never have become an aristocracy—as at last it did—nor would popular monarchy ever have been defeated and replaced by rule of the gentry had it not been for one economic factor of overwhelming importance of which Mr. Wells appears not to grasp the effect, I mean the dissolution of the monasteries. He does not even mention this prodigious economic revolution as having any connection with Parliament; yet it was the Dissolution which gave Parliament all its new power after the Reformation and enabled it to destroy the Crown.

The reason was this: the monastic land and a great deal of other Church endowment as well (the endowment of a great many schools and hospitals and confraternities of all kinds, and endowments for Masses, etc., and a great part of the Bishopric endowments) passed into the hands of the Squires and greater Burgesses—the gentry—and immensely increased their economic power, while the economic power of the English Crown was correspondingly depressed. That is the whole story.

The English Crown provided its own ruin by its ecclesiastical policy. It could no longer obtain the revenue necessary for running the country; the Squires and the great merchants had become much richer than it. Only by expedients could the King struggle on for a few years at a time by trying to put more land into the hands of the Government (resumption of the King’s rights over the forests), by selling monopolies, by reviving quaint old forgotten taxes, and (in one case and for several years) by accepting support from a foreign Government. The victory of the gentry over the Crown (which Mr. Wells seems to regard as a popular victory!) was the consequence of an economic revolution which had preceded it, and that economic revolution in its turn was a consequence of the Reformation.

Mr. Wells, whose tendency being materialism is all for exaggerating of the economic factor in history, should have spotted this; he has an acute and an original power of observation in such things. But he can well be excused through this fact that none of the ordinary official textbooks such as he would come across would put the truth before him.

In the same way, he evidently does not know who and what Oliver Cromwell was. To give us an idea of the man, he quotes one sentence about his “country cut clothes,” giving the impression (which is certainly Mr. Wells’s own) that Cromwell was a bluff “man of the people.” But the whole point of Cromwell was that he was a cadet of one of the very wealthiest of the new millionaire families. The “Cromwells” (an assumed name) had built up their enormous and ill-gotten fortune on the loot of religion. Cromwell’s real name was Williams. The original Williams, his great-grandfather, was the favourite nephew of that Thomas Cromwell, the moneylender, who was the author of the policy of looting religion, and who heavily endowed that favourite nephew with monastic lands. No fewer than five great foundations—apart from lesser pickings—swelled the gigantic wealth of the family. It is symbolic and typical of the whole affair that Oliver Cromwell should come from those traditions of wealth acquired at the expense of the Catholic Church. It is true he was only the son of a cadet and therefore enjoyed but a small part of the family fortunes—a few thousand a year as we should say nowadays. But he came out 106of the very heart of the new millionaires. When he is represented as some rough fellow sprung from the core of the populace it is history of the very worst sort; not only baldly wrong in fact, but in tendency and motive.

The same lack of general comprehension appears in Mr. Wells’s quite honestly held idea of the Parliamentary army—particularly of the “new model.” He thinks of it as a sort of democratic force. It was, as a fact, a very highly paid professional body, especially its cavalry, which was its decisive arm. Of course, there were many people of no origin in it, and a few, not many, people of low birth even held commands in it as officers. But it had a very large proportion of the wealthy classes in such positions. Nor is it true to say that this highly paid cavalry, well disciplined though it was, and containing excellent personnel, “swept the cavaliers before them from Marston Moor to Naseby.” That is typical of the quite wrong old-fashioned textbook history from which such judgments are still drawn. Cavalry was the great strength of Charles; and if there had only been cavalry on either side, Charles would have won. It was the cavaliers who generally swept the mounted part of the “new model” before them, and particularly at Naseby, but the counter-charge was fatal to the increasingly weak infantry of the King.

Naseby was won by Oliver Cromwell, leading his cavalry in person against shaken infantry. The Parliamentary horse was badly mauled by Rupert’s horse on the left, but Cromwell on the right, checking the usual sweep of the counter-charge, gave up the following-up of the horse, wheeled to the left, and destroyed the badly trained, ill-disciplined and numerically weak Welsh footmen of the centre. The cavalry part of the few years’ fighting, when against cavalry, was in Charles’s favour, but Charles’s infantry got weaker and weaker; and the reason that Charles grew weaker and weaker in quality and numbers of infantry was lack of money. His cavalry was composed largely of noble-hearted and devoted volunteers, a good part of whom, popularly said to be half, were Catholic; but his infantry he had to hire as best he could.

I only pick out these points (small in themselves) because they are typical. They show the way in which the old conventional schoolboy history of a lifetime ago is the only one our author possesses; and that explains also his quite erroneous view of what the Reformation was in England. He perpetuates what was once the official legend; naturally, no doubt, for he has never heard the modern destructive criticism levelled against it.

We have exactly the same thing in what he says of James II, that he “set himself to force the country into a reunion with Rome.” That, again, is the regular conventional stuff of his boyhood and mine, but it is utterly unhistorical. James II set himself the task of procuring toleration for that still very large proportion of the English people who were Catholic, and incidentally for other dissenting bodies as well. He insisted that the remaining minority of Catholics, who still heroically practised their Religion after a century and half of persecution unparalleled in any other country should be allowed ordinary civic advantages. They were at least one-eighth of the population (and had the sympathy of at least another eighth, if not more), and James, himself a Catholic, proposed they should enjoy the benefits of the national universities, should be allowed to enter the public services, and should have as good chances as others in the legal profession. If freedom for Catholics was likely to result in a great many conversions, and thus largely to undo the work of the Reformation, the fault was not with the policy of toleration, but with the spiritual power of the Catholic Church. To say that James II was attempting to force upon his Protestant subjects an unnatural revolution in their religion, is about as historical as it would be to say that the modern French Government is attempting to force Communism upon France because it offers (unlike most other Governments) the fullest liberty to Communist printing and to the exposing of Communist 107ideas through the Press. Or it is like saying that the Canadian Government, because it tolerates the use of French and English indifferently, is trying to force French (or English) upon the whole community.

The whole policy of James was a policy of toleration and the whole of the opposition he had to meet was a fanatical (and interested) refusal of toleration.

Where Mr. Wells deals with the Continental movement, which has weakened or destroyed Monarchy and broken up the religious unity of various nations, we have again the same confused attitude which we find in his dealing with the English one, only it is rather more remarkable that he should be so wrong about the foreign business. For, after all, it is natural enough for a man attempting to write a broad outline of History to go wrong upon the modern English record, seeing that the modern English record was not only everywhere taught officially, conventionally and wrongly in Mr. Wells’s boyhood, but is still in the main so taught. On English matters from the Reformation onward all our official History is propaganda: The Stuarts always wrong, Magna Charta a whig document, Cromwell a noble-hearted hero (and poor), etc. etc. etc. Only a good deal of original reading among modern writers and hard thinking of one’s own as well, can set one right upon it. But the Continental record has been dealt with by the greatest scholars from all points of view and with the fullest freedom for two generations. There is no excuse for going wrong upon its main lines.

For instance, the tremendous struggle between the more civilized traditional part of Germany, led by the Emperor, and the less civilized northern part, led by the Protestant Princes, was decided adversely to the Catholic Church at the Peace of Westphalia. Mr. Wells prints a good little map of the results of that Peace. But what he certainly does not understand, and probably has never heard of is that those results were due to French policy. It was French deliberate support of the anti-Catholic side in the Empire towards the end of the struggle which prevented the evil of the Reformation in Germany from being undone, and which left the Catholic civilization and tradition of the German Empire in ruins.

He is also lacking in what should be part of the mental furniture of every educated man, and that is the history and quality of what is called religious toleration in the struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whether religious toleration be necessarily a good thing may be left to debate; whether Mr. Wells regards it as a good thing no man can tell, because he is all for it where a Catholic culture is tolerating anti-Catholicism in its midst, and yet quite indifferent to an anti-Catholic culture oppressing Catholicism in its midst. That is a very frequent phenomenon in men who feel strongly and think weakly. I have heard men propounding with violence the duty of the State to forbid tobacco, wine, large families, free marriage of the poor, socialistic literature, Sunday trading, and Heaven knows how many other things—and everyone of them would have told you that he loved toleration!

Here we have Mr. Wells’s pronouncement that the “more tolerating countries” became Protestant with happy little Catholic lumps inside them, while the “less tolerating countries—France, Italy and Spain,” produced societies in which men are either definitely Catholic or Atheist, or, at any rate, strongly anti-Catholic.

A man who writes sentences of that sort about the processes which have produced modern Europe, singling out France, Spain and Italy(!) as specially intolerant, does not know what he is talking about. The Protestant countries persecuted religion with a ferocity unknown elsewhere. You find that persecution rampant in the exclusion of Catholicism in the early laws of the Protestant culture in North America as in England. The whole story of the Cecils is a story of drastic and murderous persecution, the determination of the new Reformation millionaires under Elizabeth and James I to stamp out the last vestiges, and the first beginnings, of Catholic truth. Persecution 108of the most extreme kind, relentless and overwhelming, is the one striking characteristic of later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Does Mr. Wells imagine that he could find in any province under the Princes of France, Italy or Spain the wholesale confiscation that went on in Ireland: a whole people dispossessed of their land in the effort to crush out the Church? Did the Valois or Louis XIII string up and disembowel Protestant pastors for no other crime than the reciting of their service?

Again, Mr. Wells does not understand what it is that makes men in the Catholic culture either definitely Catholic or definitely and wholly sceptical. It is that men in the Catholic culture think; they use the human reason. If they have the Faith they argue that a Divine authority will be infallible; they therefore accept all its doctrine. If they have lost the Faith, if they think the Church to be of human institution, their reason bids them as a consequence combat an organization which makes such enormous pretensions to authority without (as they believe) any right to it.

The reason, for instance, that you do not have mawkish religious sentiment hanging about such minds as, in Catholic countries, have lost the Faith, is that those minds are founded upon Intelligence and despise muddle-headed emotionalism. They admit their loss of doctrine, and they are not afraid to face the consequence of whatever they conceive to be the truth.

But in nations not of Catholic culture it is the other way about. Men like Mr. Wells, who have ceased to believe that Our Blessed Lord was God, or even that He had Divine authority, cling desperately to the emotions which the old belief aroused—because they find those emotions pleasant. That is a piece of intellectual weakness for which corresponding men, atheists of the Catholic culture, very properly feel a hearty contempt.

When Mr. Wells goes on to the climax of the affair abroad, which is the French Revolution, his work becomes a mixture of good and bad. The précis side of it is good in so far as it proceeds from his own pen. It is, in my judgment, an error to print great wads of Carlyle, column after column. Mr. Wells’s own less picturesque way of writing is much better suited for an outline—but that is a small point. The sequence of events and their proportion is well kept, and there is a very good little sketch map of the Campaign of Valmy which shows that the author—or whoever else it was that drew the map—has got a good clear comprehension of that rather complicated and very important episode.

But in his attempts to judge the characters of the Revolution he goes all wrong, because he is dealing with a whole side of Europe which is unfamiliar to him. For instance, he does not know what the trouble was with Marie Antoinette. It was not that she was grossly extravagant; that is a mere legend. She was a lady; and certainly Mr. Wells would not give one to understand that; moreover, during all the later part of her life she had become a very sincerely religious woman, practising, frequenting the Sacraments. The tragedy of the queen lay in the intimate relations of her early married life. Now, everybody ought to know that who pretends to deal with the period at all. The details have been fully printed (by myself among others) and are available to popular writers.

In the same way he has got Robespierre all wrong. He has evidently read nothing modern on Robespierre, and he commits the old error of recording the last and worst of the Terror as being in particular Robespierre’s work.

The point is of no very great importance, but it is worth quoting because it is very characteristic. Ask one of Mr. Wells’s myriad-headed popular public, who Robespierre was, and they would answer a fanatical Republican who attempted to force his views upon France by guillotine, and was at last put down because people sickened of the increasing slaughter. Now when a popular author writes what his very large and uninstructed public already believe they know, he naturally goes down; if he wrote historical truth instead, his work would be less 109pleasant to them and far less saleable. Yet, after all, truth is the test of good history; not momentary selling value.

Now the truth about Robespierre is to-day fairly well known. Hamel’s great monograph, though far too favourable to his subject, is crammed with document and reference. It was not Robespierre, it was the Committee of Public Safety, and Carnot in particular, who created the Terror as an instrument of martial law. They created it in order to win the desperate battle in which they were engaged on every frontier and upon the sea, and the first sign of Robespierre’s downfall was his desertion of the Committee of Public Safety. Carnot in particular saw that Robespierre was interfering with the Committee’s rigour. The Committee had no idea that when they had got rid of Robespierre the false popular conception upon his character and position would release the very heavy strain which the Terror had created and make the continuation of it impossible: but though they did not see what was coming, it was they that deposed Robespierre, and they deposed him not because he represented the Terror, but, on the contrary, because he would have modified and restricted their power, of which the Terror was the instrument.

If Mr. Wells would be at the pains to read the actual indictments on which people were put to death in Paris, he would find that the great majority of them were humble people, and most of them, humble or prominent, were put to death for some form of weakening the military effort; for sending money abroad, for attempting desertion to the enemy, or helping him, or uttering “defeatist” sentiments, and so on.

On Mr. Wells’s very long and violent diatribe against Napoleon I shall not delay. It is merely silly. Mr. Wells seems to have a personal grudge against anyone in history who shows remarkable military talent, or, indeed, remarkable powers of any kind, and these in the case of Napoleon were combined with all the qualities which are to Mr. Wells like red rags to a bull. He was of the Catholic culture, he had an immense genius in nearly every department of human activity, he was a gentleman by birth, he was a soldier by profession. It is, therefore, natural that our author should be opposed to him strongly. But surely one can be strongly opposed to an historical character without making a fool of one’s self! I, for instance, am strongly opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s character, I have no indulgence for his particular kind of vices, cruelty and avarice and pride, while I have a natural indulgence for the sensual frailties to which Cromwell was not inclined. But what would any competent critic think of me as an historian if I denied Cromwell’s energy, belittled his capacity as a cavalry leader, or doubted the reality of his fanatical religion? If I made him out an insignificant fellow?