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Title: A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: October 7, 2024 [eBook #74534]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Ecclesiastical Supply Association

Credits: Richard Tonsing, Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS'S "OUTLINE OF HISTORY" ***





            A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS’S “OUTLINE OF HISTORY”


                                   BY
                             HILAIRE BELLOC

[Illustration: ECCLESIASTICAL SUPPLY ASSOCIATION E + S + A PUBLISHERS
AND IMPORTERS]

             328–330 STOCKTON ST.       SAN FRANCISCO. CAL.
                                  1927




                  Made and Printed in Great Britain at
      _The Mayflower Press, Plymouth_. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.




                                   TO

                           MY BROTHER-IN-LAW

                               JOHN HOGAN

                                   OF

                            NAPA, CALIFORNIA




                                CONTENTS


   CHAPTER                                                      PAGE
        I. INTRODUCTION                                            1
       II. MR. WELLS AND THE CREATION OF THE WORLD                 9
      III. MR. WELLS AND THE FALL OF MAN                          28
       IV. MR. WELLS AND GOD                                      34
        V. WHENCE CAME RELIGION TO MAN?                           40
       VI. WE COME TO REAL HISTORY                                47
      VII. MR. WELLS ON PRIESTHOOD                                51
     VIII. BUDDHISM AS A STICK WITH WHICH TO BEAT THE CHRISTIAN   59
       IX. MR. WELLS AND THE INCARNATION                          64
        X. THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH                              72
       XI. ISLAM                                                  77
      XII. THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES                                84
     XIII. THE MIDDLE AGES                                        89
      XIV. THE REFORMATION                                        93
       XV. THE FRUIT OF DISRUPTION                               103
      XVI. SUMMARY                                               110
           APPENDIX                                              115
           INDEX                                                 119




                       A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS’S
                          “OUTLINE OF HISTORY”




                               CHAPTER I
                              INTRODUCTION


My object in these pages is to follow, for Catholic readers, Mr. Wells’s
_Outline of History_; to point out the principal popular errors, most of
them now out of date, which its author has repeated, and to state the
opposing truths with their supporting evidence and reasoning.

If it be asked why I should devote such labour to a book which is but a
passing fashion, and that not in the classes or districts which count
most, I answer that, though ephemeral, the work has had a wide
circulation, and is therefore of some momentary effect worth checking,
while it is also representative of its type: writing of wide circulation
which repeats as facts for general acceptation theories once respectable
and now exploded. Now to check erroneous statement is always worth
while.

If it be asked why I envisage a Catholic audience in particular, I
answer that the issue in such matters lies between the Catholic Church
and its modern opponents. The hosts of modern writers in all countries,
of whom Mr. Wells is a local example, act more or less consciously in
reaction against the Catholic Church. It is her doctrines they are
concerned to attack; and soon, with the increasing effect of the Church
upon the one hand, the increasing abandonment (outside her boundaries)
of all transcendental belief on the other, there will be but two opposed
camps: the Faith and its enemies.

Already the denial of a Personal God, of Immortality, of the Redemption,
of the Fall, of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, is no longer
directed against some vague “Christianity”—a word with twenty meanings
or none—but against that defined and existing corporation which alone
defends in its entirety that body of dogma upon which our civilization
has been founded and with the loss of which it will perish.

Further, I have the legitimate motive of sustaining others. There are
Catholics into whose hands a work of this kind falls, and it is possible
that here and there a Catholic may be disturbed in his faith by popular
literature of this kind. For the sake of this very small number of
chance Catholics, who may suffer from a popular (though ephemeral) work
of this kind, I desire to examine the book and distinguish its merits
from its absurdities. One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more
important than a host of the average reading public of England and
America, drowsily accepting stuff they have heard all their lives, and
reading it because they have always believed it to be true.

A Catholic disturbed in his faith is like a man troubled with his sight.
A Catholic losing his faith is like a man going blind. One should take a
great deal of trouble to prevent a man from going blind.

I am aware that to aver such a motive reads presumptuous and a little
ridiculous. For faith is strongest in the humble. But the motive is
there, and at any rate the important thing is that Mr. Wells’s widely
read, though necessarily short-lived, survey of human affairs, with its
violently anti-Catholic motive, should not be of effect on any Catholic
mind so far as a Catholic critic can provide the antidote.

Every man, even the idlest, occupies his time with something or other.
The vast majority of men have their energies absorbed by their daily
tasks. So when a man comes forward with a mass of historical facts,
drawn from Encyclopædias (which not one man in a thousand has had the
leisure to look up in those books of reference), and tacks on to these
historical facts all manner of false conclusions (destructive of the
only truth worth having, destructive of the one grasp on reality which
is of any value to men), the reader may well be misled.

He may easily say to himself, “Since all these historical facts are
presumably true, the conclusions tacked on to them are also probably
true.” And in this way a false philosophy is insinuated.

Mr. Wells’s main motive—the honestly held conviction which drives him to
writing matter of this kind—is reaction against the Catholic Church. But
as this motive is not stated—(and, indeed, I fancy, not fully conscious
in the mind of the writer)—the reader may take his work to be neutral
matter. In doing so, false history, and, therefore, false philosophy
(for history is but the illustration of philosophy) may, without his
knowledge, pass into his mind. It is this which it is important to
prevent.

At the outset of my task it behoves me to set forth the great talents
with which Mr. Wells has been endowed by Almighty God, and especially
the talents suitable to the writer of general history. For, indeed, he
seemed from his earlier works admirably fitted for writing a general
outline of history, and would, by the consent of all, have been thought
apt for the task—had he not undertaken it.

First, he writes very clearly; he practises an excellent economy in the
use of words. This, for popular exposition, is essential; and he never
fails in it. He never lapses into verbosity. He is direct, simple,
clear.

Next, he possesses a sense of time. Now in history nothing is more
valuable. Within his lights, within the measure of his limited
instruction, he does see _time_ in right scale; and that is so rare in
any historian that one cannot welcome it too warmly.

Next, we should remark that Mr. Wells has (as his works of fiction amply
show) a strong power of making the image he has framed in his own mind
arise in the mind of his reader. This is, indeed, his chief talent.

It is a talent extremely rare: the very essential of good imaginative
writing, but of particular importance in historical writing. For
History, as the great Michelet finely put it, should be a resurrection
of the flesh. Were I engaged upon a critique of Mr. Wells’s more
permanent literary claims I would dilate on this: for such a gift is of
quite exceptional power in him. None of our contemporaries possesses it
in anything like the same degree. But I am not concerned here with his
style, and must reluctantly leave it.

Next, it is worth noting that Mr. Wells is exceedingly accurate in his
use of reference books and proof-readers. The dates are always right,
and the names and all the mechanical details of the book are similarly
exact. I have a particular right to praise such a quality because in my
own case (as in the case of the great Michelet, whom I have just quoted)
I despair of accuracy. My own writings on History are full of misprints:
“right” for “left” in descriptions of battles, “north” for “south,”
“east” for “west,” transposed letters and the rest of it. Mr. Wells’s
writing is quite remarkable for its freedom from such irritating verbal
blemishes.

But much more important than these advantages which he possesses for a
writing of an Outline of History is his sincerity. He feels the
importance of History to mankind, and especially, I think, to that part
of mankind which he knows best—the mankind of the English Home Counties
and London Suburbs. He feels instinctively that he and his must now
obtain a general view. It is due to Mr. Wells to say that hardly anyone
else in our restricted society feels this as strongly as he does. Our
newspapers, our politicians, and even our financiers, cosmopolitan
though they are, do not feel the need of trying to understand the past
of Europe and of the world. They are still soaked in what is left of the
old self-sufficiency. But Mr. Wells has woken up, and it is to his
credit.

I put his sincerity thus last in this category of his advantages for
writing History, because it is the chief. He is conspicuously and
naively sincere. This good quality is apparent in every line of the work
as it first appeared. It is equally apparent in the first part of the
new revised edition. He does really believe from the bottom of his heart
all that he read in the textbooks of his youth. He does really and from
the bottom of his heart believe that the little world he knows is the
whole world; and that his doctrines of goodwill, vague thinking, loose
loving, and the rest—all soaked in the local atmosphere of his life—may
be the salvation of mankind. It is not vanity or pride (though, of
course, it is ignorance); it is a perfectly honest conviction. He cannot
imagine how things could possibly be otherwise; and that, by the way, is
the root of his recently acquired hatred of the Catholic Church, which
has now become, directly and indirectly, the universally present savour
in his writing.

He is sincerely bewildered and exasperated at the power of Something so
different from the only world he knows. He hopes vaguely that the Church
may be dying: he suspects it is not—the doubt worries him. It moves him
to hatred; but that hatred is sincere. This sincerity of his, even where
it is misguided and untaught, is respectable. He does sincerely desire
to do good to his fellow-men within the narrow circle of his experience
and understanding.

If the reader will add up all these advantages for the writing of
History, he will find them amount, I think, to a very notable sum.

There are few men who could have produced a general history better than
Mr. Wells—had he not suffered from certain graver disadvantages to which
I shall presently allude. To be sincere is essential. To have the motive
of History is both singular and decisive. To have clarity, economy and a
sense of time is rare and of high value. To be accurate in detail of
dates, etc., is a most excellent minor virtue in any historian.

Mr. Wells has called me an inveterate antagonist. He is wrong. From the
first moment that the _Time Machine_ appeared, so many years ago, I have
consistently praised his talents in private conversation and in public
writing, and I shall praise them still.

Before I leave this point of his advantages in the writing of History,
let me deal very briefly with certain false accusations that have been
made against him.

The first and, I think, the stupidest, is that of brevity. I have heard
people say, “Here is a man pretending to write a history of the world in
a few months and in a few pages,” and they have laughed at him on that
ground. The accusation is unintelligent. You can give the outline of the
history of anything in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a pamphlet, or a
book, or an encyclopædia. If Napier, the great historian of the
Peninsular War—perhaps the greatest English writer of History—had been
asked to state in one sentence the outline of that struggle, he might
have replied, “The Spanish national feeling engaged with French
usurpation was supported by a small English regular army possessed of
the command of the sea. These two forces combined achieved, after
Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the driving out of the French from the
Peninsula.” If he had been given a page in which to write the thing he
could have added phrases upon the talent of Wellington as a defensive
General, the misconception of the French upon the Spanish national
feeling, the skill with which the lines of Torres Vedras were drawn,
etc. Had he been given fifty pages, he could have added more details
still—and so on, up to a shelf full of books. But the outline from such
a pen would have been good History had it covered ten lines or ten
thousand. It is thoughtless to say that a man has no right to give an
_outline_ of any movement, however great, in any space, however small.
The Catechism puts the whole vast business of man through time and
eternity into one short phrase, “That we were made to know, love, and
serve God, and to be happy with Him for ever.” You could add to that all
the rest of true philosophy in as much detail as you like, and still
expand; but the original brief outline of less than a score of words
remains true. Mr. Wells has a perfect right to produce an outline of
general History in one volume, or half a volume, or a page, and, so far
as the _manner_ of it goes, he has done it excellently: the drawing is
firm, the intention honest; it is the shape of the Outline that is
wrong.

Again, he is wrongly accused of superficiality. That is an accusation
made by people who see—what, indeed, is obvious—that the book has no
lasting value, and that therefore they can call it hard names with
impunity, secure against the judgment of posterity. The book is
ephemeral, certainly; but no honest critic can call it superficial. The
book is not superficial at all. On the contrary, it goes to the roots of
things, and considers what is really important to mankind. One may
indeed call the writer superficial in so far as he knows nothing of
beauty or tradition—that is due to his unavoidable limitations; but
superficial his effort is not. It is as searching in the matter of cause
and effect as its writer can make it. That is not saying very much, for
its writer has never had the opportunity for digging deep into cause and
effect; but the book does not suffer from that prime mark of
superficiality—_indifference_. Mr. Wells means to say all that is in
him, and if there is not very much in him, that is not his fault.

He has a neutral quality, neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in the
writing of History; or, perhaps, rather an advantage than a
disadvantage, and that is, an intense nationalism. An English scientist
is supreme. An English book changes the world. An English mode of
thought is self-evidently the best. The Catholic Church itself is
hateful mainly because it is foreign. Such nationalism is often the
unconscious accompaniment of limitation, but, upon the whole, it serves
the historical sense. After all, any worker must be himself. He cannot
create unless there is a flame within him. Such flames arise from
intense conviction, and the historian steeped in his own country does
better, in my judgment, despite his inevitable leanings, than one who
pretends attachment to nothing: for attachment to nothing is sterility.
The three great historians whom good judges most admire were all intense
lovers of their country—an Athenian, a Frenchman and a Scotsman.

Now for the disadvantages.

The first and most glaring of these is Provincialism.

But here I must warn my readers that they will not discover in this
criticism any of those personal descriptions or offensive allusions to
private life by which our vulgarians aim at extending their large
circulations. I am concerned only with this one book of Mr. Wells’s, and
with History and Religion in it; not with domestic details in the
Author’s life or the caricatures of them. The mental formation and
social motive of an author must indeed be alluded to in any judgment of
his work, as must his defects of instruction or judgment. The rest is
irrelevant. I have even, in revising the text, cut out anything which
might be _mistaken_ for a personal allusion, and leave it, I believe,
confined wholly to the criticism of historical statement, method and
motive.

                  *       *       *       *       *

I have said, then, that with so many qualifications for writing a
popular general History, Mr. Wells suffers from defects which ruin it;
and the first of these is that his book is Provincial.

The word “Provincial” is a hard one; but it exactly applies to Mr.
Wells’s History; therefore it must be used.

I find it the more difficult to use this necessary and precise word here
because I know Mr. Wells, from an acquaintance of many years, to be
abnormally sensitive to any printed judgment of his work.

Such extreme sensitiveness is not rare in men of vivid imagination,
especially if they cultivate its literary expression. But in this case
it is quite exceptionally developed; and I naturally hesitate to offend
it.

Greatly as I admire Mr. Wells’s scientific romances, and have always
admired them, I am compelled to use exact terms in this criticism. I
cannot do otherwise, because the truth of History is a sacred thing—the
most sacred next to the truths of Religion. If History is falsely
written, the reader not warned of it obtains a distorted view of human
action and comes to misunderstand all the most essential things of life,
including Religion itself; and Mr. Wells’s History is obviously and
fatally distorted through Provincialism.

Provincialism does not mean a limitation of experience to some one small
department of life—we are all of us subjected to such limitations, and
any man’s petty personal experience is always infinitely small compared
with the total possible field of knowledge. Nor does Provincialism mean
seeing things through the medium of one’s own habitat and character,
both necessarily limited. All men must see, and can only see, through
some such limited medium.

No, Provincialism means thinking that one “knows all about it”;
Provincialism means a satisfied ignorance: a simple faith in the
non-existence of what one has not experienced. Provincialism involves a
contempt for anything foreign and, what is worse, an actual denial of
things which the provincial person has not been made familiar with.

It is Provincialism in a yokel when he laughs at you for not knowing the
way to his local railway station. It is not Provincialism to say, “I
don’t know about this. It is new to me. I must examine it before I
accept it.” But it is Provincialism to say, as the Frenchman in the
story did of Joan of Arc, “It can’t be true. If it were I should have
heard of it.”

It is not Provincialism to say, “I far prefer the atmosphere and
institutions of my own country to those of any other.” But it is
Provincialism to think that the Cathedral of Seville must necessarily be
inferior to the Crystal Palace because it was built by Dagoes, and that
anyone who thinks otherwise is either a humbug or a fool. It would not
have been provincial in Mr. Wells to have written “the character of
Napoleon repels me; give me rather the honest Englishman of my
acquaintance than this hard and profound Southerner”; but it is
dreadfully provincial to belittle Napoleon’s immense capacities. It
would not be Provincialism in me, who do not know German, to say that
Heine in translation had not moved me, and that when the German of Heine
was read aloud to me it seemed to me harsh compared with the exquisite
music of Keats; but it would be gross Provincialism in me were I to lay
it down, ignorant as I am of German, that Heine was no poet, that his
reputation was exaggerated, and that, say, Schiller was his superior in
the management of the German tongue; yet that is how Mr. Wells treats
Napoleon.

Now this vice of Provincialism runs right through Mr. Wells’s _Outline
of History_ from beginning to end.

The moment he is on a thing that is not of his own religion and social
experience he rejects it or blunders on it. I shall have many occasions
for pointing this out in my criticism of the book, but I may mention
here, by way of example, one out of these many, to which I shall return.
This is Mr. Wells’s hopelessly provincial attitude towards the
fragmentary record of the Gospels. He can only think of the events
recorded as though they were taking place in the time and place he
himself has known—they took place, as a fact, in the first century and
in the Roman Empire. He imagines them taking place in a world where the
supernatural elements of the story could only have been introduced
gradually and after the death of the founder; whereas, in point of fact,
the atmosphere of that time was in every class of society especially apt
to the reception of the supernatural. There was scepticism among
them—but the scepticism of society in the first century was not like our
scepticism and—quite apart from the question whether such a state of
mind were wise or unwise—the men of the first century accepted the
Thaumaturge and expected the marvellous in connection with religion.

The next disadvantage which I find in Mr. Wells for the writing of an
outline of History is one which he has developed somewhat late in his
life, which is more and more warping his writing as a whole, and which
is quite fatal to any attempt at History. This is his entertaining
unreasoning reactions which one may now without exaggeration term rabid.

These reactions have a common root. They are all provoked by anything
_traditional_. It is _Tradition_, its usage and Nobility which irks our
author. Lineage offends him, and whatever is venerable and great.

He suffers these reactions against the Gentry—especially the Gentry of
his own country—against soldiers, great military characters in history,
against certain contemporaries of his, but, most of all, against the
Catholic Church. To be thus provoked to action by others—not to direct
one’s pen of one’s own initiative, but to have it jerked into action by
the strength of another—is weakening to all authors, but it is death to
the historian. For History, of all forms of writing, most demands a
general and balanced action of the mind, free from all control save that
of a calm, inward judgment.

Here I would have my reader note the exact words I use; for I use them
with discretion and after having fully weighed them. I do not mean that
the dislike of a particular type—such as that of the English
gentleman—or of certain individuals, or of a powerful institution, such
as is the Catholic Church—necessarily makes a man a bad historian. Every
vivid writer must have affections and distastes, and History that is not
vivid is not worth writing. But when the distaste becomes _unreasoning_
through violence, when it has that quality which we call “rabid”—a
quality of impulse and unrestraint, the quality which makes men yell or
pile on superlatives or descend to mere insult—then you have a quality
useful perhaps in pamphleteering, but fatal to the reputation of an
historian.

I do not mean that this quality is to be deplored in all writing or
speaking: far from it. It is of great value in rhetoric; it will often
move men in the direction desired; it is often justly applied to
something evil against which an honest indignation is felt. What I do
say is that in History it is out of place in proportion to its being
unreasoning: and unreason is the very essence of these instinctive
reactions. Cobbett’s _History of the Reformation_, for instance, is a
first-rate piece of literary work, but bad history, because in his
hatred of the Reformation he accepts anything against it—such as the
impossible story of Anne Boleyn being Henry VIII’s daughter—and loses
the faculty for weighing evidence.

To judge by his books, Mr. Wells came up against the English idea of a
Gentleman early in life. He probably thought it an illusion, and a
harmful one, from the first. Very many will here agree with him. But
later on he became obsessed by the thing. He came to hate everything
connected with what used to be called in England “the governing class.”
He grew to hate Latin and Greek because these are, or were, the basis of
a gentleman’s schooling; soldiering, because it was by tradition a
gentleman’s profession—he hates it all, even down to the spurs worn by
officers.

But Mr. Wells’s violent and blind reaction against the Catholic Church
is a much more important matter. Here he is quarrelling with the very
matter of History; for the foundation and career of the Catholic Church
is the chief event in the history of mankind.

To judge (again) by his books, Mr. Wells seems to have come up against
the Catholic Church late in life—he does not yet really know what it is.
But here, again, he found a power opposed to many ideas which he
cherished, and (more exasperating) to many things which he sympathized
with and practised. Perhaps he felt that in a world turned Catholic a
man like himself would have difficulty in carrying on, and therefore
came to hate the idea of a world turned Catholic as a fish would hate
the idea of a world without water. But this mere impulse—this mere
instinctive kick, lacking sufficient knowledge and lacking reasoning
power—this mere attack without any sufficient ammunition of
instruction—this mere impatience—makes it impossible for the man who
suffers thus to write History as it should be written.

For instance, his hatred of the Church makes him wish to believe that
its influence is dying. Instead of looking around him, and seeing that
Catholic influence over the more intelligent of modern men is markedly
increasing, he shuts his eyes and screams his passionate refusal to
accept so plain, if unpalatable, a fact. It has recently led him to
write that sufficient income and interesting occupation would make
Catholic priests pour out of the Church _en masse_: a judgment clearly
ridiculous.

Again, in dealing with the Galileo case, he will have it that the
advance of physical science broke down the Catholic scheme. The motive
of such a statement is clearly to suggest that the Faith is incompatible
with real knowledge and that all extension of ascertained truth tends to
destroy the Christian Religion.

But that is not rational history; it lacks even elementary instruction;
a schoolboy ought to know better than to write thus. The historical
process whereby so much of Europe was lost to European religion was not
_first_ an advance of physical science, _then_ a loosening of the
Catholic authority, and, _lastly_, a wide denial of that authority and
the establishment of various heresies. The historical process was just
the other way—_first_ came the violent explosion of spiritual revolt and
anarchy which nearly wrecked our civilization altogether; _then_, later,
a large but not complete recovery; then, _last_, and principally in
societies which had retained or recovered the Catholic culture, a new
and remarkable advance in physical science.

It is not historically possible that astronomical discovery in the
seventeenth century, the telescope, and the great new development of
mathematics, could lead to the denial of Catholic doctrine in the
sixteenth. Not only is it impossible in History; it could not possibly
be true in psychology. No one with an elementary knowledge of Catholic
spirit and doctrine could conceive that doctrine and spirit to be
affected by any discovery in the plane of physical science. You might as
well say that a man’s judgment on his duties to his country would be
affected by a new ordnance survey, or his admiration of Bach by the
discovery of zinc photography for printing music.

With all this I will deal later in more detail when I come to those
parts of Mr. Wells’s work which specially show his general animus
against the Faith. Meanwhile, let me conclude with another disadvantage
which I find in him for the task he has undertaken. It is the inability
he has shown for consulting the right people.

It is a laudable thing in any popular novelist who has acquired a large
public and can attract its attention to set out with the sincere
intention of instructing his fellow-beings, even in a department wherein
he has had hitherto no practice.

Thus some such popular novelist might say to himself: “I think people
ought to know more about the laws of health. I will therefore use my
wide circulation and my large audience for the purpose of spreading
knowledge upon hygiene.” There is nothing blameworthy in this, nor need
the effort be insufficient. The popular novelist, being hitherto
ignorant of modern medicine, would have to go for instruction to men who
were already experienced in the matter: he would have to read certain
textbooks; he would have to “get up the subject,” and might, if he
selected his tutors and guides with a good _flair_ for the right
sources, produce a really useful elementary treatise upon a matter of
which he had, till lately, known nothing. His name being well known to
the multitude, his little effort would probably have a wide sale, and
that wide sale would do nothing but good. But it is essential that he
should make himself acquainted with the difference between what was
certain and what was hypothetical; with the most recent debates upon
disputed points; with at least the main arguments on either side, etc.,
and it would further be essential that he should hear the latest results
of research. For though a theory is not better than another merely for
being later than that other, yet as there is new _fact_ continually
being discovered, and new arguments concluded, their bearing upon theory
must be appreciated.

Now, Mr. Wells has been very remiss indeed in this duty of consulting
the right authorities, before sitting down to write even so elementary a
history as this “Outline” of his. He had, at the outset, not more
faculty for writing an elementary history than any other best-seller
might have for writing a book on elementary mathematics; indeed, a good
deal less, for our schools give a certain amount of elementary training
in mathematics, but as yet no training to speak of in history. But it
was manifestly apparent from the first issue of his book that Mr. Wells
was rarely given the latest historical theories, let alone the latest
historical discoveries.

What is more extraordinary in a man so interested in such things, he
does not know the modern trend of controversy in Pre-history and
Anthropology. He remains away back in what I may call “the early
Golden-Bough-Period”—that of Grant Allen’s _Evolution of the Idea of
God_ in Pre-history. From internal evidence it would seem, as I shall
point out in the text, that his studies in these matters stopped
short—or at any rate crystallized—in 1893, the date of Ball’s book on
Croll’s Theory of Glaciation and of the Weissmann articles in the
_Contemporary Review_.

And I am appalled to discover that he knows nothing of all the modern
work against Darwinism, in which system—that is, in Darwinian Natural
Selection—he retains the simple faith of the day—over thirty years
ago—when he was “doing” elementary science in a class.

It is the same with the recorded history of Europe. His informers
referred him to no books wherein he might learn what force that Catholic
Church was which made Europe. He did not compare—perhaps he never heard
of—the various sources ascribed to our main political institutions, and
the increasing evidence for their Latin origin.

Now these disadvantages taken together have ruined the book. Had they
not done so, I should have taken for Catholic readers a different line.
I should have said: “This History is full of knowledge; its statements
in Anthropology and Biology are cautious and well balanced, its
conclusions on historical cause and effect are correct; its knowledge of
fundamental historical processes, though slight, is sound: the outline
is just. Nevertheless, do not follow the author in his antagonism to the
Faith, in defence of which we have arguments both historical and
philosophical of such and such a kind.” As it is, my task is an easier
one. I can say to my readers: “Mr. Wells’s sketch of History is not
insincere in spirit; it is simply out of drawing from lack of common
instruction. He has not kept abreast of the modern scientific and
historical work. He has not followed the general thought of Europe and
America in matters of physical science. While, in history proper, he was
never taught to appreciate the part played by Latin and Greek culture,
and never even introduced to the history of the early Church.

“And this is the more remarkable as he assures us that he has a wide
knowledge of modern languages, in which he reads French like English,
and can handle German, Spanish, Italian and even Portuguese.

“With all this Mr. Wells suffers from the very grievous fault of being
ignorant that he is ignorant. He has the strange cocksureness of the man
who only knows the old conventional textbook of his schooldays and
thinks it universal knowledge.”

So much for the general consideration of the author, and of what he has
attempted, and failed, to do. I next turn to the particular
consideration of points in his writing which will illustrate the truth
of the contentions I have advanced in this Introduction.




                               CHAPTER II
                MR. WELLS AND THE CREATION OF THE WORLD


Mr. Wells sets out to recite not only History properly so-called, the
known and conscious records of the human race, but also Pre-history,
i.e. our knowledge, little as it is, of life on this earth prior to the
advent of man or his predecessors, and of man himself prior to any
surviving record.

In the department of Pre-history the first task which meets the writer
is that of telling the order in which, according to the geological
record, the rocks composing the earth’s surface were presumably laid
down, and the order in which the vestiges of life appear in these rocks.

This task Mr. Wells has successfully performed. Anyone can put down the
main known facts in their order, for it is a mere matter of reference to
encyclopædias; but Mr. Wells has done so with concision, lucidity and
accuracy: qualities which are apparent here as throughout the work. He
is even careful to modify phrases which might be too absolute. For
instance, he tells us that astronomers “give us reason to believe the
slowing down of the rotation of the earth,” instead of saying, as many
another would, “have proved....” He also acts with sense in giving very
wide limits to the guesswork of modern physicists upon the scale of time
by which we should judge the geological process, though he does not warn
his readers, as he should do, that it is only guesswork, and that the
deductions upon which it depends are taken from first principles, which
are many of them incapable of verification and others mere hypotheses.

It is, perhaps, asking too much of our author to adopt a strictly
scientific attitude: that is, to distinguish between hypothesis and
proved fact. And this is particularly true of a study so full of
hypothesis as geology. Men pretend to vastly more knowledge than they
have in that branch of knowledge—as, for instance, on the rate of
stratification. A man cannot but be influenced by his own time, and Mr.
Wells is influenced by the unscientific loose thinking and
insufficiently supported affirmations of his generation and place.

The chief mark of our time is a decline in the logical faculty, and with
that decline goes an increasing inability to distinguish between what is
proved, what is probable and what is possible only. It is in fields
(such as Pre-history) where very little indeed is known, and where there
is immeasurable room for making things up out of one’s head, that the
distinction between fact and fancy is most easily lost. Only a minority
in Europe have appreciated as yet how small a proportion of what passes
for ascertained fact upon the remote past is really known, and how vast
a proportion is based upon mere analogy or such quite unproved
assumptions. Among our older men dogmatic affirmation of much that is
already disproved, and much that is increasingly doubtful, continues.
Such a profound remark as Ferrero’s “The men of the nineteenth century
thought they knew everything, we know that they knew nothing,” would
shock them to hear.

Allowing, then, for that natural tendency towards repeating in age what
one was dogmatically taught in youth, Mr. Wells’s précis of the
geological process is quite exceptionally good.

He also states clearly our present ignorance upon the origin of life;
our failure, so far, to find a link between organic and inorganic; and
even our inability to affirm—what is presumable upon analogy and was
taken for granted in antiquity and during the Middle Ages—that living
proceeds from dead matter.

All this done, however, Mr. Wells tackles the fundamental question of
Creation—and here, at once, the fundamental weakness of the book
appears: at its very outset on page 11.

The author becomes deeply concerned with a discussion peculiar to his
own local society, and of a sort so childish that a thinking man has
difficulty in taking it seriously: the discussion between the
old-fashioned Protestant who thinks of creation as a sort of conjuring
trick and the new-fashioned one who cannot believe in creation at all
because he has discovered (rather late in the day) that things grow.

The old-fashioned Bible Christian thought that the Hen appeared mature
in a twinkling, out of air, like the mango tree of the Indian jugglers.
His newly enlightened son has discovered that it comes from an egg. Mr.
Wells, upon this page 11, appears in the rôle of the newly enlightened,
and is most earnest to convince his erring and belated fellows that life
can have come into existence as a “natural” process: an idea which he
conceives as repugnant to “religious” minds. It is astonishing that
either of these two back-waters of culture should survive: the
back-water of the Bible Christian enlightened by elementary “science,”
which gets rid of a Creator, and the back-water of the not yet
enlightened Bible Christian, who can’t think of creation except as the
sudden appearance of familiar objects out of surrounding space. We may
wonder with amusement what Mr. Wells would make of such a Catholic
sentence as “God made this oak.” I suppose he would think it a confusion
of acorns with God. He should read St. Thomas.

However, though the philosophy is pitiable, the précis of familiar facts
in this summary of observed origins is very well done, and all these
statements, though they are no more than what you may find in any
popular textbook, are put much better than in most.

So much for Mr. Wells’s brief summary of the geological evidence as
given in all our encyclopædias and books of reference. It is most
readable, and accurately presents the ascending complexity of vegetable
and animal life in the past.

But the man writing upon this process has another and far harder task to
perform than the mere cataloguing of facts set down in textbooks. There
comes a moment when he must try to solve a certain problem: when he must
_think_. He must face a question which is as old as human enquiry, and
which searches the very depths of his own nature and of the world around
him. It is this:—

“Under the action of what Force did this difference between various
kinds of living things come to be? Under what Cause did the organism
differentiate and meet its environment, and develop into its myriad
forms each fulfilling a function? What _mind_ was at work, if any; and
if no _mind_, then what?”

_That_ question is the one capital enigma, the pre-eminent riddle of
life set to the enquiry of man. For centuries upon centuries he has
examined it and has found no reply, save in mystery.

A lifetime ago a group of men, intolerant of fundamental philosophical
enquiry and intolerant of mystery, thought they had found the answer in
a very simple and wholly mechanical method which explained Evolution in
a new way. They called this method “Natural Selection,” and thereby—as
they hoped—all necessity for design in the universe could be eliminated.

What that theory of Natural Selection was, I describe in a moment. It
must suffice here to say that it made Evolution subject to blind
chance—and that to-day it is quite dead.

It is characteristic of Mr. Wells’s work that now, in 1926, he still
gives in all simplicity that exploded answer, which was so fashionable
in the nineties. Mr. Bernard Shaw said the other day, with native
charity, that no one under seventy still believed in Natural Selection.
Page 16 of this new Part I of Mr. Wells’s book shows that Mr. Shaw
estimated too highly the intelligence and culture of his contemporaries.

To trot out Natural Selection at this time of day as the chief agent in
Evolution is almost like trotting out the old dead theory of immutable
and simple elements in a popular chemistry. That is what was taught as
chemistry when Mr. Wells was young, and Natural Selection was what was
taught as the cause of differentiation between living beings when Mr.
Wells was young. The one error is to-day nearly as obsolete as the
other. There is still continuing the remains of an obstinate defence,
urged by the strongest of human motives, religion: for there are still
those who agree with Weissmann that Natural Selection must be maintained
at all costs, and with no matter what fantastic affirmations, because
“It is the only alternative to Design” in the Universe—that is, to God.

But there can be no doubt which way the battle has turned.

When Driesch said, twenty long years ago, “Darwinism is dead,” he was
hardly premature.

To quote him now is to repeat a commonplace.

Let me not be misunderstood. I should not criticize Mr. Wells for
ignorance if he had written thus: “Many explanations have been given of
how Evolution has worked. The Ancients ascribed it to some inherent
power in living things which they called ‘entelechy,’ i.e. the power to
realize an end. The eighteenth century, led by Lamarck, tended at its
close as did the earlier nineteenth to something similar, but emphasized
the will and effort of the organism. In the mid-nineteenth century there
was proposed by Darwin and Wallace a new mechanical explanation which
got rid of design and of ‘an end’ to which organisms worked. Its authors
called it ‘Natural Selection.’ For a short time it was so completely the
fashion that it seemed impregnable. But Criticism soon began, and grew
menacing by the end of the century. With the opening of the twentieth
this Criticism had grown greater by far in volume and force, especially
in America and on the Continent. To-day it seems overwhelming. None the
less, I hold to those who with many modifications still maintain the old
theory.”

But Mr. Wells did not write thus, with an appreciation of the position
as it stands to-day. He set down Natural Selection in all its crudity as
an admitted final truth, a piece of unquestioned modern science, and
left his unfortunate readers under that impression.

To do that is morally inexcusable save on the plea of ignorance of all
that vast bulk of criticism with which the average educated man is
generally acquainted—at least as to its main results. And if he plead
such ignorance as his excuse, then he admits himself quite unfitted to
put forward even the simplest outline of Evolution to-day.

The point is one of first-class importance, for it illustrates at once
the fixity and the weakness of that anti-Catholic—and irrational—spirit
which will support any thesis however blown upon, so it be still of some
service against the Christian Faith.

Let me give as briefly as possible the story of this old-fashioned
theory of Natural Selection—which seemed so convenient for getting rid
of God—and of its breakdown. I will first note the motives under which
it arose during the mid-nineteenth century; next describe the theory
itself; after that, give the arguments by which it was more and more
shown to be untenable. Those arguments have long been familiar to all
educated Europe.

Organic Genetic Evolution, i.e. the theory that one kind of living being
arises from another kind, is as old as human observation and human
thought. Common experience suggests it to everyone, because we know of
no way in which living beings can appear upon earth save as the product
of other living beings.

When, therefore, men first took notice of, say, donkeys and horses, or
tigers and cats, they naturally said to themselves, “These things look
as though they had a common ancestor.” The next step is to suppose that
there would be a common ancestor to more widely different types. It is
even admissible, though not probable, that all life on this earth sprang
from one very simple origin. Our old Pagan forefathers—those of them who
were civilized—discussed all this centuries ago, and the Fathers of the
Christian Church spoke in the same terms.

Though criticism, and instruction in physical science as well, declined
in the Dark Ages, and though popular imagination had then, as ever, a
simple imagery, the idea was not so much contradicted or denied as
neglected.

In the Middle Ages it reappears, very vaguely, under the conception of
Mediate Creation. God is the Creator of every living thing. Yet every
living thing has a parent or parents. That is an example of Mediate
Creation; and it at once suggests the idea that groups as well as
individuals might originate in the same way. Indeed, St. Thomas, the
great teacher of the Middle Ages, by concluding exceptionally that the
creation of Man was _not_ mediate, but direct, implies the possibility
or probability of Mediate Creation for organisms other than Man.

With the growth of Modern Science in the eighteenth century full
discussion of the Idea was revived, and from a hundred and fifty years
ago Evolution was discussed throughout educated Europe. During the
nineteenth century a great mass of evidence was accumulated in its
favour, and to-day it is almost (but not quite) universally held by
specialists who have authority to speak upon such matters.

It is true that the process Organic Evolution may have taken becomes
more and more doubtful as modern research and debate advance.

Have the various species of Plants and Animals branched out from one
original living cell or from many? It is uncertain.

Have the new origins of life appeared in succession and separately at
long intervals of time? It is possible or probable.

Is transformism, that is, the change of one fully-developed mature and
complex type into another, true? For instance, could a Reptile have
changed into a Bird? Half a lifetime ago nearly everybody answered
“Yes.” To-day—especially since the great work of Vialleton—more and more
people are answering “No.”

These and any number of other doubts and criticisms—and some
disproofs—have arisen in our time, though Evolution in the widest sense
of the word—that is, the doctrine that living things are genetically
connected, is still the main doctrine taught and held in Biology.

But Evolution in general is not the point. It involves no fundamental
issue. It clashes with no theology or philosophy, unless we dignify by
those terms an attachment to pictures of ready-made beasts in the family
Bible. It is when men come to discuss _how_ the difference between
varying types arose that we enter at once upon a quarrel between
opposing philosophies, Christian and anti-Christian. No Catholic, nor
indeed any man possessed of a philosophy, would trouble himself much
over the confirmation or disproof of Evolution. Evolution simply means
continuous growth; a tree growing from a seedling is an example of
evolution; growth is the universal phenomenon apparent in ourselves and
all organic life around us, and to discover it generalized is no shock,
but rather an extension of the obvious.

But when we come to ask _how_ and _why_ the vast variety of living
things past and present grew and differentiated as they did: whether a
Spirit is at work or no: whether the process be intended or
motiveless—_then_ the essential quarrel is engaged between those for
whom the Universe is blind and those who see it to be the work of God.

That quarrel, which had long been acute in the general field of
philosophy, became acute in the particular field of Biology in the late
middle of the nineteenth century—over sixty years ago.

Darwin and Wallace and their school belonged to a generation—lived in a
place and a time—to which the mysterious action of Will upon the
Universe—and, indeed, any mystery—was incomprehensible. Mystery in any
form the typical nineteenth-century “Liberal”—as he was called
abroad—rejected; and it has been well said that his very politics were
founded on the idea that even human life was not mysterious.

We must remember that they had but just escaped—most of their
fellow-citizens were still plunged in—the base Puritan superstitions of
the seventeenth century. The Vision, the Shrine, the Miracle, the
Supernatural in Sacred Place and Thing, they had become too dull to
grasp. It was inevitable that such particular rejections of mystery
should lead at last to the more general rejection of Divine Action. At
the same time they were in reaction against the old Puritan Bibliolatry,
which, in their ignorance of Catholic truth, they thought of as
“orthodoxy.”

It occurred to them, after doing a great deal of work upon the evidence
for transformism—that is, for the change of one living type into
another—that the (to them) impossible idea of Design could be
eliminated; and it was under the more or less conscious action of a
prejudice against Design that they propounded this theory of Natural
Selection.

The process of their prejudice against Design moved as follows:

“We must never have recourse to Mind in order to explain the Universe;
that would be ‘unscientific’; for to be ‘scientific’ is to allow for
nothing but material causes. Therefore the appearance of separate kinds
of living beings must come from blind chance, or at least
_mechanically_. At all costs we must get rid of the idea of Design; of a
desired End conceived and maintained in a Creative Will. Here is a
theory which will make the whole process entirely mechanical and dead.”
Incidentally, it made it possible to get rid of the necessity for a
Creator. It was upon that aspect and use of the theory that the enemies
of religion immediately seized, and it is precisely because it is
supposed to get rid of God the Creator (and Judge) that some defence for
Natural Selection is still being kept up, especially (in part from
Patriotism) among Darwin’s fellow-citizens, but also abroad.

Darwin thought (and so did Wallace, who was a man of exactly the same
type, belonging to the same generation and surroundings) that since the
mysterious action of Will in the Universe was out of tune with his own
mood, the evident order and purpose of organic life must be explained in
another way, by the action of dead, unintelligent forces.

Whether God could create, did He choose, by the action of blind chance,
trained theologians may decide. But it is obvious that if a system of
blind chance were demonstrably true, those great modern intellects who
say in their hearts “There is No God” have a powerful weapon, in the
Theory of Natural Selection. They seized that weapon with gusto; and
they are still desperately clinging to the handle though the business
part of the instrument has long been battered shapeless by their
conquering opponents.

Here I must pause to make an important point. I have said that the
motives which made the first theorizers incline to an atheist solution
were not consciously atheist. Indeed, it was characteristic of their
generation that they could not define their own first principles.
Further, they lived at a time when Christian principles were still
powerful around them in the Protestant middle classes of England, and
probably they honestly desired to combine incompatibles.

I want to make this point quite clear, because it is one upon which
there has been a great deal of misunderstanding.

Neither Darwin nor Wallace, nor a host of other lesser known people who
were all theorizing in much the same way a lifetime ago, were
philosophic atheists after the type of the great Lucretius.[1] They were
not of that calibre. None of them could think out a consistent
philosophical theory, true or false. Most of them would have told you,
in a muddle-headed sort of way, that they reverently believed in a
Creator, while actively preaching the crudely mechanical and accidental
processes which alone they could grasp.

Footnote 1:

  It is more accurate to say of Lucretius that he did not deny the Gods:
  only their action on our affairs. But the great Epicurean philosophy
  of Antiquity was essentially Atheist, though in a form far nobler than
  the vulgar “No Goddism” of yesterday.

But though these men characteristically confused themselves about what
they did and did not ultimately believe (or rather feel) in
religion—i.e. what their ultimate philosophy really was—any modern
reader, especially any reader with the clear intelligence of the
Catholic, can see what was running through their emotional brains. The
idea of Design was intolerable to them. It was inextricably connected in
their minds with what _they_ thought the word “Creation” meant. They had
been taught in their childhood that “Creation” meant millions and
millions of quite separate, mature, complicated things appearing
suddenly, unconnected one with the other: magic full-grown oak trees
without acorns to grow from.

To get rid of this folly they took refuge in another, and produced that
theory of “Natural Selection” which seemed to them to account for the
different types of living beings without having to admit a conscious and
permanent Divine Intention. It seemed to them to solve, in a simple
fashion any child could understand, the awful and ancient riddle which
has perplexed Europe for certainly three thousand years, and perhaps
much more. To the question, “How did differentiation among living
organisms come to be”? they thought they had got the answer on what was
virtually an atheist basis—a getting rid of intelligence from the
Universe. They would not admit a Divine Plan of the oak tree and an
inherent power, tending towards that end, implanted in the acorn. They
called a profound view of this sort “mysticism,” using that word as a
term of abuse—and using it, of course, in a totally wrong meaning. No,
they would get their oak and elm out of some general parent tree without
an Idea being at work, without Fiat, without an underlying Spirit.

So they propounded the theory of Natural Selection.

The theory of Natural Selection was this:

No living thing can possibly be _exactly_ like its parent: for every
organism is individual. The difference may be very slight, but it is
always present.

Now, it is also obviously true, from experience, that the conditions
under which organic beings live—what is called their environment, i.e.
their surroundings—change unceasingly. That again is necessarily true if
the material Universe be, as it is, under the condition of Motion. These
surroundings are perpetually changing slightly; sometimes they change
suddenly and catastrophically, as, for instance, when there is a flood.

Now, some particular change—as, for instance, the climate getting
gradually colder or wetter or dryer—will suit some particular small
variation apparent in a certain proportion of any given set of organic
beings. For instance, out of a million sheep-like animals, ten thousand
must in different degrees have very slightly woollier coats than the
common run, and, if the climate is slowly getting colder, this minority
of woollier sheep are better suited to the change.

All organisms die; but those better suited to a particular surrounding
condition have a greater chance of survival than those less suited.
(This dreadfully self-evident truth was solemnly set down in an academic
formula: it was called “Survival of the Fittest,” or, more clumsily,
“Survival of the Fitter”!) Bit by bit, therefore, through the mechanical
process of the slightly less fit specimens dying off more rapidly, and
leaving presumably less progeny, while a small number of slightly more
fit lived longer and presumably left more progeny inheriting their
advantages, the type of animal could be, and was, by the blind action of
matter and with no necessity for its own or any other will, and with no
design in the process at all, adapted to the changing condition. Since
conditions are always changing, organic types (i.e. living things,
vegetable and animal) were perpetually conforming to their environment
by this process of “Survival of the Fittest,” wherein a _mechanical_
process _inevitably_ and _blindly_ picked out—_selected_—(whence the
term “Natural Selection”) those who were to survive and form a new type.
In this fashion all organic things came to be what they are at any
particular moment _and also to change perpetually into new things_.

This doctrine of Natural Selection was thus made to explain the
diversity and the unity of the living world.

Let us see how some simple organism, living on the tidal belt of the
sea-shore (between high and low water-mark), and able both to exist in
the air and under water will, according to the doctrine of Natural
Selection, differentiate out and produce a land animal. Out of a million
of these organisms there are, perhaps, ten thousand in which you can
discover some slight superiority, present in varying degrees among them,
for standing a long dry spell. There are another ten thousand who show
in varying degrees some tiny, almost imperceptible, superiority of
standing a long spell without air under water. Raising of the land or
the set of winds gives a season of abnormally low high tides. The
animals just on the upper edge of the tidal belt die out for lack of
their regular tidal supply of water, except some few who can, having the
slight differential advantage apparent among them, stand the strain of
living so long in the air. The progeny of these, again, will tend to
survive according to the degree in which they can stand the lack of
water about them. The less fit for air-life are gradually sifted out by
this natural process; the more fit for air-life survive.

There is the theory of “Natural Selection” in its broadest outline. It
was excellently adapted to the generation for which it was produced. It
looked as simple as the old theory of Free Trade did in economics, or
the old theory of Universal Suffrage in politics, or any other of the
old crude mechanical conceptions born of the denial of mystery. It
accounted for everything straightforwardly and at a blow. If you used
its loose phraseology repeatedly, without ever gripping the full
implication of the terms, without the capacity for holding a theory down
hard and examining it closely, it seemed perfectly sufficient—and the
old riddle was solved.

“Natural Selection,” “the Survival of the Fittest,” the very gradual and
quite blind, purposeless, undesigned forcing of the living organism into
correspondence with its material environment, the formation of the
living thing by the pressure of the nonliving—of death—was sufficiently
proved. All the old ideas of Design, the looking for mysterious forces
at work in the world, and for a Mind behind it all in order to explain
the suitability of each organ to its function, could be scrapped. There
was no creative God required. Those who wanted to be rid of Him could
(and did) say that men had only imagined such a Being from an ignorant
projection of themselves on to the Universe. It was not life that
transformed itself to meet and master matter, but (as Delage admirably
put it in his refutation of Darwinism) matter which, through death,
ordered life.

Such was the theory of Natural Selection.

Now, as we are about to examine why this theory of Natural Selection is
untenable, and to discover why it burst after so very short a
fashionable run, we must, by way of preliminary, clearly understand its
implications. We must understand—what its original promoters did not—the
things which, whether you know it or not, you are accepting when you
accept Natural Selection. After that we can understand the arguments
which have destroyed it.

Put as I have just put it, and as it used to be put in all the
old-fashioned textbooks of Mr. Wells’s youth, it sounds not only simple,
but convincing It is when one looks into what it implies that the old
Darwinian theory of Natural Selection gets shaky.


                 THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATURAL SELECTION

(1) In the first place, note that, according to this theory, _there can
be no stable type; there can be no fixity of species_. All is in flux.
Environment is never exactly the same, even for two days at a time, let
alone for two successive thousand years. Very long slow changes in
climate, or any other factor of environment, would necessarily involve
long, unceasing, slight transformation, never halting. The theory
_necessarily_ demands a living world in a state of slow but _incessant_
transformation, with no fixed mature results at the end of development.

It is only by the loosest sort of thinking, and by substituting
imagination for close reasoning, that the ideas of Natural Selection and
permanent stable types can be reconciled.

Thus some have said that the Seal was “sifted out” by Natural Selection,
got more and more suited to its habitat by “survival of the fittest,”
until it had no further need for adaptation: it was at last perfectly
adapted to the purposes of its life.

Well, one of the most pressing needs of the seal under the conditions of
its life is to scramble on to the icefloes in order to escape from its
most deadly enemy. It does so most clumsily and ineffectually by the
help of its flappers. For countless generations Natural Selection has
had time to work if it were capable of bettering that state of affairs
by producing flappers more serviceable. It has not done so. Why? Not
because the seal is “in equilibrium,” but because, however it may have
evolved, it is now a fixed type: mature: it is what is and can now no
longer change its fundamental structure.

It is true that Darwin and others talk vaguely of the process “reaching
equilibrium,” but that, according to his own theory, is a contradiction
in terms. Under Natural Selection there can be none such.

Darwin, Wallace, and the rest did not think clearly enough to see that
this was so, but so it is. If a hare runs fast because it has developed
its speed through an immense series of faster and faster hares who
“survived” because their speed made them “fitter” to escape enemies,
then the process demands that the speed shall continually increase. Your
hare of 1925 that can cover the measured mile in three and a half must
develop into your hare of A.D. 20,000 who can cover it in three: for
there is no doubt whatsoever that an increase of speed has survival
value. And he must be developing all the time. There is no escape from
that conclusion, if the theory of Natural Selection held water: which it
doesn’t.

That is the first necessary result of Natural Selection. If the theory
of Natural Selection is true there are not now, and cannot have been in
the past, _fixed types_ recognizable by marked and permanent characters.

(2) Next, observe that the theory of Natural Selection also demands a
_regular_ progression, and _a very slow one_. It involves, for instance,
the development of a land animal out of a water animal by an immense
accumulation of exceedingly slight differences in each generation,
favourable to a water animal’s longer and longer bouts of staying out of
water. These exceedingly slight differences in each generation are
presupposed to be only such as we always observe between parent and
child. Darwinian Natural Selection as a prime cause can admit no rapid,
startling changes.

For it presupposes a purely blind, unintentional, “sieve-like” action,
not merely as killing off the unfit—which is obvious—but as producing
gradually increasing fitness, with no inherent power in the organism for
adaptation. According to Darwinian Natural Selection, what works the
change is a vast number of successive tiny differences such as always
appear between parent and progeny.

To turn out, for instance, the white bear of the Arctic from the general
undifferentiated type of subfusc beardom you must have hardly
perceptible steps beginning with the slightly lighter hue of a few
bears, and proceeding gradually for æons and æons until only the pure
white survived (though however one could get at _pure_ white by such a
process it would have puzzled them to say!)

Natural Selection, then, imperatively demands for each species a slow
ascension, a regular, inclined plane, produced over a prodigious space
of time, in which the animal is getting whiter and whiter, or fleeter
and fleeter, or what not, by infinitesimal degrees.

The theory of Natural Selection necessitates the presence, in all
fossils, and even during any considerable historical period, of
increasing progressive slight differences in type.

It is no good saying that Natural Selection might apply to new highly
suitable variations coming at exactly the right moment to benefit the
animal. Such variations indicate Design of some sort and Will. If the
climate gets colder and very woolly types of an animal immediately begin
to appear, that is not Natural Selection; that is a startling but
obvious adaptation, due to some other cause, of organism to environment.
It is the very negation of a blind, causeless, undefined, unwilled
process which the theory of Natural Selection was intended to bolster
up.

(3) Again, Natural Selection implies advance by the killing off of the
organism not possessed of a specific advantage. How is it then that
organisms not possessed of the advantage survive—as they certainly
do—side by side with the advantaged and in the same environment? The
Elephant’s trunk grew longer because the short-trunkites were killed
off. What of the Tapir?

(4) Again, Natural Selection cannot allow itself to be ousted by any
rival aid to development.

This is a very important point. The whole point of Natural Selection as
the explanation of the difference between living beings is that it is
mechanical. The moment you have to prop it up by saying “Animals with
similar variations will tend to mate one with the other,” or “Striking
change in environment will tend to produce corresponding variations,”
you are abandoning Natural Selection, and covering up your retreat with
mere verbiage. Why “tend”?

The theory of Natural Selection is a jealous god and it will admit no
rival, nor even any support. You must make it your mainstay or give it
up: for the whole point of it is that it permits you, if you will, to
eliminate Will and Mind from the Universe. The moment you have to prop
it up with some theory involving Will and Mind the essence of it
disappears. Therefore does Weissmann, the most famous of its later
defenders, ascribe to it “All-might” (to make a barbaric translation of
his term) and desperately add that we “must” accept Natural Selection
because the only alternative is design—that is God; the Inadmissible:
the Dogmatically Denied.

Suppose a man to say, “No one threw that stone: it hit my window by the
force of gravity.” Another then points out that a stone, merely falling,
would have gone past the window, and that the stone, from the course it
took, striking the window, must have been thrown by someone to take the
glass at the angle it did. To this the man replies: “Well, yes, perhaps;
but gravity influenced its course.” Clearly he has abandoned his case.
He was arguing that the stone merely fell: that no Will or Design caused
it to take the path it did. When he admits a thrower of the stone and
merely brings in gravity as affecting the course of the stone he
abandons his position altogether.

That is exactly parallel to the old-fashioned advocate of Natural
Selection who reluctantly admits, on modern evidence—and mainly through
the work of De Vries—great and rapid changes adapting animals to a new
environment, but adds, “Anyhow, those that _don’t_ change will be killed
off.” Of course they will! But that isn’t the point. The point is that
the killing off of the unfit is proved _not_ to be the _agent_ of
change. The climate gets colder. Much thicker fleeces begin to appear.
Such animals as don’t show the new thick fleeces begin to die out.
Obviously!—But that doesn’t explain why the thicker fleeces began to
appear. If you admit Mutation (the name for rapid change) or Saltatory
Evolution (Evolution by jumps) poor old Natural Selection goes by the
board.

In the same way Natural Selection does not mean that, upon a change of
environment, things unsuitable to the new condition tend to disappear.
Of course they do.

If there is a flood, fishes survive, cattle are drowned. The fishes are
fitter to survive the flood than the cattle. And if the flood lasted
long enough, there would at the end of it be plenty of fish and no
cattle. But to talk of that as “Natural Selection” is to use the same
word in two different senses.

The theory of Natural Selection as the _agent_ of Evolution does not
mean that floods drown cattle and don’t drown fish. We all know that.
The theory means that successive floods turn cattle into fish—and that
is a very different proposition!

The theory of Natural Selection does not mean that things die out when
they cannot live; if it only meant that it would not be worth stating.
It means that the chance of survival, through exceedingly small and
inevitable slight differences between Parent and offspring, is the great
cause producing the marvels in adaption and beauty and special action in
a million forms which make up the life of this world. Its chief use has
been to back up the denial of God, and now it has broken down the
opponents of Design in the Universe must seek for a new reply.

They are still seeking it.

(5) Next note that the theory of Natural Selection implies a _continual
accumulation of fresh advantages_; although for this there is no sort of
necessity and, on a theory of blind chance, no possibility of such a
thing. It is a mere gratuitous assumption with no reason behind it and
all actual experiment against it. This is the point which Morgan
(Professor of Experimental Zoology at Columbia University) so powerfully
emphasizes in his critique of the Theory of Evolution which came out
just after the war.

To apply the theory to that simple case of the animal on the tidal
beach. Those with minute advantages over the average in the way of
standing slightly longer immersion have survival-value over those who
are only on or below the average. But why—by the mere blind selection of
death—should the advantage _accumulate_ from generation to generation?
Why should _new_ advantageous exceptions, each better than the last,
appear in unbroken succession generation after generation?

(6) Lastly, there is the exceedingly important, the essential, point
that, according to the theory of Natural Selection, _each slight
successive change in the whole series must give its possessor a
survival-value_. Not only must a fully formed flapper be an advantage
(to a whale) over a leg, by the time it has become aquatic, but a
half-formed flapper must be an advantage to the whale while it still
uses the land. Clearly it was nothing of the kind. If transformism be
true (which is not certain) then Design explains the leg into a flapper
in spite of the intermediate disadvantages. If there is Design behind
the transformation, if there is special protection for the heavily
handicapped intermediate form, one can understand the possibility of it.
Under Natural Selection it is impossible.

So much for the Implications of the Theory. I hope I have put them as
clearly as may be, and accurately; not a very hard task, for it was an
extremely crude and simple theory during its short life, and could be
grasped (and refuted) by anyone.

Let me summarize these Implications.

(1) First, _Change must be continual and types must be always in a state
of flux_. Stability of Type and Natural Selection form a contradiction
in terms. You can have one or the other—but you cannot have both.

(2) Second, _Natural Selection inevitably implies that, on searching the
records of Evolution, we shall find only gradual change_, proceeding
continually, so that the ascending organisms follow, as it were, regular
inclined planes showing no steps. The whole of Evolution should, under
Natural Selection, prove to be of this kind. Thus you would have, say,
tigers as they are now, gradually developing out of some tiger-like
ancestor in the past by a regular and uninterrupted process, never
achieving a fixed type but perpetually changing as time went on; and
that perpetual change would be still going on to-day. The world about us
would not show (as it does) a vast number of strongly separate types but
a confused jumble of forms all melting one into the other.

(3) _Third_, Natural Selection presupposes Evolution through the killing
off of individuals lacking certain advantages, _how then do other types
continue still to be with us in spite of lacking these advantages?_

(4) Fourth, _Natural Selection must stand or fall of itself_. If you try
to prop it up with Will or Design, inherent in the organism, or acting
in any other fashion, you destroy its whole thesis. If you say, for
instance, “the country becoming dryer, animals which _adapted
themselves_ to the new conditions survived, and those that could not
adapt themselves died out,” that is no example of Natural Selection _as
an agent of Evolution_. For when you say “_Animals which adapted
themselves_ to the new conditions,” you are presupposing some inherent
power in the animal to adapt itself: you are presupposing a form of Will
and Design, and thereby denying the purely mechanical action, the
unintelligent “sieve,” of Natural Selection as an agent.

(5) Fifth, _Natural Selection presupposes, quite gratuitously, that new
survival values will be perpetually and progressively appearing_. That
sheep woollier than the average of a flock have survival value as the
winters get colder is obvious: too obvious to need stating. But why
should the next generation, under mere chance, produce a number of new
still woollier variations, and the one after that yet another even
woollier set; and so on indefinitely?

(6) Sixth, _Natural Selection presupposes that in every stage of the
slow process of development by infinitesimal differences_, each
_successive difference is more advantageous than the last and has a
special survival value_.

A bird with fully formed wings has a survival value through being able
to fly away from land enemies. But if it evolved from a reptile by
Natural Selection, then each stage between the useful Reptilian fore-leg
and the useful wing must have had a special advantage over the stage
immediately preceding it. There must have been an advantage in the
fore-leg getting stumpy, then in its getting stumpier, then its getting
so stumpy that the beast couldn’t use it at all. And this must be true
of every change in all the millions of tiny evolutionary changes
proceeding through æons of time. All the way along, from the first signs
of something which _later on_ will be an advantage to the mature type,
through myriads of generations, from the first origins when the organ
was as yet rudimentary to the last when it was perfected, every step
must have had a survival value over the last. And this must apply not
only to broad cases, such as the reptile’s fore-leg turning into the
bird’s wing, but to every one of innumerable organs and to every part of
each organ. Otherwise the theory breaks down.

The implications then of Natural Selection as the blind agent of
development, “give one furiously to think.” Merely stated roughly as I
have done here, they shake the ordinary man’s confidence in it. But when
we come to ordered proofs against it, we shall find those proofs
conclusive.

To these I now turn.


                THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST NATURAL SELECTION

When one has to examine any proposition and see whether it be true or
no, two radically distinct forms of reasoning present themselves to the
mind.

(A) You may find the thing asserted to be in itself impossible, granted
certain self-evident principles of thought. For instance, a man who died
on the 16th of the month cannot have died of poison taken on the 20th of
the month. Or again, the sum of certain payments cannot be less than
some one of those payments. This method is called the _a priori_ method.

(B) The other approach made by reason to see whether a theory is true or
false is the experimental one, that of positive evidence. You test, by
the positive evidence at your disposal, whether the thing affirmed has
really taken place or not. Sometimes the first of these methods is
conclusive, in which case one has no reason to go any further.
Sometimes, and more usually, the second is conclusive, and there is no
opportunity or occasion to apply the first. For instance, if we are told
that John Jones forged the will of a man who was born after John Jones’s
death we know _a priori_ that the story is nonsense. But if John Jones
is said to have forged the will of a man who died while John Jones was
still alive, then we must go into the evidence of handwriting and all
the rest of it.

The reason that people rightly and necessarily supplement _a priori_
reason in practical affairs by the experimental method is that _a
priori_ conclusions depend for their value on the rigid certitude of
their premises. E.g. a man who died on the 16th cannot have died of
poison bought on the 20th. But are we sure that the 16th is really the
date of his death? To test that we require actual evidence.

One can conclude absolutely against a false theory by either of these
two methods of reasoning. But when they concur, when you find the theory
to be false both _a priori_ and from the available evidence as well,
then certitude could not be more certain: the combination of both
methods of proof is overwhelming.

Now we shall see that this is exactly what happens in the case of this
false theory of Evolution called Natural Selection. There are four
crushing _a priori_ arguments disposing of it, and, after that, there is
overwhelming positive evidence against it, of which the main divisions
are three in number.

The four conclusive _a priori_ arguments are these:—

(1) Variations in nearly every case must continue to accumulate.
Variations more and more advantageous must appear successively,
Generation after Generation. This is not logically essential in every
conceivable case, e.g. particoloured animals could grow whiter against
snow. But in the vast majority of cases such accumulation is essential:
e.g. to produce a taller type or to produce horns or to lengthen a tail.

Now the chances of such a regular series appearing by accident even in
one case, let alone in millions, clearly approximate to zero.

(2) The advantageous differences making for survival are not of one kind
in any particular case, but of an indefinitely large number (e.g.
climate getting colder needs not only warmer coat, but power to digest
new food, protective colouring so as not to show dark against snow, etc.
An indefinitely large number of qualities). Now the chance of _all_
being combined (and co-ordinated) in a single individual, _without
design, accidentally_—let alone of their thus appearing in many
individuals _accidentally and without design_—approximates to zero. On
the same line of reasoning the chances of co-ordination between all the
vastly numerous parts of one complex creature by accident approximate to
zero.

(3) The chances of _each_ very slight change being an advantageous one
over the last in a series indefinitely prolonged of myriads or millions
approximate to zero.

(4) Where more than one specially favoured progenitor is necessary to
the production of an organism (e.g. among mammals, two, a male and
female: with many plants three, a male and female and an insect
go-between) the chance combination of such favoured progenitors
_accidentally and without design_ diminishes with each generation in
geometrical ratio and rapidly approximates to zero.

The decisive character of these _a priori_ arithmetical arguments will
appear later.

Now for the arguments from evidence.

The arguments from evidence against Natural Selection come under three
main heads:—

(1) Within humanly recorded historical experience no trace of such
permanent progressive action is observable. There is no doubt of
individual differences; there is also plenty of proof of slight changes
swinging round the normal. There is manifest to every one
differentiation of type: Negroes and Mongols among men for instance. But
the main types are fixed. Negro and Mongol are both men. Man and other
mature types are, within historical record, fixed. They are not on their
way to becoming something else.

It is true that humanly recorded historical experience covers but a very
brief fraction of the total time allowed for even the shortest estimates
of the past of this world. None the less, it is sufficient to prove that
types once achieved are permanent. Call it five thousand years (perhaps
man-made prehistoric pictures may extend that limit), even that short
period is enough to prove the existence of stable types. For if during
five million years some animal form existing at the moment has been
forever slowly changing by a process such that its present apparent
fixity is an illusion, and is still proceeding to further slow changes
indefinitely, then five thousand years ought to show a perceptible
fraction of the movement; only a thousandth of it, no doubt, but one in
a thousand is measurable: tiny, but measurable. Yet no fundamental
change, still less any progressive change, is apparent. During all the
_historical_ epoch fixity of type is invariable.

(2) The geological record, so far from showing types perpetually in a
state of flux, presents us with Fixed Types and Nothing but Fixed Types.
A Fixed Type does not mean a Type which had no other Type for its
ancestors; nor one which never passed through immature stages before
reaching maturity. Nor does it mean a type without collaterals. It means
a type which, when mature, is repeated indefinitely.

(3) The geological record does not as a fact show gradually progressive
change by imperceptible degrees like an inclined plane, but on the
contrary, a series of leaps, like a number of steps.

There, in brief summary, is a table of the main arguments which have
undermined the old theory of Natural Selection.

I will now take them one by one:

(1) The first _a priori_ argument against Natural Selection, that it
presupposes quite arbitrarily that variations will accumulate, I have
already dealt with.

(2) _The second_ a priori _argument against Natural Selection_:

_Natural Selection involves accidental survival-value not in one single
feature but in many complex co-ordinated features all simultaneous and
yet accidental. This without Design is mathematically impossible._

Natural Selection is usually spoken of by those who still put it forward
for popular consumption in terms of _one_ advantageous difference: for
instance, slightly greater speed, slightly better protective colouring,
etc. This escape from the difficulty is duly repeated here by Mr. Wells.
He gives us, as an example of the way in which Natural Selection would
work, the climate becoming more snowy and, of a number of whity-brown
animals, the whiter tending to survive in each generation, and the
quality of whiteness tending, therefore, to increase. No better instance
could be found of the way in which this book merely follows (and
repeats) the mistakes of a generation ago. For that instance of the
whity-brown animal is the regular old tag which always cropped up
whenever this theory of Natural Selection was advanced.

It should surely have been evident, even to the originators of the idea
(as it is now at last evident to everybody worth counting), that what
you need in order to adapt (_a._) an animal to new circumstances, (_b._)
any developing function of a particular species, (_c._) the development
of many co-ordinated functions within one organism, is not one simple
advantage, but _an indefinitely large number of advantages, all of which
have to be co-ordinated if survival-value is to be obtained_.

When the climate gets colder, there will probably be more snow. But this
is not the only thing that will happen. There will also be a change in
the methods of progression over the surface of the earth. Paws
advantageous for speed when there was no frost or snow may be
disadvantageous when there is. There will also be a change in the things
present for an animal to eat; many of the grasses and fruits present in
the warmer time will presumably disappear and others better suited to
the new, cold climate will increase. Again, a change of this kind does
not take place in isolated fashion; it will be accompanied perhaps by
longer nights in winter; probably by more cloudy skies, and by sudden
floods in spring, and so on. Change of environment will nearly always
mean not one, but a very great number of concomitant changes.

Change, then, in environment is always complex. But the organism which
has to meet it is also complex, only because it _is_ an organism. Every
living organism is highly complex. It is its very complexity, that is,
the vast number of its parts and the mysterious co-ordination between
them, which makes it a living organism, and distinguishes it from dead
matter. Even the simplest organic cell is chemically of a highly complex
nature, and its principle of continuity is so different from a simple
mechanical process that no one has ever been able to lay down a formula
for it. In plain words, the very nature of a living organism escapes us
on account of its complexity.

Here, then, you have a complex organism, consisting of an indefinitely
large number of parts, all of which must be co-ordinated to the changed
environment; and you have also an environment which, when it changes,
changes not in one, but in a very large number of respects.

Now observe the inevitable, mathematical necessity of this relation. The
environment changes not in one respect, or fifty, or a hundred, or a
thousand, but in as many as you like to catalogue. The living animal
consists not in one function, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as
many more as you care to examine. To every change of climate, or what
not, there are an indefinitely large number of consequences. The
organism has to be adapted to meet _all_ the changes. But that living
thing also must, in order to have a special survival-value, discover,
somehow, a corresponding change in all its own innumerable functions.
When such and such a proportion of the organisms shows _one_ particular
slight advantage for meeting _one_ aspect of the change, such an
advantage helps this favoured proportion, _in that point only_, to
survive. But, in order to have special survival-value, the organism must
also show advantages in every other respect. The chance of _all_ these
advantages coinciding in any one organism and _accidentally_
corresponding to the very numerous changes in environment, is
mathematically indistinguishable from zero. The animals with whiter
coats than the average are not (if the matter be left to chance) the
same as those with paws slightly better suited for snow than the
average; nor are either of these the same as those with slight survival
advantage over the average in digesting changed food—and so on with any
number of conditions. Left to chance the combination could not arise.
Yet it does arise.

It is equally true that the adaptations of function to function within
each organism are vast in number and could never have arisen from blind
accident.

This is the unanswerable point brought out half a lifetime ago and
increasingly emphasized ever since.

Wolff put it admirably in his attack on Darwinism as early as 1898: “One
might possibly imagine the adaptation between one muscle cell and one
nerve-end, through Selection among innumerable chance-made variations,
but that such shall take place in a 1000 cases in one organism is
inconceivable.” And another great biologist has well said: “What is the
survival value of horns without the structure to support them and
muscles to use them?” Strange that Mr. Wells should never have heard of
all this!

Animals _are_ adapted, we know. They _do_ co-ordinate an indefinitely
large number of internal conditions to meet a whole complicated bundle
of external conditions. They also have a myriad adaptions within
themselves necessary to their existence as organisms quite apart from
external change. But this could not possibly happen from blind chance.
The mathematical chances are millions and millions to one against the
possibility of such a thing. Grant Design moulding all nature—that is,
God,—and this process is explicable. Grant even an inherent power
possessed by the living thing to attempt its own adaptation, and the
process is explicable. Leave it to the mechanical explanation of Natural
Selection, and it is impossible.

(3) _The third_ a priori _proof against Natural Selection_:

_Natural Selection presupposes that each new infinitesimal stage in
development out of millions in each type, is, by blind chance, an
advantage over the last. This is mathematically impossible._

This third _a priori_ proof that Natural Selection is a false theory
lies in the simple consideration that it demands _each stage_ in
millions of stages in millions of types to show a survival-value. The
chances against this being possible are many, many more millions than
the number of stages multiplied by the number of types. The chance of a
penny coming down heads a hundred times in succession is vastly less
than one in a hundred; and when it comes to myriads of times, the chance
is approximately zero. The chance of a hundred pennies chucked by a
hundred men in unison doing this is far less. In other words, it can’t
happen by chance.

Let me return to the case of the bird. A bird has wings with which it
can escape its enemies. If it began as a reptile without wings—when,
presumably, it had armour or some other aid to survival—what of the
interval? Natural Selection sets out to explain _how_ the evolutionary
process changes a reptile’s leg into a bird’s wing. It does so by making
the leg less and less of a leg for countless ages.

By the very nature of the theory _each stage_ in all these millions is
an advantage over the last towards survival! The thing has only to be
stated for its absurdity to appear. Compare the “get away” chances of a
lizard at one end of the process or a sparrow at the other with some
poor beast that had to try and skurry off on half-wings! or to fly with
half-legs! The change took place?—No doubt. Some of our greatest
Biologists say it didn’t and couldn’t. Most say it did. The hypothesis
has much in its favour. But the change could not possibly have taken
place by successive advantages any more than the turning of an egg into
a full-grown hen takes place by successive survivals, or of a chrysalis
into a moth.

Postulate a Design, say “Here was something in the making,” and the
process is explicable, especially if fairly rapid so as to bridge over
the dangerously weak stages of imperfection. Postulate Natural
Selection, and it is manifestly impossible. Now Natural Selection wants
that to happen not only with every kind of bird, but with every kind of
living creature.

(4) _The fourth_ a priori _argument against Natural Selection_:

When two or more progenital agents are required, _Natural Selection,
acting by blind chance alone, loses effect in geometrical proportion
with each generation._

This argument is rather more difficult to follow than the first two, but
it is worth understanding, because it is particularly strong, and
because it was among the first rude blows against the Darwinian theory.
Nägeli brought it out with crushing force as long ago as 1884—it is a
commonplace with everyone—except Mr. Wells, who imagines (a great
compliment!) that I made it up.

Where two or more progenitors are necessary, rare accidental advantages
rapidly disappear in a few generations _if the process be left to
chance_, as Natural Selection demands.

Suppose two progenitors required—as is the case with all animals—there
are, of course, many cases in which the total number of factors
necessary for the production of progeny is more than two and the
argument far stronger, e.g. the pollen of one flower, the pistil of
another flower, and the insect which acts as go-between. Take any
proportion you like of slightly favoured specimens. Suppose out of a
hundred individual males ten show in varying degrees the slight
differentiation which gives them a survival-value under changing
conditions of environment. It will not be anything like ten out of a
hundred, and we have already seen that a _single_ advantage is useless.
But we can afford to give this nonsense every advantage in argument, so
we will consider only _one_ clear advantage and allow one-tenth of the
males to have it. Now, suppose a similar number of females showing in
varying degrees this slight valuable differentiation. _Upon the
mechanical theory of Natural Selection_, the chances in favour of
progeny inheriting that differentiation in the next generation are not
one-tenth, but only one-tenth of one-tenth, i.e. one-hundredth. The
chances of favoured progeny in the third generation are not
one-hundredth, but one in ten thousand. In the fourth, the chances are
already only one in a hundred million—which we may call zero.

The reason is clear. Here are a hundred male land birds compelled by
change of environment to take to the water. Ten of them show an
infinitesimal rudimentary webbing between the toes of their feet, and
that is a first infinitesimal advantage in swimming. Ten hens are of the
same kind. _Left to mere chance_ there is no reason why a season’s
mating should allocate the web-footed male to the web-footed female.
Each one of the ten males has nine chances to one of paring with a
non-advantaged mate, and only one chance of mating with a hen similar to
himself and possessing, as he does, this infinitesimal advantageous
differentiation. On the average you would have only one couple in each
hundred handing on in full even that first tiny advantage to their
progeny with a corresponding tiny survival-value. In the case of
eighteen others it would be halved, and in the case of a hundred and
eighty-one, it would be absent. It is so with each generation. Each
little infinitesimal advantage can only be _fully_ handed on to a
fraction which is the square of the last, and in even _diminished_ form
to a fraction smaller in proportion to the flock in the third generation
than in the second. Long before you got anything like an even
rudimentary webbed foot the tiny advantage would have been absorbed. The
advantage, left to chance, sinks into the common stock.

There is no getting away from this conclusion by saying, “Oh! we’re not
talking of individuals, we’re talking of great masses.” The masses are
made up of individuals, and the mathematical argument is exactly the
same whether you are dealing with a hundred or ten million.

These four _a priori_ arguments against the theory of Natural Selection
as the agent of differentiation in species are as conclusive as
arithmetic can make them, and there is really no need for any
others—though many others have been urged—e.g. the mathematical chances
against one special advantageous variation appearing by pure accident at
exactly the time it was needed.

But, as I have said, apart from these _a priori_ and sufficient
arguments, there are conclusive arguments drawn from actual evidence,
and all this evidence is in favour of this _Fixed Type_. A fixed type
would be an impossibility under Natural Selection: it goes with a
Creator and with Design; and certainly it is true of the real world.

Natural Selection, if it had been the agent of Evolution, would have
prevented the formation of fixed types.

In the old materialist days when Natural Selection was triumphing, its
supporters used to say, as we have seen, that it acted “until
equilibrium was reached by the organism conforming to its environment.”
That was typical of their hiding the weakness of their case under vague
phrases which, closely analysed, proved self-contradictory.

_If Natural Selection be the Agent of Evolution stability can_ never _be
reached_. There is always some slight proportion of beings rather more
suited to survive than the mass of its fellows, and that fact should
cause a perpetual change rendering stability impossible.

A water-mammal has not “reached stability” when it can stay under water
ten minutes, or an hour, or two hours. According to Natural Selection,
it ought to progress unceasingly to longer and longer capacities of
submersion. A swallow has not “reached stability” by Natural Selection
when it flies sixty miles an hour; it ought to fly faster and faster
with the process of time. It may well have reached stability in the
sense that it is suited to its lot and makes no further effort. It may
well have reached stability in the sense that its end has been achieved,
its design completed. But if it got its fast flight only because a
slightly faster minority of swallows always outlive and outbreed their
slower rivals, by an assumed perpetual accumulation of little additions
of speed, why should the process stop at the bird’s present capacity? Of
course the series is a diminishing one. Each increment of speed is at a
higher cost than the last. But no fast-flying bird has nearly reached a
theoretical limit of speed—nor shows any tendency to reach it. Granted
Design then an End,—a Fixed Type—a Normal to which individuals are
planned and to which freak types tend to return—is explicable. Those who
cannot bear the idea of Design, that is of a Creator implanting inherent
powers, must try to invent some new theory which will allow of Fixed
Types without Design. But if Fixed Types exist they cannot be due to
Natural Selection, for Natural Selection and Fixed Types are
contradictory terms.

If Natural Selection be true, then what we call a pig is but a fleeting
vision; all the past he has been becoming a pig, and all the future he
will spend evolving out of pigdom, and pig is but a moment’s phase in
the eternal flux, while, all around us should be quarter-pigs,
half-pigs, near-pigs, all-but-pigs, slightly super-pigs, just
beginning—and so on. But there aren’t. There are just pigs. In other
words, the evidence is all in favour of Fixed Types and all against a
ceaseless process of change.

(1) We have the evidence of our senses that we are surrounded by Fixed
Types, and are Fixed Types ourselves. We have all about us species,
including man, which remain distinct species during all our experience
and as far back as historical record can carry us.

(2) If that were not sufficient we have Fixed Types, and nothing but
Fixed Types, in thousands and thousands (and continuing for what seem to
be immense stretches of time) in the geological record.

(3) That same geological record shows us, not a gradual turning of one
type into another, not a gradual ascent like an inclined plane—which
Natural Selection would demand—but a series of steps with _sharp_
divisions between.

These three arguments from experience are conclusive.

1. _The First Argument from Evidence against Natural Selection:_

_The Fixed Type is apparent in all recorded human experience._

This is the argument based on human experience during the period of
humanly recorded History, of which argument not nearly enough has been
made.

For certainly 5000 years of this record types are fixed. That is not to
say that maturity is not reached by growth, nor is it to say that a type
cannot disappear. But it _is_ an affirmation that the conceptions of
ceaseless flux, of the absence of form, of no maturity in
characteristics and nature, are baseless. As, indeed, the mere evidence
of our senses and of common sense acting on that evidence, must convince
anyone who prefers reality to print. Tell the plain man that there is no
such thing as a fox or a salmon or a human being, and he will laugh in
your face. And he will be quite right.

We are told that the 5000 years or so of recorded History (if we count
prehistoric relics the period is probably longer) are so brief that they
are a mere flash, and that we cannot observe in that tiny section of an
immensely long period the slight process of change over which Natural
Selection has been at work. We are under the illusion that types are
fixed because the few thousand years over which we can compare them are
as nothing compared with the whole period of development. Types only
_seem_ fixed to us in the same way as a revolving wheel _seems_ at rest
when discovered by a flash of lightning: the period of vision is too
brief for the motion to be appreciated.

But people who talk like that have not made the very simple calculation
of dividing the total period of a particular development by the few
thousand years over which our direct experience stretches.

Take, for instance, the theory of Natural Selection as applied to
ourselves. We know that over all these 5000 years the human body has not
progressively changed. There have been various sorts of men, of course,
and variations also round the normal. But the norm is set. Now even
those who have indulged in the wildest guesswork to allow for
development do not give true man more than 50,000 years.[2] Now,
one-tenth is a very sufficient fraction by which to measure any
movement. If so highly differentiated and co-ordinated an organism as
man has been subject to unceasing slow transformation during 50,000
years, and will go on changing slowly through the next 50,000, then
certainly in one-tenth of that period some considerable change should be
marked. None is so marked. Man, throughout those 5000 years, at least,
is a certainly Fixed Type, as his own records and portraiture show.

Footnote 2:

  Not to burden the text, I give in this footnote a few of the main
  guesses. Sollas 15,000 from the beginning of the Magdalenian.
  Waldmeyer 15,000 to 20,000 for true man. Boulay 10,000. Mainage (a
  very high authority) 15,000 from the Chellean. Holst, less than 7,000.

2. _The Second Argument from Evidence:_

_Geological record is entirely in favour of Fixed Types._

The geological record also shows us nothing but Fixed Types. Each _may_
have come by a transition more or less rapid out of some other—but at
any rate fixed they are, and the longer the time demanded by the modern
geologist for his periods, the longer the Fixed Type can be proved to
exist. Some few survive to-day from the very early days of life on this
earth. It was hoped, when the theory of Natural Selection was first
broached, that evidence would appear for continuous change. None has so
appeared. On the contrary, the more fossil evidence we acquire the more
definitely does it appear that the Fixed Type is the normal—indeed the
only—recorded thing. Of connected transitional changes (perhaps because
they were too rapid to affect the fragmentary record of the rocks)
_none_ has been discovered. There are plenty of intermediary forms:
there is not one connected series of changing forms passing one into the
other.

All this evidence is no argument against transition. But it is damning
evidence against the (a) very slow, (b) infinitesimally graduated, (c)
continuous and unceasing transition or flux which Darwinian Natural
Selection demands.

3. _The Third Argument from Evidence:_

_The geological record shows not a gradual unceasing development such as
Natural Selection demands, but sharp steps._

If Darwinian Natural Selection were the means by which simple ascended
to complex forms, this ascent would necessarily have been a regular,
very slow and uninterrupted process, continually at work.

The lines of ascent would have appeared in the geological record as so
many inclined planes. They appear, in point of fact, as so many
steps—each composed of very, very long flats separated, each from the
one below, by a clean gap or break.

This character in the geological record does not get weaker as we come
to know more and more of that record. On the contrary, it becomes
increasingly emphasized.

There is evidence suggesting development of one type from another, but
no evidence at all for the extremely gradual and continuous change of
one type into another. On the contrary, each step noted in the process
is a Fixed Type. What proportion the (presumably) rapid periods of
transition and change may have borne to the immensely long periods of
stable type, we cannot tell; but we do know that stable type is the
rule, and that the process of change from one type into another must,
compared with the long periods of fixity, have been the brief exception.

Yet, in the face of evidence so considerable and so widely known, the
talk of Natural Selection still survives in these popular manuals. As
Dwight (Professor of Anatomy at Harvard) very well put it fifteen years
ago, “Just at the time when the uneducated are prating about the triumph
of Darwinism it is fast losing caste among men of Science.”

But if it be asked why so patently false a theory was so tenaciously
defended for some years by serious authorities—is still defended by a
diminishing few—the answer is that the defenders of Natural Selection
were so preoccupied with a totally different discussion (to wit, the
defence of Evolution in general) that they confounded the two.

In England and North America, more than anywhere else, there were many
people a lifetime ago who, from some inherited superstition, did not
want to admit the idea of growth, though growth was going on all about
them. They did not want to admit that two kinds of tree might have come
from an original common type of tree; still less that one kind of animal
could come from another apparently different; although they had before
their eyes the oak tree coming out of an acorn, and the frog out of a
tadpole. They seemed to be unaware of the age-long controversy upon the
matter; they had never heard, apparently, of the modern founders of the
evolutionary hypothesis, especially Lamarck and Buffon: the former of
whom had a much more rational theory than Darwin’s, and put it forward
before Darwin was born. Still less had they heard of the theory of
Evolution among the Ancients and the Fathers of the Church.

Therefore, when patient observers of the middle of the nineteenth
century (of whom the best known was Darwin) accumulated a great quantity
of evidence in favour of Evolution, quite a number of their
contemporaries tried to stand out against that evidence. It became, in
England, a sort of national debate. The defenders of the ancient theory
of Evolution, finding themselves caught in a religious quarrel—of a most
irrational type, it is true—were at the same time carrying on a
conflict, quite novel and wholly their own, in favour of blind,
mechanical, Natural Selection as the _agent_ of Evolution. Their special
contribution, their only original idea, the only thing that properly can
be called “Darwinism,” was Natural Selection—“the explanation of
descent” (as Kohlbrugge, I read, has put it) “in terms of Materialism.”
But in order to defend their new instrument of Natural Selection, they
also had to support the old, old idea of Evolution. They confused the
two together. Many still confuse them.

To this day, in discussing the matter with a woolly headed man, or with
one who has not followed the matter closely, you will find him advancing
these strong arguments, which certainly support Evolution, as though
they also supported Natural Selection—with which last such arguments
have nothing whatever to do. You will find people saying (for instance)
that the exploded theory of Natural Selection must be true, because
living organisms (including the human body) appear to show vestiges of
ancient functions now atrophied. Such vestiges are properly advanced in
defence of the general Evolutionary theory; they have no bearing
whatever upon the essential point of _Agency_; and that alone is of real
theological and therefore of fundamental interest.

For this great debate has one supreme query underlying it, which is
this: whether we may see in the Universe a Creator and His Ends, or a
blind Nothingness.

Natural Selection has been the theory used to do without God: the theory
which crudely attempted to put the organic in terms of the mechanical
and chance in the place of Design. It was a bubble which burst when it
was touched by the finger of Reality.

I think I have said enough to show how strong are the considerations
against Natural Selection, and why it is being more and more abandoned
among Biologists as the Agent of Evolution.

But I am not writing this book as a treatise on such things. I am
writing a criticism of Mr. Wells. And I would ask my reader in
conclusion whether it is not remarkable to find Mr. Wells quietly taking
Natural Selection for granted as the Agent of Evolution? Taking it for
granted in 1926 as though we were still stuck fast at—say—1893?

Is it not remarkable to find a popular novelist swallowed whole when he
propounds in Natural Science a theory which has been riddled for a
generation? Is it not strange that he should take no account of such men
as (to quote at random) Bateson, Eimer, Morgan, Delage, Le Dantec,
Driesch, Dennert, Dwight, Nägeli, Sachs, Korchinsky, Wolff, Carazzi,
Vialleton, Diamare, and a hundred others?

I pretend to no sort of special knowledge in these affairs.

I have no more than that general liberal education which Mr. Wells so
greatly despises. Yet I have at least heard of these men and of their
work, and I know, roughly, where discussion now stands.

For Mr. Wells it stands as it did over thirty years ago, with no
knowledge of the revolution in thought in between!

I say that in a man professing to teach popular science, this degree of
ignorance is quite inexcusable.[3]

Footnote 3:

  Not to crowd these pages too much, I have relegated to a short
  appendix at the end of this volume authorities and criticisms which
  the readers may consult for examples of insufficient reading on the
  part of our Author.




                              CHAPTER III
                     MR. WELLS AND THE FALL OF MAN


As we approach the problem of Man it behoves us, before dealing with Mr.
Wells’s views on that animal, to examine a little further his competence
as a teacher of Science to the multitude.

I have pointed out that where Mr. Wells has to deal with ascertained
facts he is not only an accurate but an excellent précis writer, and
that his summary of such facts as are contained in our older books of
reference is clear, vivid, and in good proportion.

But the judgment of evidence is very badly done, the reasoning weak and
yielding to imagination; while the theories supported and the positive
errors repeated are most of them years and years behind the times.

I will give examples.

In the course of his account of Evolution Mr. Wells repeats (on page 37)
with complete confidence, as though it were scientific fact, the old and
now worthless theory called “Recapitulation.” It was a theory invented
by Haeckel (about 1870) purporting to be based on the work done by Von
Baer more than 40 years earlier—though, as a fact, Haeckel
characteristically suppressed one of Baer’s four points.

The Theory of Recapitulation was as follows:—The embryo—in particular of
man—bears witness to transformism by showing as it develops one phase
after another of its ancestral past: as the current phrase went when Mr.
Wells and I were young, it “climbs up its family tree.” It was imagined
that the embryo represents as it grows the various stages, from the
original aquatic life onwards to general tetrapodal forms, then to more
immediate ancestors from which the present form of the animal came.
Vialleton of Montpellier, probably the greatest contemporary authority
in Europe on Embryology, has disproved the theory and left it wrecked.
He has knocked the last nail into the coffin of that facile and
superficial short-cut (and blind alley). Here again I must make myself
quite clear, for Mr. Wells’s tendency to confusion of mind (a defect
attaching, perhaps, to his deservedly famous gift of imagination) may
easily make him accuse me of opinions I do not hold.

I do not make this allusion to the great work of Vialleton (which I have
had by me since it came out and which I study with increasing
admiration) as a criticism of Evolution in general. Who could? I allude
to it because Mr. Wells’s ignorance of its existence is inexcusable in a
man proposing to deal with such subjects even in the most summary and
popular fashion. That Mr. Wells does, as a fact, know nothing of
Vialleton’s mass of instance and argument, and its modern effect, is
clear from a protest he issued against me just before the publication of
this book. He there said that perhaps some French student had believed
the embryo to repeat its ancestry “conscientiously,” and that Vialleton
“may have thought it well to discuss this idea in one of his books”!

I might as well write that Darwin “may have thought it well” to discuss
(and attempt to destroy) Design. Why, the whole of this work is one long
and victorious attack upon the idea which Mr. Wells took for granted! It
is not a casual refutation of some nonsense about the embryo exactly
reproducing every minute stage of its ancestral past; it is a
fundamental, detailed, complete refutation of the idea which Mr. Wells
repeats.

Out of any number of citations which might be taken from Vialleton’s
hundreds of pages I then gave, and here give again, one: and it is
sufficient. “Ontogenesis” (that is the development of the Embryo)
“always begins with a general form and _not_” (my italics) “with a form
recalling another simpler form passed through in an earlier phase of
development.”

So much for that. It is but one out of many examples of our Author’s
being behind the times. Here is another.

In describing the glacial epochs, he trots out with the most naïf
confidence (on pp. 20–22) the hopelessly dead astronomical theory which
did duty in the textbooks of his youth and mine—for I also have believed
these things. Relying on a popular volume which, at the time, had great
effect, he puts down the main cause of glaciation to the combination of
varying eccentricity in the earth’s orbit with varying inclination of
the axis, of which he gives a large diagram. Under the effect of the two
movements (which Leverrier calculated more than a lifetime ago) the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres would alternately suffer from cold and
enjoy greater warmth. When the Northern Hemisphere was getting colder
and colder, the Southern would be getting warmer and warmer, and vice
versa.

This was called “Croll’s astronomical theory of glaciation,” and was
made popular by a book of Sir Robert Ball’s in 1893.

[1893, as I have said, seems, from internal evidence, to be about the
date when Mr. Wells’s stock of information crystallized.]

Now Croll’s astronomical theory broke down quite early under criticism.
It was dead before the end of the nineteenth century. The eleventh
edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is not exactly recent. Its
well-worn covers testify to its age in all our libraries, and I see that
a thirteenth edition is due. But even the eleventh edition of the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ could have informed Mr. Wells that Croll’s
theory had broken down. Would he like something quite recent? Professor
Coleman—Emeritus Professor of Geology at Toronto—has just issued a study
of glacial periods, and I find on page 274 the curt sentence, “Croll’s
theory at present receives little attention.” And why? Because fact,
that dreadful enemy to theorizing, has killed it. If it were true,
glaciation would have been alternate in north and south. As a fact, it
has been proved simultaneous—the South American clay deposits alone show
that.

This is not to say that astronomical factors have played no part in
glaciation. That they did not do so would be incredible. But it is to
say that Mr. Wells still takes for granted in this year of grace 1926,
and states as facts, theories which the average educated man knows to
have been exploded as long ago as the nineties of the last century.

Mr. Wells suffers, in this connection, from another fault besides that
of stating the old and exploded theories of his youth as facts. He also
affirms as fact what is doubtful. Thus he builds a whole series of
assertions (p. 154) on the—at first sight—apparently obvious, but, in
fact, much disputed idea that as the ice receded the sea-level rose. It
is clear that the melting of great quantities of ice would, other things
being equal, raise the sea-level. It is also presumable, on the
isostatic theory, that the earth rose when and where relieved of ice
pressure (the raised beaches seem proof of this). That—other things
being equal—would mean a _lowering_ of sea-level when the ice melted
(thus the highest-known raised beach of glacial times in America
indicates a _fall_ of the sea-level since the ice melted by nearly 700
feet). Which of the two factors predominated? Only observation of such
phenomena as raised beaches, fossils, submerged forests, etc., can
decide, and the matter is still debated. Boule in 1906 affirmed a high
sea under glacial conditions. The periods of high glaciation were,
according to him, the periods of high sea-level, and the interglacial
epochs the periods of low sea-level. Wright (in 1914) inclines to the
opposite. The Scandinavian observers noted in one locality a rise of
sea-level at the first receding of the ice, then a lowering of it. The
latest opinion is mainly in favour of a rise in sea-level since the last
Ice-age. Coleman, the last authority, tentatively suggests a rise.

But to affirm a rise as proved is bad science. In these and many other
points Mr. Wells is evidently a man confusing theory with fact.

However, the few things really known by him about Pre-history are very
well put. The narrative is straightforward and a fair summary. It is
also to Mr. Wells’s credit that, unlike his fellow disseminators of
popular “science,” he frequently uses in this section, as elsewhere,
those qualifying words which distinguish fact from probabilities or
doubtful possibilities. He has “may,” “probably,” and “it would seem,”
where many another of his sort would have written “did,” “was,”
“certainly.” But what might here have been of excellent effect in
ridding uninstructed people of their dogmatism is more than neutralized
by too much positiveness in diagrams and riotous make-believe in
pictures.

For instance, on pages 35 and 36, regarding a table of Geological
Epochs, he writes: “These divisions _probably_ mark off too precisely,”
etc. But the accompanying diagram gives a timetable like Bradshaw, with
exactly 50,000 years for the last glacial epoch, 550,000 for those
intriguing anomalies the Javanese skull and thigh-bone, and 100,000 for
the vastly debated Piltdown fragments.

He does not, by the way, remark that the original guess at the cranial
capacity of the Piltdown man was too small, certainly by 30 per cent,
and possibly by 50 per cent. He does not tell his readers the remarkably
high angle of the forehead, nor the really disturbing fact that there
appear to have been no strong orbital ridges. And why are his readers
not given all this? Because—like so many facts in Pre-history—they
interfere with the simple “progress” idea and would make the reader
understand how very little we do know about early man and his ancestry,
and what an intolerable amount of theory there is to a halfpennyworth of
fact. For the Piltdown man, on all the orthodox hypotheses, has got to
be enormously older than Neanderthal man—and yet has a much more modern
brain-box.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wells’s artist constructs out of these little pieces of
bone a human being wholly imaginary in all its functions.

This person appears on page 43 in a detailed picture as “Eoanthropos.”
He is having a good time hunting, and looking uncommonly like an
acquaintance of my own; but he is entirely made up out of the artist’s
head. Again, we have the coloured picture of a dance of American Red
Indians round a fire solemnly presented as a “reconstruction of
Palæolithic society.”

I know very well the excuse that is offered for such things. The public
for which such books are written can digest a definite timetable, and,
better still, a picture, more easily than carefully thought out pros and
cons; _something_ must be put simply before their eyes, and one can’t
put doubt pictorially. Nevertheless, the effect produced and intended to
be produced is utterly false and misleading. The Piltdown fragments
would fit into a soup plate. No one knows and no one ever will know
whether the ape-jaw belongs to the scraps of human, and rather high
human, skull; on the one hand you have the very high authority of Keith,
on the other the main weight of continental opinion. No one can
confidently tell the exact posture and shape the total skull may have
had. Of the creature as a whole, apart from these insufficient fragments
of skull and that almost impossible jaw, we know absolutely nothing. To
conceal all this and to present a finished picture of him as a fully
known being is like writing a full biography on the evidence of a torn
quarter of visiting-card.

But though this lack of scientific habit in Mr. Wells is woeful enough
and very misleading, a defect of infinitely greater importance is his
incapacity for dealing with the fundamental questions of our nature and
destiny which are alone of real moment.

He seems to be aware of some clash between the materialist assumptions
of his narrow world and another much more majestic philosophy, much more
comprehensive; but he does not know what that opposing philosophy is. It
is evident throughout all his work that he has not even consulted an
elementary treatise on Catholic philosophy. Sometimes he seems to think
that Catholicism is a jumble of irrational tenets like those of the old
Bible Christians, for whose descendants he is writing and whom alone he
really understands. There are other times when he brings in the name of
the Catholic Church in a fashion which betrays his hatred of it, but
clearly in ignorance of what the doctrines and nature of the Catholic
Church may be.

He is like a man who, hearing a piece of Mozart, complains angrily of
the noise it makes, but has never heard of the theory and emotion of
music.

He suffers, therefore, as do much the greater part of his readers, from
two forms of ignorance, very fatal to a proper handling of our chief
human problems.

First, he is ignorant of the fact that he and they are working not on
common sense accepted by all men, but on a highly particular
philosophical theory (called once the Epicurean, but to-day the
Materialist, Theory) which may be accepted or denied, but which can no
more be taken for granted as universally admitted than can the Catholic
Faith itself. He thinks he is only dealing with ascertained fact,
whereas he is really acting on a religion; and as that religion is
false, it compels him to force facts to fit it. This is the very mark of
the provincial mind. It mistakes its local superstition for the very
nature of things. It is from this inability to define their own first
principles, from this conception that they are dealing with ascertained
physical truth alone, that people of this kind are at once debarred from
understanding their superiors and from reasoning clearly upon their own
postulates.

Secondly, he is ignorant of the Catholic philosophy which he
instinctively opposes. He does not know what it is that he is combating,
nor what a crushing advantage of scope and examination it has over the
insufficient and parochial experience lying behind his own work. He
approaches the Catholic Church as a man who has only done a little
suburban gardening might approach a fifty-acre field—with a spade.

All this comes out most clearly at the very opening of his discussion of
human origins on pages 37 and 38. He there exposes in one paragraph all
that ignorance to which I allude. He says with rather ponderous sarcasm
that the Catholic Church is no more committed to a denial of the now
widely accepted view of man’s origin “than it is to a doctrine of a flat
earth, or of a stationary earth round which the sun revolves”; but adds
that though the Church is apparently not committed to any particular
view in such matters (he has grasped that much), yet “many believers
dissent from the scientific opinion _because they feel it is more seemly
to suppose that man has fallen rather than risen_” (my italics).

In that one sentence on Original Sin you have the whole of the writer’s
ignorance upon the matter (and upon the very terms used in its
discussion) exposed. It is as though some foreigner were to say of
English constitutional practice: “The English legal system is not
committed to the denial of historical evidence on the vices of James the
First, but many individual lawyers believe that the King can do no
wrong—because they think it more seemly.”

Why did he not look up the point in any book of reference? It is
astonishing to me that, with his active mind and interest in his
contemporaries, and his reliance upon books of reference, he has not
done so.

The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin has nothing to do with the stages
of man’s material culture. The fact that man now in Europe uses iron in
places where he once used stone for his implements, has no possible
connection with the doctrine of Original Sin. The traces of beings not
men but, as are apes, man-like, exceptionally discovered, and belonging
presumably to a remote past, can no more affect the Catholic doctrine of
Original Sin than Pasteur’s discovery of fermentation being due to a
micro-organism affects the truth that men can and do get drunk.

The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin is this. That man, our known human
nature as true men, was created by God to be supernatural, that is,
enjoying beatitude; but fell, through the rebellion of his will, into a
natural state. This, and this alone, says the Catholic Faith, explains
man’s dual destiny, his sense of exile, the lack of correspondence
between his ideal and his practice. It is not “many individuals” in the
Catholic Church who affirm this great and luminous doctrine because it
is “more seemly.” It is _all_ Catholics who affirm it, and they do so
because, whether pleasant or unpleasant, it is true.

We affirm the Fall: _First_ on the authority of the Catholic Church
itself, which we have discovered from experience to be the only teaching
body whose voice and nature correspond with reality; answering justly
the queries and fulfilling the needs and ends of man. _Secondly_,
because this truth, like all other truths which we receive from that
same Authority, we discover to be but one in a consistent scheme of many
co-ordinated doctrines, which scheme alone explains the world, and is
consonant with the nature of the individual and with the nature of
society: with the nature of man himself as he discovers it to be when he
examines the recesses of his own being and with the nature of man in
corporate action. Nor has the firm hold which the high Catholic
intelligence maintains upon this essential and reasonable dogma of the
Fall any conceivable link with the denial or the acceptation of some
piece of physical evidence. It does not depend upon the existence of the
Garden of Eden somewhere between Mosul and Baghdad, nor upon the date
4004 B.C.

The truth is that Mr. Wells, in some confused way, regards the Catholic
Church as a sect; an extreme right wing of the various Protestant sects,
with which he is fully acquainted, from which he himself derives, and
whose ethics and general attitude towards life are part of his being.
For he goes on to tell us “that no considerable Christian body _now_ (my
italics) insists upon the exact and literal acceptance of the Bible
narrative.” He does not know—so ignorant is he of history—that this
attitude towards the Bible came very late—in the seventeenth century—and
was during its brief career highly local. He does not know that this
conception of the Old Testament as an exact text book of history and
science, not a word of which must be taken as allegory or
generalization, was mainly confined to England and her colonies. The
Catholic Church never held it or could of its nature hold it.

I wonder what effect it would have upon him to read a few passages from,
say, Origen, on the allegorical interpretation of Genesis, or from St.
Augustine? He need not do more than that. He need not waste energy in a
long examination of the Christian past. It would be quite enough for him
to consult a couple of passages, or, indeed, for any competent historian
to inform him that the only body of people who ever dreamt of taking
Genesis as a literal and sufficient guide to all the details of history
and physical science were the members of a small and local Puritan sect
(now rapidly disappearing) of which he is himself a product and which
held this amazing view of the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew
scripture into archaic English. These people loom so large in Mr.
Wells’s personal experience as to obscure all else; but I can assure him
that they count for next to nothing in the general culture of Europe.

So much for the first of Mr. Wells’s ventures into Theology, where it
regards the relation of God to man. He and his like often profess to
regard such things as of no importance. They are the most important
things in the world. Indeed, they are the only important things; and the
proof of their importance is to be found in the fact that the
materialists can never leave them alone.

The materialists are always loudly protesting that they “do not meddle
with Theology,” that they “have nothing to do with Theology.” They deal
with nothing else. Their whole object is Theological—though they do not
know it. Mr. Wells himself protests that he is not concerned with
Theology in his _Outline_. It is his one preoccupation—though he may not
realize it. The only criticism that really moves him is theological
criticism. The only opponent he seriously challenges is a theological
opponent; and the moment he attempts to _reason_ upon his subject,
Theology at once and inevitably appears.

I have neither the space nor the inclination to deal with minor
blemishes in this part of the work.

I do not even insist on Mr. Wells’s failure to perceive (though he
honestly quotes the facts) the implications of those perpetually
recurring anomalies in our few shreds of evidence—e.g. more human teeth
with less human craniums and vice versa. For though he misses the lesson
of these unceasing breakdowns of each new “scientific” dogma upon the
origin of man’s body (which lesson is, that Hypothesis should never be
taught as Science), he shirks none of the things he knows, and, when he
_is_ abreast of modern knowledge, he states it clearly and well. For
instance, he is acquainted with the exploding of the last dogma but two
(still popular with most of his readers, I fear), the arboreal ancestry
of Man. He knows it has broken down, and he admits it quite freely. Such
a confession is greatly to his credit.

It is ascertained fact that many human and some very few doubtfully
human remains of various types have been found under conditions which
suggest high antiquity. It is ascertained fact that presumably older
fragments are those of animals resembling men, in some cases, perhaps,
even more closely than any known monkey of to-day—though the resemblance
of monkeys to men has been a commonplace throughout History. Nor is it
any surprise to learn, as we recently have done (though Mr. Wells makes
no allusion to them), that in sundry other tests less striking (the make
up of blood, for instance) the animals most like us in structure and
gesture have common qualities with us. It is only what was to have been
expected.

But none of these things—though of curious interest—is on the same plane
as the theological discussions upon which Mr. Wells embarks and makes
shipwreck. That is why I have concentrated here upon the nature and
doctrine of the Fall.

If you go wrong on that, your whole philosophy of politics and of
individual human life will be wrong in its practical applications, and
you prepare the ruin, certainly of society and perhaps of your own soul.




                               CHAPTER IV
                           MR. WELLS AND GOD


“_Utrum Deus Sit._” “Whether God be.” That is the title of the second
question in the Summa of St. Thomas (2nd article); and it is, out of all
comparison, the most important question which man can put to his own
mind.

There is another question on that same overwhelming subject, put
centuries ago in the tersest form: “_Is Religion from God or from Man_”?

Upon the right answer to these questions the whole meaning of the
Universe and of our own lives depends. If we get it wrong, all is wrong,
down to the least details. All is warped, diseased, increasingly
unsatisfactory, and running down to some chaos. All is sick and
ultimately doomed; not in our speculation, but in our action and being.
If we get it right all falls into order, down to the smallest actions of
daily life. The picture falls into perspective. We are one with reality;
we are sane men; and we may, if we choose, go forward towards our
end—which is an eternal happiness.

If God be and is our Creator, performs in us His works and makes of
Himself our end, then the great structure of doctrine reposes upon a
firm foundation. For there could not but be between That which made all
things and ourselves the link of the intelligent creature with his
Maker. There could not but be some intuition and some communion. Reason
being present in man, there could not but be a process of striving for
the fullness of being. Correspondingly, it becomes rational that the
Creator should reveal Himself. It becomes rational, though awfully
mysterious, that the Fatherhood should accept redemption. The
Incarnation falls into place; and from thence onwards everything—to the
last bead of the Rosary.

But if all this be an illusion, if (to summarize St. Thomas again, in
his famous Two Objections to the Being of God), “Nature be sufficient to
herself” (“_Ea quae sunt naturalia reducuntur in principium quod est
natura_”), then everything of the Creed fails, and so do all mortals.
Whence we come and whither we go, and how we so proceed, are left at
large and appear indifferent. Each man will adopt some petty object of
his own for living, or deny that living has any object at all. Men will
despair and satisfy the moment only. Lacking God, Unity and consecutive
effort are dissolved.

“_Utrum Deus Sit._” “Whether God Be.”

“_Is Religion from God or from Man_”?

Now these questions Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ proposes to answer
simply enough. To the first, “No”: God is Not. He is a figment of man’s
imagination. To the second, “From man”: Man invented the idea of God: it
is a phantasm of his brain.

I owe to a man for whose talents I have so great an admiration (though
none for his culture or instruction) to say here, that I am not judging
Mr. Wells’s private opinion upon the existence or non-existence of God.
Indeed, that is not very important. Further, he is so impressionable, so
carried away by his emotions, and so unaccustomed to close, consecutive
thinking, that his decisions vary, as it would seem, with the last thing
he happens to have read. In such and such a book he invented a new kind
of Trinity. In another place he protests against what he elegantly calls
the “stuffed Nicæan God.” In another he protests against the idea of
God’s omnipotence. In general, he is in a state of flux, very
characteristic of his time. He has thought nothing out.

But in this book (and it is with this book alone that I am concerned
here) he quite definitely answers the essential question in that way
which I have described. Religion is of man. God is a figment of our
human imagining. He sets down again for us in 1926, at too great length
(pp. 68 to 73), the old vacuous guesswork of the seventies and eighties
on how man came to imagine God, first as a projection of a man they
knew, then by extension into a greater and greater being. With
characteristic confusion of mind, he calls this process (p. 72)
“Discovering God.” But that’s exactly what it isn’t. It’s _inventing_
God—and one can’t have it both ways. I know Mr. Wells honestly wants to
have a sort of God, and, being a typical Modernist, he insists on
combining what his emotions crave with what his creed denies. To say
that primitive man “discovers God” when, as a fact, he is making Him up
out of his head, is a contradiction in terms. There are not two truths,
an historic and a moral. There is only one truth.

Of two processes, one must have been the actual process at work in man’s
mind from the moment when a true man existed and could think at all.
Either he first felt instinctively that there was an external power upon
which he was dependent, and later, perhaps, corrupted that instinct by
identifying such power with lesser things; or he had no such intuition,
but from having at first, though intelligent and a true man, no idea
whatever of the spiritual life and of such an invisible external power,
he came later to _imagine_ it, to suffer the _illusion_ of a god, by an
erroneous taking of confused mental habits within for reality without.

No one can say the two processes could mingle or exist side by side.
You do not mix a northward direction with a southward one. There is
contradiction. Either the process was in one direction or the reverse.
If the historical order was in the direction, “First a recognition of
God ... then the corruption of that idea by visible association ...
then idolatry, perversion, and all the rest of it” (as the very slight
evidences and analogies suggest, and as common sense suggests also),
that is one thing. If it was “A confused memory of being bullied by
the Old Man of the Tribe—then perversions such as human
sacrifice—idolatries—later vague imagining of some overshadowing
spirit,” that is the opposite. To postulate the _first_ process is to
say, in terms of Theology, that man had an original apprehension of
God, and later often overlaid it with false worship:—even to the
degree of losing the original idea. To postulate the _second_ is to
lay down the definite affirmation that God is but a fiction, man-made:
and therefore has no being: is _not_. And it is the second which Mr.
Wells repeats once more in this book, from the popular materialist
works of our boyhood.

Those who are of Mr. Wells’s generation, the men who date their birth
from the sixties and seventies of the last century, will remember the
many efforts then made to get rid of God.

What efforts were made to get rid of Him as Creator I have described in
my examination of the birth and death of that crude error known in its
time as “Natural Selection.” There was a moment when those who were
attacking the idea of creation tried to turn this error from a mere
fashion into a dogma. Created beings had no End for which they were
designed. This grossly mechanical system, Natural Selection, thus
invented, has failed. They must seek for another.

But meanwhile they went to the heart of the matter—or at least the
bolder of them did—and proposed to show not only that Creation and
Design were illusions of the human spirit, but that the idea of God
Himself was such an illusion. They made many efforts; they started a
dozen major theories, and scores of minor ones, to account for that
illusion. Mr. Wells in this book characteristically follows one of the
crudest—Grant Allen’s. But while all of them, old or new, differ, they
differ most amicably as fellow-opponents of true religion; for men do
not mind how much their theories disagree so long as they all have for
their root-motive a common antagonism to the Faith and right living.

Note that these people were not out to observe historical record or to
ascertain prehistoric fact upon the actions and the thought of man. That
would have been true science; and true science was not in their line.
They were out to bolster up a theory. Facts must be twisted to meet
theory, or, even more often, invented to support theory. A disciplined
subjection to ascertained truth was abhorrent to them.

Since all can see that God—and God Creative—explains the Universe, some
odd system must be constructed to get rid of that simplest and most
obvious explanation. Since man in his most primitive condition
apparently takes God for granted, and only in later perversions distorts
his vision of that primordial truth, some brief must be got together to
argue an exactly contrary process.

We have had the suggestion that man first thought of spirits because in
his dreams he saw dead friends again; then came to imagine a universal
governing spirit. We have had the suggestion that early man’s vivid
imagination, comparable to that of a child, saw personality in every
natural object that moved and apparently acted with intention—wind,
trees, clouds, rivers—put gods into these, and so, very late, came to
unite them in one Universal God. We have had a totally different
suggestion that man, perceiving the action of the sun upon the earth,
both beneficent and maleficent, got his illusion of God from that. This
piece of foolery ran riot in my youth, and was made to explain not only
the idea of God, but even great poems, until the very heroes of Homer
and Patriarchs of the Bible became “Sun-myths”—as the silly jargon went.

How it all dates, to be sure! As I read Mr. Wells on the Evolution of
the idea of God, I recall those successive cataracts of nonsense in this
country alone: Grant Allen’s, Max Müller’s, and the rest of them. I am
back in my youth. I am back in the days of the Bustle and the Bang, of
Knowles’s old _Nineteenth Century_, of _Sweetness and Light_, and many
another faded picture and phrase that turn me cold with the mere memory
of them, and yet give me a sort of homely feeling. I smell the gas of
the old gas-burners, and I hear the wheels of the hansom cab along the
London streets, and the clatter of horse hoofs in Pall Mall.

Mr. Wells brings out one only of these venerable contraptions. He goes
in for “The Old Man Theory.” It dates from about forty years ago.
Here—as in the case of “Natural Selection,” or of the Croll theory of
glaciation—he reposes upon his early manhood; he is not even immediately
pre-war, as he was in the case of Eoanthropos. He is as modern as the
days before the _Daily Mail_. How it dates! How it dates!

But, like Cyrano, we elder men must be just as we approach the tomb, and
I must do Mr. Wells the justice to admit that the “Old Man” theory is
something a good number of his contemporaries still swear by. He is not
so high and dry here as he is in the more antiquated passages of the
book.

The “Old Man” theory is, briefly, this:

When man was not yet fully man, but still of a bestial type, the brutes
went about in little groups, consisting of a father, several mothers,
and a lot of young. The father was a vile bullying beast, and the
subordinate members of the little group lived in terror of him. As the
younger males grew up he got jealous of them and chased them out. What
with one thing and another his horrid cruelty, his vicious temper, his
jealousy—the dread of him filled the mind of all his wretched
dependants. The mothers would tell their children hair-raising stories
about him. He became an obsession. When this “Old Man” grew to be a
little over forty, and lost some of his original vigour, he was knocked
on the head by a younger male, or if that did not happen to him,
something else got rid of him. He went off to die, or another rather
younger “Old Man” supplanted him. But his legend was firmly fixed, and
_that’s_ where we got the idea of God.

Personally, I think it a more unpleasant suggestion by far than the
still older ineptitudes of men making God up out of Dreams, or the Sun,
or even than that ubiquitous modern mania of Sex and the rest of it. In
my judgment, the “Old Man” rubbish is an awful example of what happened
to the nineteenth-century child who suffered a Calvinistic upbringing.
There must, I fear, have been many “Old Men” at the head of suburban
households forty to fifty years ago to give rise to this disgusting
vision.

But what I would like to point out is not so much the offensiveness of
the picture (and of the minds that entertain it) as its gratuitous
inanity.

It is one thing to confuse hypothesis with fact—and bad enough, God
knows—but it is a still more degraded thing for the human intelligence
to descend to mere unsupported affirmation.

Let us get this point quite clear—for it applies to the whole of Mr.
Wells’s work. Not only is hypothesis stated as fact, but things are
stated as fact which aren’t even hypothesis—which have _no_ evidence at
all in their favour.

If I see a man throw away an old pair of boots by the roadside, I can
register the fact that he threw them away. That is science; that is
ascertained fact.

If I see an old pair of boots by the roadside I can, if I like, attempt
to account for their presence by an hypothesis, that is, by a suggestion
which (if I am a reasonable man who can distinguish knowledge from
guessing) I do not _affirm_, but only put forward as a possible
explanation. I say, “These boots _may have been_ thrown away by the man
who stole a new pair of boots from my neighbour Brown.”

But what should we say of a man who, although no old boots had been
found, made up a circumstantial story of the thief, saying, “This is
where he threw away his old boots. His name was Archie Williams, he had
red hair, he was a teetotaller, a widower, and had been in gaol for
assaulting the police”?

Now this exactly corresponds to the process by which the Victorian
Materialist group got its idea of God deriving from the “Old Man.”

He is not even an hypothetical “Old Man,” for he corresponds to no known
human habit. All vertebrates have fathers, and all fathers grow old.
Some sorts are polygamous, others pair in couples. But of a vertebrate
ancestral to man, polygamous, and possessing these habits of bullying
his “group” of terrorized wives and young, there is no trace. There is
not a shred of evidence in bone or flint or prehistoric painting or
tradition. The whole thing was spun entirely out of the Victorian
writer’s head. It gave him pleasure in this, as in other points, to
think himself much nicer than his ancestors, because that flattered his
pride. He liked to suppose the idea of God a figment of man’s brain,
because that left him free from moral responsibility; but of _evidence_
there is not a fragment. This fairy (or ogre) tale corresponds to
nothing in the human spirit; it has no relation to the reverence, the
exaltation, the affection which we instinctively feel for that by which
we come to be: not only for God, but for our parents and our country. It
is not the way in which our minds work from childhood to maturity—at
least it is not the way in which the minds of normal children work. I
cannot answer for the workings of the mind in children brought up in
strange heresies.

I say of positive evidence there is nothing whatsoever. The whole thing
is as much like sober history as “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It is
invented from beginning to end.

Mr. Wells is less to blame for this absurdity than if he had made it up
himself out of his own head, and I hasten to spare him such ridicule. He
did no more than copy it out of other people’s old books. But he cannot
be spared the ridicule of having copied it. He had far better for his
reputation have left it alone. It looks silly enough to-day, and in a
few years’ time it will look far sillier.

But the reader here may say, “It is true that those whom our Author
copies had no evidence for the theory that primitive man suffered from
base illusions, out of which grew up the illusion of a general God. But
neither have we any evidence to show that early man had intuitions of
the One God.”

But is that so? Have we, indeed, no evidence leading towards, probably,
a true answer?

Now, in the nature of things, evidence of such a sort must be vague in
quality and very insufficient in amount. But it is converging evidence,
and it is striking.

In the first place, we also are men. We can examine our own minds and
find how they work upon the matter. The old-fashioned doctrinaires, the
“Natural Selection” men, who are now rapidly becoming museum specimens,
may tell us that such an examination is no guide because man is always
changing; so what we feel to-day is no guide to what our remote
forefathers felt. But they have been proved wrong. _Man is a fixed
type._ We have just as much right to infer Early Man from ourselves as
we have to infer the reindeer he hunted from the reindeer of to-day.

It is the neglect of this elementary truth that _Man is a fixed type_
which renders ridiculous all the monstrous recent mythology on man. And,
indeed, why is it that they only apply this mythology to man? They infer
the habits and reactions of all other existing animals in the remote
past from their present habits and reactions. Why is man alone treated
as an unique anomaly, perpetually changing not his implements but the
very nature of his mind, and changing vastly in a few centuries, while
his fellow creatures stand unchanged for countless generations? Because
their theories have for object a denial of man’s Divine connection, and
these theories break down unless facts are twisted to fit them.

Whether Man became a fixed type by this or by that process may be
debated, but that when he had once appeared as true Man he remained a
fixed type is certain.

Now when we consult our own Man-mind upon this problem of God and ask
ourselves (as we are perfectly capable of doing), “How should I have
felt about it had I not the traditions and teaching which I have had?”
the answer is not far to seek. We should wonder at the unity and
diversity of life of the world around us. We should suppose an origin
for such things. Probably we should think of it vaguely, but undoubtedly
we should think of it personally. We should conceive governance and a
Being behind it all.

Here is another line of approach.

Nothing is more common in anti-Christian argument than the appeal to
contemporary savages as examples of what Early Man was like. It is true
that this cardinal doctrine, the close similarity of the modern savage
with primitive man, having been turned against them, the materialists
have recently been warning us against too close a parallel, and have
begun repeating something we Christians talked of long ago (it ought to
be obvious enough) that the savage has been at it just as long as we
have, and that often he may have degraded rather than have risen. But
they can’t have it both ways. They can’t use the savage to make out the
origins of Man as abominable as possible, and then, when the savage
gives evidence on our side, say that they won’t accept it.

Now the evidence from the savage in this respect is very remarkable. Not
only is its general trend clear, but the more it is examined the
stronger it becomes.

It is twofold. First, the very simple (and therefore, presumably, the
very primitive) peoples are precisely those which have, as a rule (not
always) the primary conception of a Universal God. That is true of the
Pigmies, it is true of certain striking cases in Australasia; it seems
less certain of the Esquimaux.

Secondly, when you get successive layers of culture, _it is precisely
the later layers in which this idea fades away, and local immediate gods
begin to obscure it_. The whole process has every appearance of being
that of an original concept of a Universal God, later modified by
particular tangible relations with immediate things, or, in plain words,
Idolatry.

You get all the successive stages: The Supreme God still believed in,
but regarded as indifferent; the Supreme God half-forgotten; the Supreme
God wholly forgotten. They are like geological strata.

As an example of the way in which closer examination confirms this
succession, I may take the case of the Andaman islanders and those who
have observed them.

It was at first generally admitted, on the witness of an original
observer, that these primitives held the idea of one Universal God. Then
came a later observer who made his enquiries and decided that they had
no such idea at all. Then came the careful scientific critic of this
later observer (Andrew Lang), and showed, to the delight of all those
who enjoy the comic, that the _first_ witness spoke the language and
lived intimately with the natives for years, while the _second_ was a
passing traveller who could not speak a word of it.

To all this add a third form of evidence. Primitive man, unless he was
quite unlike contemporary savages, and unless his thought did not follow
the ordinary rules of thinking, could not possibly turn a local God or
deified chieftain or what not into the Universal God. That is a wholly
gratuitous assumption born of modern academic speculation. In the actual
practice of the mind the two things are quite apart.

When a statement is continually repeated and is also simple, it easily
comes to be an accepted commonplace. We ought always to test such
ambient ideas by close inspection, and this one of many gods coalescing
with one God won’t hold water. Our minds do not generalize local
attachments: they concentrate them.

They may extend the field of operation of such attachments, as when the
patriotism of the city is extended to a nation or empire. But they
remain fiercely exclusive. There is no “patriotism of the Universe.”

Local gods are essentially competitive, active in a defined sphere. They
are, by definition, many. Their very nature is to conflict one with
another. There is no mental process whereby they can coalesce into a
totally different kind of being. Far from it. They should, in the nature
of things, and they do in actual historical example, degrade yet
further, until they fall of their own insufficiency; but they don’t turn
into the one Universal God. There is no case of it in all History.

One body of Men—the ancient Jews—did indeed say that their God was the
only true God and the Universal God. But they were unique in this, _and_
they didn’t begin by imagining many Gods. The whole point of their
peculiarity was their affirmation of unity. That was what separated them
from all other religions around them. The worshippers of local gods
mocked this Jewish Jehovah (as on the Moabite Stone), but they never
called _their_ gods universal.

More than that we cannot say, and we do not know. The beginnings of the
race are hidden from us, so far as scientific examination is concerned,
save for certain analogies. There is no record of a contemporary sort,
there is no direct archæological evidence. But such analogy as there is,
and such examination of mental processes as is possible, leave the old
anti-Christian theories—sun-myth and sexual and animistic and
somniac—wrecked; and none more derelict than the unpleasant “Old Man.”

                  *       *       *       *       *

So much for that one, and much the most important, point.

If anyone would support the contention that man had not in him the idea
of God, nor came to fulfil it, but acquired it as an illusion from
circumstance, he must make up some better theory than this. It is even
stupider than those still older exploded attempts which Mr. Wells has
wisely left alone. After all, there is such a thing as the sun, and
there are such things as dreams: and children, and all people with vivid
imaginations, and in a healthy spiritual state, feel separate spiritual
forces behind the world which well might be erroneously deified. But the
“Old Man” is fictitious altogether. He is as unreal as Santa Claus; but
we lose him with less regret.




                               CHAPTER V
                      WHENCE CAME RELIGION TO MAN?


What has Mr. Wells to say on the origin of religion in matters less
than, but connected with, the Idea of God; for instance, Sacrifice,
Worship, the Future Life? I leave Priesthood to a later discussion, in
the place where Mr. Wells himself deals with it.

I take for my text a sentence drawn from his own work, page 67:

“_Fetichism is only incorrect science based on guesswork or false
analogy._”

That sentence is an accurate and exhaustive summary of what Mr. Wells
has to tell us on the origin of religion. It is exactly that. It is
“incorrect science based on guesswork or false analogy.”

I have said that the origin of all the errors which he copies from his
predecessors of half a lifetime ago is the neglect of the obvious fact
that _Man is a fixed type_. It is the point I so emphasized in my last
chapter, because it is capital to the whole discussion.

If you pretend, or try to believe, that Man alone, out of all creation,
is not a definable being, but in a ceaseless process of rapid change,
then, of course, you can invent at will any mythology to account for
anything you prefer to hope happened to him in the past. You can imagine
any monstrous lack of human faculty in the past so as to make your facts
fit in with your theory. But if you regard Man as Man, since the time
when first True Man (Mr. Wells’s own term) appeared upon earth; if you
regard palæolithic man as Man, a known animal, just as you regard the
palæolithic reindeer as a reindeer; if you consider a known thing called
“Man” and not a succession of imaginary beings made up as you go along,
then you have three certain guides to go upon, to wit: (1) your own
knowledge of your own self, (2) your knowledge of your fellow-beings,
(3) the record of Man’s actions and being since he has kept records.

Let us first see what are the accompaniments of religion in the human
mind, and how they tend to work in the fallen nature of man.

What is the _known_ way in which the human mind proceeds in its
religious activities?

Those activities are all connected together by being each of them
dependent on the original Idea of God.

If God be, then these religious practices—sacrifices, sacraments,
prayers, awe, the sanctity of special deeds, places, and things,
restrictions, rituals, _Fas et nefas_—are more or less consonant to that
Supreme Reality. However perverted, each religious action will, _if
there be indeed a Creator and Sustainer_, correspond to and resemble
what might have been an _un_perverted action of the same kind; and that
_un_perverted religious action would be an action in exact tune with
reality. The perverted Sacrament argues a true Sacrament; the perverted
Sacrifice a true form of Sacrifice, and in general the perverted Worship
a true Worship.

If God be not, then Sacrifice, Sacrament, Prayer, Inhibition, Ritual,
are even worse perversions than the original illusion of a God from
which they all derive.

These main religious functions I have just put down by their popular
names. Let me give them a more exact order. They are, first of all,
Veneration; next, the offerings of gratitude and propitiation, that is
Sacrifice; next, the Communion of the Human Spirit with God, that is
Prayer; next, a recognition of Being, spiritual and incorporeal, which
involves the possibility of man’s surviving death; next, Ritual—the
necessary human framework of any continuous human Veneration, Sacrifice,
Prayer, or affirmation of Immortality.

The Veneration natural to That which made us and by which we are, That
which overshadows all possible things (including ourselves), produces a
multitude of results: love quite as much as fear or wonder; a vast
curiosity and search; and, above all, the ineradicable desire to
_worship_—that is, to put up monuments (within the limits of our powers)
bearing testimony to our Veneration; to perform acts consonant with that
Veneration; to ask for aid, to admit wrongdoing, to expect justice in
social relations, to enforce it, and so forth.

That, I say, is the very first action of the human mind, as we know it,
where the conception of the Divine comes into its action: _worship_.

There is no race of men whatsoever, even where it has lost the
conception of the Universal God, or has let that conception become
obscure and indifferent, which does not still preserve the derivatives
from the original idea of God. Treat the simplest savage with gross
injustice, and you will soon see what he has to say to you: it will be
of exactly the same sort as what the most corrupt of Londoners or
Parisians would have to say to you. Propose that there is no ultimate
vengeance for injustice, and you will discover despair in those who
admit such a doctrine. You will find those who deny God—and those who
find the Universe unjust are deniers of God—to be in despair, and you
will find this despair showing just as clearly in the most corrupt
Parisian or Londoner as you would in the most candid savage. Yet with
this difference, that the savage is much less likely to accept such a
proposition than the worn-out dregs of a luxurious civilization are
likely to accept it.

Now on this chapter of Veneration—which must of necessity come first in
order, and which we know does in practice, to our own human minds, come
first in order—Mr. Wells has nothing to say.

He, or rather those from whom he got his mythology, have plenty to say
of a base fear at the origin of religion, but nothing of Veneration.

Men feel Veneration in varying degrees, just as they feel colour or
music in varying degrees; but it is not for those who feel it least to
teach those who feel it normally and fully. It is not for the man almost
colour-blind to instruct the average man on colour; it is not for a man
almost tone-deaf to instruct you and me on the insufficiency of music.
Mr. Wells does not apparently feel Veneration—even for great things near
at hand, let alone for his Maker—at all.

Next to Veneration as a religious function proceeding from the Idea of
God comes Sacrifice. If you will look at your own mind and see how the
idea of Sacrifice arises in it you will discover that there is in that
suggestion essentially the motive of offering a gift; _after_ that (not
before it) there may also be a motive of propitiation. There may also
come a motive, perhaps, sooner or later, of direct ritual connection
between cause and effect: the feeling that a Sacrifice made by you will
have a spiritual result. At any rate, the main motive is certainly
_offering_. It is so with Sacrifice made for the sake of human beings
whom we love or venerate. Still more is it so with Sacrifice to and for
the Supreme Power: “I owe you all things: so take back this, yours
though it is, in gratitude.”

Now, this is a noble and generous emotion; why in Mr. Wells’s account do
we only hear of its perversions and especially of its beastliest
perversions? The very primitive races among us enjoy that very feeling
of owing gratitude; we enjoy it in the full light of revelation. Many
men continue to sacrifice all day long. The better they are, the more
they do it. It is an essential factor in religion, subsidiary to and
derivative from the Idea of God.

Now let us proceed to the survival of man after death. It is not true
that all primitive men everywhere have been (or are) equally conscious
of survival after death and of the immortality of the human spirit. It
is still less true to-day that all men in our refined and fatigued
civilization are conscious of it. But it is true that some consciousness
of it is almost universal in unspoilt men, and that, wherever it exists,
it is accompanied by certain natural and almost necessary acts. We find
these acts, on examining our own emotions, to be often rather symbolic
than positively religious; but they are intricately bound up—whether
symbolic (such as putting flowers on a grave or objects into it) or
actively religious (such as prayers for and to the dead)—with the
conception of survival.

If you find that a particular set of men bury their dead with care,
deposit with them loved or valuable objects, or objects with which their
lives were associated, or even sink to the superstition of sacrificing
companions to accompany them into the other world, you may be certain
that these people believed in the survival of man.

Here again I repeat that warning which I have brought in over and over
again in these notes. We must distinguish between what is evidence for
truth and what is evidence only of human mood. We Christians may argue
from philosophy upon the survival of the soul, or we may argue from
authority upon it; and we shall triumph in that argument, for we have
all the trumps in our hands. We may, and I hope, do, accept Immortality
simply on faith, as a truth which the Church teaches; and we affirm it
equally strongly whether we _feel_ it little or much; for the Faith is
the best ground for certitude. But we are not here concerned with either
of these processes, Faith or mood. We are not here concerned with
whether man be right or wrong in generally accepting survival after
death; we are concerned only with the value of Mr. Wells as a would be
historian when he tells us that man has not accepted the idea.

I am not examining whether primitive man was right or wrong in this or
that religious practice, or even in his acceptance of God. I am asking,
Did he, in point of fact, act as Mr. Wells says he acted? If a
materialist seeks to upset my faith in the Catholic dogma of Immortality
by philosophical argument, he may be formidable in his assault on that
ground. But if he produces the _historical_ argument, and says that my
forefathers did not believe in their own survival, I must test his
statement. If he prove to be quite wrong in his affirmation, then he
ceases to be a formidable opponent in that respect: as an _historian_ he
is, on that prime matter, worthless.

Let us see how our Author deals with very early palæolithic sepulture.

Here Mr. Wells depends for his views directly upon Morillet, one of the
great founders of modern archæology. Morillet laid it down (in a book
dating from 1883) that palæolithic man was without religion, and only
came to religion by a gradual exercise of invention: by an increasing
illusion. Morillet based that negation of his _on the supposed fact
(accepted in 1883) that there were no palæolithic tombs_. Mr. Wells
knows that since 1883 those tombs have been discovered, but he is too
rootedly conservative to admit the effect of the evidence. He is still a
devoted pupil of Morillet, forty-two years after his master—it is a
terribly long time for a man to cling to the superstitions of his youth!

As palæolithic sepulture _has_ been discovered since Morillet—and
objects buried with the dead—instead of modifying his old-fashioned
error, Mr. Wells begins forcing new facts to fit exploded theory. He
tells us (on p. 68) that men buried the dead with ornaments and little
domestic sanctities of food and arms, not because men loved the dead,
and could not be rid of the idea of their spirit carrying on, but
because “they doubted they were dead”! He makes it very clear what he
means by this. He means that men doubted whether the actual physical
body were dead or no! He adds that this “is just as reasonable to
suppose” as that men showed by such burial offerings an idea of
Immortality!

Well, to such a knock-down sentence as that one can only have one
answer: It is nonsense. It is not “just as reasonable” to suppose that a
man didn’t know a corrupting carcase to be dead. It is wildly
_un_reasonable to suppose that man would carefully bury his fellow-man
in a carefully made tomb, deposit with him objects that showed great
toil in their making, and were, therefore, a sacrifice of value, and at
the same time did not know that he was physically dead. That such
nonsense can be talked at all is the best proof that, rather than give
up a false theory, men will do anything with facts. It is exactly of a
piece with the Bible Christian naturalists and geologists of the
mid-nineteenth century, who said that fossils were freakish tricks to
try their faith in the literal interpretation of Genesis. It is False
Faith afraid to reason.

It is the very mark of False Faith that it fights shy of reason. So did
the Bible Christian of the Victorian Age, who would not face geological
science. So does his immediate lineal descendant, Mr. Wells.

When a False Faith is challenged by awkward facts it suppresses, denies,
or distorts them. The facts have got to fit the dogma.

Materialistic Faith is at this warping of scientific truth
perpetually—and nowhere more than in Mr. Wells’s book.

If I thought this straining, ignoring, and twisting of ascertained
fact—that is, of true science—to be an insincere trick in Mr. Wells, I
would call it that. But I do not think it is. I think it is the
unconscious action of a man untrained to clear thinking.

Take, for example, his attitude towards the known facts with regard to
palæolithic man, so far as they regard the origin of religion in
departments other than burial. Palæolithic man made the pictures
everyone has heard of in the depths of the caves and elsewhere. Mr.
Wells remarks on page 68 that “one sees no scope in such a life” (that
of the palæolithic hunter) “for superstition or speculation.”

Why on earth not? Are superstition and speculation absent from wild
hunters as we know them to-day? Would they be absent from us if we
turned to wild hunting again? Why should they be?

The only answer is that common sense and plain fact must not be
admitted, because they would interfere with a preconceived theory that
religion was an illusion coming late in the human story. The palæolithic
hunter must be free from the taint of religion. The religious illusion
must come far on in the development in order that it may be associated
at its origin with ritual murder and known savage customs. Yet the same
writer is perpetually telling us that religious ideas are of bestial
origin and came from the brutal cruelty to females and young of an aged
monkey-like fellow myriads of years before the palæolithic hunters
existed.

There is here a complete lack of consecutive thought. Religion began
long before men were men, says Mr. Wells; yet there is no trace of it
when men first _were_ men! And then again (in a separate and
contradictory proposition) religion began, very late, with the neolithic
culture.

But indeed in his necessity for forcing facts to fit theory he makes a
hash of palæolithic man from beginning to end. We have seen in how
extraordinary a fashion he stretches fact to fit theory in the matter of
palæolithic burial. Let us see now how he stretches it to fit theory in
the matter of palæolithic art.

Mr. Wells says, on page 53, of the men who made the cave drawings
(palæolithic men), that they “drew with increasing skill as the
centuries passed.” He says that because he thinks they _ought_ to have
done so according to all the Darwinian dogma of slow, minute, mechanical
evolution. The plain fact is that they did _not_. Their painting
followed a cycle precisely like that which the painting of higher
cultures has followed: it sprang suddenly, or very rapidly, into
existence as a vivid, intense realization of the thing drawn. It sank
into mere convention and then disappeared.

The more I look into Mr. Wells’s book, the more I find this
characteristic straining of facts to meet a mythological doctrine and
neglect of facts (or, to be more charitable, ignorance of facts) which
might upset theory.

Thus, I find, on page 47, “with regard to the cave drawings there is
scarcely anything we can suppose to be a religious or mystical symbol at
all,” and he argues throughout this page that the cave drawings had no
religious signification.

There are only two possible explanations of so strange a remark. One is
that Mr. Wells knew the evidence and suppressed it. The other is the
much more probable one, that his reading is too slight for him to be
acquainted even with the main lines of the evidence.

We can prove that the latter, more charitable, explanation is the true
one. That the cave drawings were religious in character everybody now
knows—except, apparently, Mr. Wells—from two discovered characters.
_First_, a large proportion of them are in the very depths and recesses
of dark passages—sometimes deliberately obstructed—where they could have
had no utilitarian or merely artistic object. But apart from this we
have, _secondly_, the famous Phallic Dance, at Cogul, which is
conclusively ritual, in garment and circle and all else.

I have a further right to conclude that Mr. Wells was simply ignorant of
the evidence, and not merely shirking it, from his confused writing upon
details not religious. Upon page 55 he writes, concerning the
palæolithic men of the cave drawings, this sentence, “_It is doubtful if
they knew of the bow._”

When I first read that sentence, I was so staggered I could hardly
believe that I had read it right.

I have already confessed to a native inaccuracy in detail. I often have
to read a thing several times to be certain I have not missed anything.
I often skip a modifying phrase or word. I went carefully over several
pages to make certain that I had not overlooked any qualifying term. But
no. There was the thing in black and white.

It was the more extraordinary because here before me, in Mr. Wells’s own
book, were reproductions of these cave paintings with the bow and arrow
appearing all over them!

We have the clear statement that later palæolithic men—who knew not the
bow nor domestic animals nor tillage—were succeeded by another culture
which knew all these things, and that can only mean the neolithic
culture. Yet, _after_ saying this, Mr. Wells remembers, or is told,
that, after all there were palæolithic men who used the bow and made
pictures of it. So he devotes a section to them, contradicting what he
has just said. It is as though a man wishing to deny the Red Indians
were to say “They did not know the horse, but were succeeded by a new
culture of white men who did.” But having said that (and allowed his
publisher to illustrate the remark with a picture of a Red Indian on
horseback!) were to add a supplementary chapter saying, “By the way,
before they disappeared they did get the horse.”

Mr. Wells would not have written thus if he had not been driven by the
necessity of denying facts which did not fit in with his theology.

What is the point of saying that the cave painters, who made their
drawings so often under conditions obviously religious, and who painted
an unmistakable religious ceremonial dance, had “as yet no religion”?
What is the motive producing so absurd a saying as that later
palæolithic men did not know the bow and arrow which they painted so
clearly, and then, as an afterthought, bringing in palæolithic men who
_did_ know the bow and arrow? What is the driving force which makes a
man write—in the teeth of the evidence—that this art arose very
gradually from rude beginnings and progressed—instead of declining (as,
in fact, it did)?

What is the point of saying that Neanderthal man may have spoken (_may_
have spoken! A man who made instruments, lit fires and buried his
dead!)? Or why add that he had “nothing we should call language”? (On
which point neither Mr. Wells nor any other man has the least
information and which on the face of it is wildly improbable.)

The answer is that you have to imagine facts without evidence, you have
also to distort facts, you have also to suppress them if you are to
present to your readers a childishly simple scheme of regular and, above
all, slow “progress.”

You must make Early Man last as long as possible and be as base as
possible. If the facts will not fit in with that very slow process of
development, which was felt (stupidly enough!) to make a Creator less
necessary, so much the worse for the facts. Such very slow advance,
unconscious, of imperceptible degrees—mechanical—such prolonged
bestiality in true man, was dogma with all cultured people thirty or
forty years ago. It is still dogma with Mr. Wells. Being dogma, and
dogma divorced from reason, the facts must give way to it.

Or turn to the origins of Sacrifice. We come at the outset on the very
true remark that the killing of a man is a very violent and striking
act. But immediately after we find the quite false remark that such
ritual murder would be “naturally” associated with any propitiatory
offer. Mr. Wells at once proceeds to postulate this horrible perversion
as a universal human action and a precursor of all religion. He has no
basis for that at all. It is made up, not indeed by him, but by the
older men whom he copies—the writers who were authorities half a
lifetime ago, notably Frazer.

There is plenty of evidence to show that men have put their
fellow-beings to death here and there, and have done so in _all_ states
of culture and for all manner of widely differing reasons—ritual,
vindictive, military, magical, judicial. But there is not a scrap of
evidence to show that such murder was original to religion, and most
certainly it was not universal. The attempt to prove it universal has
not only failed, but ought never to have been made: for it is nonsense.

Frazer, in _The Golden Bough_, gathered all the evidence he could—most
of it negligible, some of it doubtful, a little of it firm and good—upon
human sacrifice as connected with harvest. All he could show was that
some few sets of men have here and there, in places unconnected and wide
apart in time, killed men in a ritual fashion from a superstition that
such ritual murder would procure them a good harvest. There is no sort
of proof that it was a general human custom; and what is worse, there is
no distinction in Frazer between certain evidence, uncertain and
worthless.

I should have thought that by this time educated opinion was alive to
that criticism: it is many years since Andrew Lang died; and Andrew Lang
(in this country—it had little acceptance abroad) blew the theory
sky-high—I mean the theory that human sacrifice was an original
universal accompaniment of the sowing or the harvest.

Human sacrifice being a violent because a horrible thing, has
occasionally accompanied the desire for victory in war. It has
accompanied mourning for the great. It has been the product of terror
under defeat or pestilence. It has appeared in all sorts of forms,
connected with pretty well any violent emotion of desire or dread. It
has been particularly noticeable in very high civilizations; Carthage
had it at the very height of her luxury and greatness. Mexico had
it—most highly developed just when Mexico was, apparently, at the
highest point of her material civilization. Some savages have had it
also. You get it in the Moabite Stone; you get echoes of it in the
Jewish folk-lore of the Old Testament. You get it in a totally different
form among the Gauls, where it is commonly an act of vengeance on
criminals and prisoners, and in no way an act of magic. You also get an
abhorrence of it among societies which have not fallen to the
degradation of practising it; and these societies (by the way) usually
prove the masters and the betters of those who practise it. But of human
sacrifice as an original and universal habit, there is not a sign. To
believe _that_ you have to swallow whole the fourfold trick of Frazer’s
_Golden Bough_, which is:

(1) To gather all scraps of evidence indifferently, including a mass of
vague hearsay and stuff at third hand, and vague analogies, and any
custom, game, lark, or legend, however remote from killing, which can be
guessed to be—or asserted to be—a memory of that perversion. (2) To
leave out all counter evidence. (3) To put the thing cumulatively and
(4) Then to present it as proved.

In such fashion any theory, however wild, could be demonstrated to
satisfaction. Mr. Chesterton has wittily shown how it can be used to
prove that History (what with Calvus, Socrates, Cæsar, tonsured Priests,
and Calvin) is dominated by bald heads.

Such is Frazer’s “proof” of universal original ritual human sacrifice.

Yet upon the assumption that this horror was universal and original, all
Mr. Wells’s argument in this department is based; including what is not
argument at all, but mere fiction, his elaborate and purely imaginary
description of human sacrifice at Stonehenge.

Oh! That Human Sacrifice at Stonehenge! How well we know it! In how many
cheap magazines, in how many journalistic allusions! With such a lineage
it could hardly fail to turn up in such a best-seller as this _Outline
of History_.

In point of fact we have no knowledge whatever of the use of Stonehenge
or its purpose, and not a scintilla of evidence on its being used for
human sacrifice. But the cinema public will have it so.

Historically the whole talk of human sacrifice as original to religion
is quite worthless. There is no general evidence of the thing in the
remains of prehistoric civilization; no picture, no sculpture, no
language test. We may safely prophesy that if this nameless perversion
reappears among men—as it well may—it will reappear not in their
simplest societies, but rather in their most refined.

The bulwark against all such things—and such murder is but one out of
myriads of possible monstrosities—is that general tradition of our
morals and culture which depends upon the Catholic Church. Men do not
grow out of their evils: they return to them, lacking a Divine guide.

When, therefore, I lay down Mr. Wells’s book (not without relief) and
find my eyes following the phrase upon page 72, “it _must_ be clear from
what has gone before that primitive man could have had no idea of God or
of religion,” I leave that comic phrase “it must be clear” to the
judgment of the reader.

There never was any writer _less_ clear in his ideas than the author of
this work when he deals with Early Man: and as to the few real facts and
his conclusions from them, they dance such a saraband that you never
know where you are, nor which is first or last, nor which is top and
which is tail.

First religion arises in some beast living before man who gets a
“complex” of terror from his horrible old father; then it is neolithic
man who gets it—after an immense interval with no religion at all. On
one page a thing is possible; two pages later probable; four pages on it
is certain. A man having put forward a theory in 1893, it is still
gospel in 1926, though exploded in 1895. A feathered chieftain waving
bows and arrows at you is ignorant of the bow, and the poor devils of
deer with arrows stuck into them everywhere are told that their hunters
knew nothing of arrows.

It is on science of this kind, instruction of that calibre, and culture
of such a tone, that we are asked to abandon the Faith, which made, and
on whose retention depends, the civilization of our race.




                               CHAPTER VI
                        WE COME TO REAL HISTORY


I now leave Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ in so far as it deals with
guesses, unproved statements, and ascertained facts on Man as he existed
before any known written record.

I have devoted so large a proportion of my space to this earlier and
vaguer part of the book because it is by far the most important. In it
Mr. Wells, repeating the various materialist and other anti-Christian
theories of his youth, has put before his readers an ethnography and a
philosophy confused, indeed, but consistently opposed to the Catholic
Faith. And it has been my business to distinguish what was demonstrably
wrong in his statements, what exploded by recent scholarship and what
solid and demonstrated; blaming his obvious unacquaintance with recent
European thought, and his lack of mental grip, but praising his vividly
picturesque style and his undoubted sincerity.

The opportunity for speculating at large and affirming without proof in
this prehistoric region is unlimited. Therefore it is here that Mr.
Wells’s attack on the Catholic Faith is largely delivered; and since it
is his antagonism to the Catholic Faith with which I am mainly
concerned—for sympathy or antagonism with the Catholic Faith is the only
thing of real importance in attempting to teach History—I have given to
this section the considerable space my reader has traversed.

Mr. Wells closes his repetitions of the old and often discarded theories
upon Man before human record with Chapter XII, the end of his second
book, and page 88 of the volume. Thence onwards he is to deal with
History to which we have real witness, and it is noticeable that in the
last pages of this first part, when he begins to deal with certain
scientific fact, ascertained truth, and a certain amount of real
knowledge, he becomes not only very much more reliable, but much more
successful as a writer.

His remarkable talent for compressing the statements or actual
discoveries of others into readable short form comes out brilliantly.

Thus even before he comes to the beginnings of human record, he has to
deal with language, and he does so with a firmness of touch and an
exactitude of form which everyone must admire, and no one more than I.
The little passage only covers seven pages, but it is exceedingly well
done.

There is a good reason for this. Mr. Wells is here dealing with a mass
of well-known material. His talents for compression and exposition have
full scope; his weakness as a reasoner is not tried.

Language is a positive thing. It is there, a real subject for analysis;
you can study it. It is not moonshine like the “Old Man” who produced
some very nasty God, nor like the palæolithic hunter who could not use
bows and arrows, although he made pictures of himself using nothing
else.

It is true that even in this most excellent little essay on the
differences of language throughout the world, Mr. Wells cannot escape
that futility which he shares with everyone of his type, the inability
to distinguish hypothesis from fact, and the statement of a vague guess
as a known truth. None the less, these seven pages, as a whole, are
first-rate. Anyone who had not read about the differences between
existing human languages, would, on merely skimming these seven pages,
be permanently instructed by them, and soundly instructed. It can
honestly be said that this bit of précis writing is a feat.

That weakness, however, to which I have alluded appears in a few
sentences which I will quote before passing to the excellences of this
passage.

Mr. Wells repeats, at the beginning of the affair (on p. 82) that the
people who drew so well in the caves “probably” only made imitative
sounds—that is manifest nonsense. People with excellent artistic powers,
elaborate decoration, ritual, and so forth are not dumb, or half-dumb,
animals. They are men. The only possible reason for dragging in the
absurd statement that they “probably” could not use full speech is the
mania for making man as base as possible for as long as possible, so as
to feed the idea of Progress. He drags in several times the gratuitous
and demonstrably false idea of very gradual development in this, as in
other matters. He uses the phrases “_very slowly_” in his fourth
paragraph, “_very slow process indeed_” in his fifth paragraph, and in
general forces (without any evidence) the creation of language to
conform to the old dogma of the nineteenth-century materialists that all
development necessarily takes place by tiny stages spread over vast
spaces of time. We now know that it does nothing of the sort in matters
where we can follow it. We know that Evolution goes by jumps in things
before our eyes—such as machinery—and we are more and more convinced by
evidence that it has gone by jumps in the geological record. Therefore
we may presume it did so in this affair of speech.

Mr. Wells is also to blame in saying that a number of tribes using one
Aryan tongue “must” have wandered somewhere between Central Europe and
Western Asia. That “must” is absurd and highly characteristic of
pseudo-science. We do not know anything about the way in which the roots
common to the group of languages in question spread, nor whence they
spread. It is all mere statement in the void. In the same way he tells
us that the Danube, “about eight thousand years ago or less,” flowed
into a sea which reached to Turkestan, and which may have sent out arms
to the Arctic Ocean; and again “about eight thousand years ago” there
were no straits between Asia and Europe where the Bosphorus and the
Dardanelles now are. That phrase “about eight thousand years ago” is
worthless.

He knows nothing about such a date, nor does anybody else within
enormously wide limits of time. These are only guesses based on slight
and contradictory evidence.

Conversely, he does not allow for the rapidity with which languages
sometimes change before becoming fixed for very long periods; still less
does he allow for the amazing differences which a comparatively short
time will make in the development of the same word along different
lines. No one without record to prove it could possibly think that the
French word “guêpe” had any relation to the English word “wasp.” That
the English word “penny” was the great-grandson of “denarius,” or that
the German word “krieg” and the English word “war” were the same word
come down through tortuous channels from an original Latin source, or
that the English word “spade” was the same as the French word “epée,”
the noble word for a sword.

One could multiply instances indefinitely. Language sometimes changes
with the greatest rapidity and takes on wholly new forms; then remains
fixed for very long periods. And this development of language, like the
development of everything else, completely contradicts the mechanical
idea of a slow, inevitable, mechanical, blind process—which idea
governed the mid-nineteenth century.

But after allowing for these defects, it remains true that Mr. Wells’s
summary on language is, as I have said, exceedingly well done. It is a
good instance of the way in which the Author’s mind works best when it
is dealing with concrete facts, and worst when it is in the region of
hard, independent reasoning. Feed Mr. Wells’s pen with facts and he
presents them excellently. Ask him to think, and he either quotes at
random (and often confusedly and contradictorily) what other people have
deduced (usually wrongly); or, now and then, very rarely, thinks for
himself, and is then more confused and self-contradictory than ever.

We shall find, when we come to the later division of his work and deal
with his summary of known and recorded History, that there is very much
less to complain of than there is in his imaginary Pre-history; though
even in these later sections the moment he touches the Catholic Church
or the tradition of the European gentry with their foundations in the
Roman Empire, he reacts against them with such violence that he loses
his judgment altogether.

I desire here, at the end of the first division of my work, to summarize
what I have had to say so far about the book, and it is only just that I
should put down the bad side first and end with the best that can be
said about it.

Mr. Wells’s unfortunate disabilities for a task of this kind are
primarily that he has not a sufficient acquaintance with the world, and
that he has not supplemented this weakness—as it can in part be
supplemented—by wide reading. He has not met many kinds of men nor
compared many kinds of thought. He got coached, but he got coached too
rapidly and too summarily. He knows little or nothing of the vast
Catholic tradition and philosophy which inherits and explains not only
Europe but the whole nature of Man. He seems to think that Catholic
tradition and philosophy are a hole-and-corner affair, because, in the
only society he has really known, Catholics form a very small and
unfamiliar minority. He continually reaffirms what he happens to have
read in the little popular textbooks of his youth up to about 1893–94.
Over and over again one finds him saying things which passed for dogma
in the popular science of thirty to forty years ago, and have since been
quite done away with.

He has also clearly been very slack in overlooking the work. He has not
sufficiently superintended the illustration of his book, nor prevented
absurd contradictions between graphic teaching by picture and the
statements of the text.

He falls into the common modern trick or error (I prefer to think it an
error rather than a trick in this case, for he is a man, though limited,
sincere) which I will baptize “the shoe-horn,” and with which I became
wonderfully well acquainted at Oxford. It consists in putting a thing as
a possibility on one page, as a probability on a later page, and on a
still later page as a certitude.

On page 48 he quotes a theory to which he “inclines,” viz. that
Neanderthal man and true man did not interbreed. On page 52 it is no
longer an “inclination” but a certitude. He says “there is no trace of
it.” In exactly the same way on page 44 the Mediterranean area is, in
the days of Early Man, “probably” a valley below sea-level. But on page
51 the submergence of the Mediterranean is taken for granted, till, on
page 66, we get to the third stage in the “shoe-horn” process. It is by
that page “practically certain” that at the end of the last Glacial Age
the Mediterranean, not yet flooded from the Atlantic, was but a couple
of land-locked basins.

His thought is not connected. Thus he will say of the Tasmanians that
they had no Neanderthaloid characters, and then remark that they
represent a Neanderthaloid stage in the evolution of true man. He will
tell us that one cannot go very much by the measurement of skulls
because the shape of the skull sometimes changes rapidly. There he is
quite right. But a few pages on he repeats all the modern fashionable
nonsense about a Nordic race and a Mediterranean race and an Alpine race
and the rest of it—which is based almost entirely on the idea that the
skull formation is permanent. He traces religion to certain past terrors
and offensive habits in a bestial type prior to Man, but won’t allow it
in palæolithic man long after; then he suddenly recurs to it in
neolithic man far later still.

How familiar it all is!

Meanwhile, throughout the whole of the work there appears that wretched
_a priori_ bias which is the bane of all insufficient or false
religions: the determination to squeeze facts to any shape, however
unnatural, if only they may thus be forced to fit theories; the effect
of a fixed mythology to which evidence must correspond, or be neglected,
or so distorted as to become wholly unnatural, and under the influence
of which the absence of evidence is supplied by sheer fiction. We have
seen how this could lead so intelligent a man to affirm that men with
capacity to fashion instruments, use fire and bury their dead with
ceremony and gift, could not speak a consecutive language. It also makes
him say of men who hunted the reindeer in an Arctic climate and were
remarkable artists, that “perhaps” they had no clothing. It leads him to
postulate as necessary an exceedingly slow and unceasing process for all
development—right against known evidence—and thus bring him to deny or
neglect or forget plain record, such as armament, ornament, burial.

In other words, the disadvantages of Mr. Wells, in all the prehistoric
part of his work, flow from exactly the same mental defects as warped
his ancestors in religion. Just as his spiritual forbears, the Puritans
(who lasted on to our own time), could not believe anything outside the
family Bible, could only understand the literal interpretations of its
English printed word, and were inhibited by their isolation from a wide
philosophy; so, in their newer form, the Bible Christians and Puritans
in revolt still demand the infallibility of a document (in Mr. Wells’s
case, the popular scientific textbooks of his youth), and reject without
reasoning any facts which militate against an accepted theology which
they have been taught in youth. Just as the old-fashioned Bible
Christians, from whom he (and his audience) derive, could construct no
general philosophy of the world, so he, or, rather, the people from whom
he has learned these things, reject any general philosophy, and are not
afraid of perpetual self-contradiction. Just as the religious
enthusiasts of the sects from whom he (and his audience) derive replaced
reason by violent emotion, so does he.

All that is bad enough, but one must end by summarizing his many and
remarkable qualities for the task he attempted.

All his work so far (that is, down to the end of the Pre-history) shows
to the full those qualities I praise in my first article. He is devoid
of charlatanry. He always gives the name of the book he is quoting from.
He is free from envy. He advertises the works from which he draws. The
narrative is vivid, the power of presenting the writer’s mental image to
the reader is quite exceptionally strong. Indeed, Mr. Wells is here
unique in his generation. As this gift is one of the principal things to
be admired in my own trade of writing, and one which I cannot pretend to
have myself, I feel a special respect for it. Anyone reading a passage
in this book has a mental image of the brightest kind called up before
him. He can almost see and smell the apish “Old Man”—though he is as
imaginary as the Giant Blunderbore. He can assist as an agonized witness
at the barbarous slaughter at Stonehenge—which is as imaginary as the
beheading of Puss in Boots.

Mr. Wells is also, as I have said, limpid, sincere, accepting all his
simple, uncoordinated beliefs with a candour which is morally admirable,
though intellectually deplorable. Best of all, he can put into the
briefest and clearest form the main statements upon which his story
depends. And here I am so much his inferior that I would like to take
this opportunity of saluting his superiority. I would give worlds myself
to be able to put true things in History as tersely and as sharply as he
puts unsubstantial things, and to be able to strike a true outline as
firm and as strong as his fantastic one.

For, to repeat a metaphor already used, Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_
may be compared to one of those vivid profile charcoal sketches which we
had in the music-halls of his youth and mine: to a vivid charcoal sketch
of Mr. Gladstone’s profile, for instance—but presented to the audience
as that of Queen Victoria. The drawing is rapid, firm, accurate,
successful—but it is startlingly unlike the original.

It remains true that if the draughtsman had known reality well enough he
would have done useful and permanent work in this field. He would have
been a leader instead of a follower. As he has a wide public he would
have given the average men of his own tongue a view of the past which
would have rung true, and he would have been confirmed by every new fact
as he accumulated experience. Unfortunately, he was given by those on
whom he relied a view of the past which is already badly out of date and
necessarily doomed to be forgotten in a few years.

Seeing how remarkable his talents are, and how he might have used them,
it is a very great pity indeed.




                              CHAPTER VII
                        MR. WELLS ON PRIESTHOOD


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.

Unfortunately, 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 development 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 this _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 were 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 opposite), (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 Monday), 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 maximum 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 are 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.




                              CHAPTER VIII
          BUDDHISM AS A STICK WITH WHICH TO BEAT THE CHRISTIAN


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 quality 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 emotion (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!

First 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.

No 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.




                               CHAPTER IX
                     MR. WELLS AND THE INCARNATION


As I approach what is much the most important section of Mr. Wells’s
book (for it deals with much the most important subject in all History—I
mean the Incarnation, which he so cheerfully denies), I must, not
without regret, be too brief upon preliminaries, lest I should take up
the space necessary for the larger controversy later on.

Therefore, it is only in a very summary manner that I can deal with the
writer’s presentation of the rise of the Roman power and of the
beginnings of the Empire; that is, with the unity of the European world
as it was prepared by Divine Providence for the advent of the Catholic
Church: the noble antique soil in which was planted, as alone worthy of
it, that institution whereby alone Man can be put in tune, or, even in
temporal matters, a right civilization preserved.

As may be imagined, Mr. Wells on approaching the critical point in the
drama of Human History, allows his anti-Christian enthusiasm more rein
than he has given it hitherto, and the Roman Empire—because it was the
foundation upon which our civilization was built through the action of
our religion—moves him to an excited wrath in which he loses all
historical sense, and curses at random.

It would be wearisome to repeat again the excellences which this
department of the book also presents: its accuracy in date, its lucidity
in expression: but a third excellence, which Mr. Wells usually has,
proportion in statement—the essence of good précis writing, and
therefore of good summarization in History—here fails him. The reason of
this is that he takes up, of the few pages allotted to him, far too much
space in violent abuse. I think I had better give the reader a short
list of these vituperations, in order to make him understand the state
of mind in which our author approaches the majestic origins of Europe.

On page 259 he is reluctantly “forced” to repeat his grave criticism
that the Græco-Roman civilization had no printing press. On page 260 he
expresses his “astonishment” that they did not hand printed copies of
the measures about to be discussed round their assemblies, especially
the Roman Senate. In the same page he points out that the failure of
popular government towards the end of the Republic was due to a lack of
Board Schools. A wholly disproportionate amount of the next few pages is
devoted to diatribes against Cato the Elder. He begins as “a small but
probably very disagreeable child of two.” He is a hypocrite who “poses
as a champion of religion and public morality”; he “carries on a
lifelong war against everything that is young, gracious or pleasant”;
and therefore he was, of course (after much more abuse of the same
sort), “the type of man that rose to prominence in Rome” (p. 265).

Rome, successful in her gigantic battle for life against Carthage, was
“a nation so cowardly that she had to destroy her enemy,” and she is
again “a cowardly victor” on page 268. (Mr. Wells understands so little
of Paganism that he seems to think Carthage would have spared Rome.) She
proceeds to “an ungracious expansion of power abroad,” and the whole
great age of our foundation is one (p. 269) of “general grim baseness.”
The Senate, on page 270, is “a Senatorial gang,” in which Cato (who
occupies an absurdly exaggerated place) especially shows “interest and
natural malice.” On page 271 you get “pitiless greed,” and meanwhile, of
course, “the military efficiency of the Romans had been steadily
declining”—but, indeed, the singular incapacity, not only of the Roman
people, but of all soldiers, for war is one of Mr. Wells’s standing
grievances. The Senate, on the first failure against Carthage, passed
“from a bullying mood to one of extreme panic.” On page 273 we have a
pleasant contrast between the horrid ignorance of the Roman citizens and
the enlightenment of the modern British Trade Union leaders, the latter
of whom have done what no Roman ever thought of doing: to wit, started a
Labour College. On page 273 Rome is “subcivilized.” It is compared to
“Neanderthal man”; its religion “carries us far back beyond the days of
decent gods to the age of Shamanism and magic”; and there is a moving
contrast between the antique leader searching the entrails of animal
victims after a sacrifice for augury, and the more dignified gestures of
a British Lord Chancellor.

On page 274 Rome is again “Neanderthal”; and on page 275 there is yet
another contrast between the gladiatorial shows and our own more humane
sports—though there is no actual mention of either football or golf. It
reminds one a little of the famous remark of the old lady who was seeing
the death of Cleopatra on the stage, and said, “How different from the
home life of our own good Queen Victoria”!

On page 277 the Roman senators and the great equestrians are “vulgar and
greedy spirits.” But do not imagine that the poorer Romans were any
better; they, in their turn, are “ignorant, unstable, and equally
greedy”; and, once again, on this same page, all these Romans are
“Neanderthals.” On page 278 he is able to answer the question which
puzzled the Ancients in the later days of the Roman Republic. Those
mighty men asked themselves, even while they were founding a world
state, in what they were to blame, confessed their errors, and sought
remedy perpetually. But in _this_ book “we” have the advantage over
them. “We (that is, Mr. Wells) _who can look at the problem with a
larger presentation_ can see what had happened to Rome.” On the same
page there is a doubtful admission that Tiberius Gracchus may have been
“more like an honest man” than the other cowards and mediocrities of the
Roman State. But Gracchus, again, was defective compared with the modern
authors of Outlines of History in that “he did not understand how much
easier it is to shift population from the land into the towns than to
return it.” However, he stands excused; for it seems that even to-day,
in spite of progress, “few people” other than the Author “understand”
this wearisome and age-long truism.

No wonder that, after all this, Mr. Wells is astonished at the voluntary
association of external States with the Roman Empire which began before
the end of the second century B.C.

Among their other defects, we are told, the Romans could not organize
sea power. They foolishly marched their troops, not only because they
were somehow unaccountably ignorant of railways (as was Alexandria, he
bitterly complains, of typewriters) but because they had not the
military sense to see how much easier it is to embark a large army in
small sailing vessels at the mercy of the weather, and disembark them,
than to march them round a not much greater distance by land.

On page 284 even the most superficial student of antiquity will be
astonished to hear that it was the Roman unity which so weakened the
Greek culture of the East as ultimately to subject it to barbarism under
the Turks. He notes on the same page with horror that the Roman of the
Republic had no maps of Germany, Russia, Africa, and Central Asia, and
adds (of men like Cæsar) that “even if they had had maps they would not
have had the intelligence to use them.” Talking of Julius Cæsar, one
might have thought that _his_ really remarkable talents would emerge
from Mr. Wells’s eagle view of the human plain below. But no! That great
head is first presented to us as “bald and middle-aged”—two qualities
which, it seems, destroy capacity. His affair with Cleopatra marks “the
elderly sensualist or sentimentalist” (Mr. Wells remarks with an ascetic
sternness, remarkable and novel in such a novelist, that he was
fifty-four at the time). As for great-mindedness, the unfortunate man
was suffering from “a common man’s megalomania” with “a record of
scheming” which is “silly and shameful.”

It will be seen from these few epithets, chosen at random from a bare
twenty pages, what the effect upon Mr. Wells has been of his first
acquaintance, late in life, with the Eternal City.

There is only one reasonable adjective for such an attitude. It is
ridiculous. Lack of proportion and lack of dignity in historical
writing, when they are pushed to that extreme, are absurd.

There was about the Roman Empire all that we know most offends our
author—majesty, greatness, a connection with our ancient tradition, and
order. Roman letters suggest the education of the gentry, and anything
connected with the gentry is, in itself, enough to rouse our author to
boiling-point. The Roman story is the great story of soldiers—and with
the Soldier goes the Priest, two characters abhorrent to him. But behind
it all, without a doubt, the ultimate source of these ineptitudes is
reaction against the Catholic Church, which not only the name, but the
fact of Rome, suggests to the ill-guided and insufficient pen here at
work.

The odd thing is that Mr. Wells does not hesitate to illustrate his
account, and that his average reader (who, I fancy, looks more at
illustrations than at the text) has, by even such a glimpse of nobility
in architecture and statuary, the whole foolish railing discounted. Had
Mr. Wells’s publishers been able to include and present in popular
illustration to their readers, not only building and bust and statue,
but also that great volume of verse and prose which is the soul of
Rome—but of which Mr. Wells would understand nothing, even if he had
been compelled to study it for years—the effect would be greater still.

But, of course, the reader gets no hint of high verse or monumental
prose, for our author has no idea of them. The reader of Mr. Wells’s
_Outline_ is lucky to get one tiny hint of faces at least, and of
buildings—of the latter very little—taken hastily from the most
hackneyed photographs, but even these will be sufficient to destroy the
folly of the text.

It is a singular phenomenon this: the itch to kick against that which
made one: the instinct to destroy the house in which one lives: the
craving towards impiety and unfilial negation. But we Catholics who live
in the anti-Catholic culture are woefully familiar with it.

Mr. Wells himself is entirely the product of Rome; not, perhaps, the
ripest fruit on that great tree, but a fruit none the less. Out of the
Roman Empire come all things that we are—the sour and withered units of
our Commonwealth, as well as the living parts; the noblest and most
traditional, as well as the basest, the most vulgar, and the most
impatient of majesty. Yet a sort of necessity compels men of this sort
to oppose that by which they had their being. You see it in their
disgust with all that is oldest and best in their own narrow community,
in their bewilderment at any European thing which happens to be outside
their parochial experience, in their pitiful astonishment at learning
that the material details of their own lives—tramways and “last
editions” and electric light—were not to be found in the daily life of
classical antiquity. They cannot understand that bad poetry set down on
a typewriter may be of less value than good poetry written on papyrus:
the distinction is incomprehensible to such minds. That the creation of
a busy, contented, rich, united culture from the Grampians to the
Euphrates was an achievement of lasting grandeur escapes them.

Well, we know that such minds exist and have always existed. We know
that they are now being multiplied by the hundred thousand and the
million under the conditions of our great towns and their press.

We also, we of the higher and older culture, we of the Faith, know that
all of this can only end in ruin. But meanwhile let us vigorously stamp
with our own mark the expressions of such vulgarity whenever they come
before us, and label them for what they are; which is rubbish: and
degraded rubbish at that.

But all this raving against the Empire from which we descend, is but a
preface. Its cause is the fact that the high Græco-Roman Culture was the
prelude to, and the setting of, the _Incarnation_.

With this word we come to the supreme interest of mankind: the one
essential question in human History which must always be answered by a
“Yes” or “No”; and according to that answer our whole view, not only of
human society upon earth, but upon the very nature and destiny of Man,
depends.

That question is, whether Jesus Christ, who was certainly Man, was not
also God: two Natures in one Person? Those who answer “Yes, the Dual
Nature was there present,” believe in the Incarnation. Those who answer
“No, Jesus Christ was only a man (or a Myth)” do not believe in the
Incarnation.

Now the reader need hardly be told that Mr. Wells belongs to the later
division. For him as for the great mass of his readers, and, indeed, the
majority of English-speaking people to-day outside the Catholic Church,
Jesus Christ was only Man.

Indeed, if Mr. Wells belonged to the other division, that is, if he
believed in the Incarnation, his book would have had no great popular
sale, however ephemeral.

If that were the main point against Mr. Wells’s attitude towards the
Incarnation, my article might stop here. Belief in the Incarnation is
not a matter of historical proof, it is a matter of Faith. If a man
doesn’t believe it History will not make him do so. Historical truth,
like all other truth, supports Faith; but it does not cause Faith. When,
therefore, we condemn a man’s _history_ in connection with a discussion
upon the Faith, we must keep quite distinct our disagreement with his
_doctrine_ from our exposure of his ignorance or misjudgment of mundane
_fact_.

What we are concerned with in this commentary is Mr. Wells’s failure as
an historian; the insufficiency of his knowledge; his weak judgment; the
confusion in his processes of thought: Not his lack of the divine gift
of Faith, which is not here germane to our subject.

If a man comes to you with the remark that your father, long dead, once
forged a cheque, you say to yourself, “I feel that man is wrong.” But if
he brings forward some testimony to that assertion, you listen to it. If
you _then_ find that he does not know what he is talking about, you are
the more relieved in the matter of your father’s memory. For instance:
Suppose he said that your father forged the cheque in 1914 and that he
remembers the date because it was in the same week as the battle of the
Marne, while to your certain knowledge your father died in 1913, his
history is at fault, and his contention worthless.

Now that is exactly the position in which the Catholic reader stands in
regard to Mr. Wells’s quite insufficient way of dealing with the
question of the original doctrine of the Incarnation.

That question must be put quite clearly at the outset. We are not
discussing the truth or falsehood of the Incarnation, that is, of
Christ’s Godhead. We are discussing the purely historical point, whether
or no that doctrine is original to the Christian Church and its founder.

_Was the idea of the Incarnation, that is, of the Divinity of Our Lord,
held by those who had seen and known Him; did they claim to have
received it from Himself; did they record His own witness to it?_ Or is
the whole thing a later imposition?

That is the point; and it is a point not of Faith but of History.

A writer is free to call the visions and voices of St. Joan illusions,
and yet to remain a sound historian in the ordinary acceptation of that
term; but if he denies that St. Joan herself and her contemporaries
believed she had had such experiences, then he is an absurd historian.

It is clear, on reading Mr. Wells’s pages, that he has never come across
the historical arguments for regarding belief in the Incarnation as
contemporary with Our Lord and His companions. He does not know of their
existence. He approaches the problem as though all the world would
readily agree with his own cheerfully uninformed conclusions—because he
has never heard of any other. He obviously thinks that those who accept
as historical Christ’s own gradual revelation of the doctrine, and its
acceptation by certain contemporaries, are merely doing so to order. He
thinks they have not read even as much (or as little) as he, and have
only to be enlightened. He has no idea that a convincing body of
evidence exists and has been marshalled by powerful and numerous pens.

Let me begin with the common view which Mr. Wells here repeats.

It is essentially the view of _Modernists_ of a particular type, to wit,
Modernists of the Protestant type, and of the Protestant type which
flourishes chiefly in the world to which Mr. Wells himself belongs. It
is not of the German sort, still less of the French sort; it is of the
sort which you find in the more popular Sunday journals of the London
Press. And here we must define what the Modernist is.

The Modernist is a man who, having lost his faith in whatever Catholic
doctrine he or his may have held, is afraid of facing the consequences
of that loss.

That is an exact definition. A man is not a Modernist who denies all
Catholic doctrine _en bloc_, from the Omnipotence and Personality of God
downwards, and accepts the consequences of such a denial.

A man is a Modernist when he no longer admits a Catholic doctrine with
his intellect and will, but shirks the loss of its benefits.

The fear takes two forms. Sometimes (as with Loisy—a very great
scholar—during his period of Modernism), it is the fear of corporate
surroundings. A man has ceased to believe, but he is afraid of following
out the full consequences of his new intellectual attitude because he
fears what people may say. More often the fear is an inward fear, very
largely unconscious in its working and certainly unintelligent. It is
the fear of losing a certain habit of mind to which the man who has lost
belief is accustomed, which is only intellectually tenable so long as he
believes, but which he blindly clings to when it is no longer
intellectually tenable to him because the loss of the moral habit would
be so painful.

In the Modernist of this type, trying desperately to combine
incompatible things, you will find two marks invariably present. First,
he is muddle-headed; secondly, he does violence to sane judgment upon
testimony.

That is exactly what you shall find in Mr. Wells’s attitude towards the
belief of Our Lord Himself in His Own Divinity and His followers’
corresponding belief. Mr. Wells no longer believes in Our Lord’s
Divinity, _but he wants to go on feeling that He made all the
difference_. In the attempt to straddle between the two his judgment
goes all to pieces, and even his grossly insufficient reading on the
elementary evidence disturbs him. Thus Our Lord “is a great Teacher.” He
comes to “liberate the intense realization of the righteousness and
unchallenged oneness of God and of man’s obligation to God from its old
Jewish narrowness” (pp. 321, 322). (The reader will remember, though Mr.
Wells has forgotten it, that, a few pages back, God was appearing in the
_Outline of History_ as a human phantasy, and a nasty one: proceeding
from the “Old Man.” It is a fine example of inchoate thinking!) Our Lord
is, in phrase after phrase, a subject for awestruck wonder and
admiration. Yet He does not Himself quite know what He is about. Our
Lord, according to Mr. Wells, does no more than talk very vaguely on
general duties, and allude still more vaguely to some undefined,
incomprehensible “kingdom.” Our Lord has no intention of definite
organized action upon Mankind; indeed, He is clearly incapable of it. He
never said anything about His divine commission, nor confirmed it with
marvels, nor established rules of conduct, nor (of course) said a word
about any Institution designed to perpetuate His memory, to enforce His
teaching and continue His effect on earth. Those who heard Him and knew
Him had no experience of His saying any such things; wherefore Mr. Wells
adopts the old tag of Our Lord being “the seed rather than the founder.”
And so on.

All that is essentially Modernist—and already belated. In a few years it
will look grotesque.

The intelligent, straightforward and courageous thing to do if you are a
clear-headed man and have ceased to believe, is to say that the whole
Christian affair is an imposture and an irritating imposture at that.
That is the German non-Christian attitude; the German non-Christian
boldly talks of “The Jesus Fairy Tale” and asks us to be well rid of it.

That is the French and Italian non-Christian attitude: a determination
to have done with the tradition of Christian morals, and to root them
out of the State.

That is the attitude of the old and robust English Atheism which was far
more respectable intellectually and morally than the Modernist
sentimentality of our day.

Granted the premises of men like our author, the Christian spirit
proceeds from a fraud or an illusion and should be abandoned. It
interferes with many of the pleasures of human life. It prevents an easy
natural way of going on. It introduces authority in moral affairs (and
that is always irksome). Unless you believe that you hear the voice of
the Creator imposing such things, there is no sort of reason why you
should accept them.

Since Mr. Wells will not give up the emotional side of his ancestral
religion, though abandoning the intellectual side, he necessarily falls
into bad history: the bad history of that sort which we have heard
repeated so often that we almost take it for granted as a necessary part
of the world around us, but which is just as bad history to-day as when
it first startled the audiences of a hundred years ago.

The fundamental _historical_ error in such contradictory talk is this:
That the doctrine of the Incarnation was not held by those who heard Our
Lord nor inculcated by Our Lord Himself. There is a mass of proof that
it was.

There are the texts of the New Testament. There are the unbroken
traditions. There is the fact that all the divisions, quarrels, and
heresies of the very earliest years turned _not_ on the denial of
Godhead, but on the attempt to rationalize its presence one way or the
other, either by saying that the Godhead was separate from, though in
some way accompanying, the Man Jesus: or by saying that the Godhead only
was present and the Humanity an illusion. There is the Johannine and
Ignatian documentary evidence. There is the Pauline. And there is
nothing on the other side.

It is no answer to say (wrongly) that the Johannine evidence _may_ not
be, or (rightly) that the Pauline _is_ not that of an apostle who heard
Our Lord. It is no answer to say that the first Christians were
following a misguided enthusiast who suffered from illusions. (Mr. Wells
is afraid to say that.) The point is that these first writers wrote for
people who had met and known scores of witnesses, and that these
evidently took the doctrine of Our Lord’s Divine Origin for granted.

Before critical examination grew detailed men could say vaguely that the
Gospels were of very late fabrication, and that there had been plenty of
time between the Crucifixion and the first documents for legends to grow
up and for living memory to die out. They cannot say that to-day.

They could, till recently, pretend that the Ebionites were not the
heresy of one Ebion, but the original Christian Church. They cannot say
that now. Historical Science is against them. They are free to say that
the doctrine of Divine Origin was a folly and an illusion in its
Propounder and His apostles. They cannot say it was not held by them. To
say _that_ is simply bad History. It is bad History also to admit the
contemporary character of a document, such as a gospel, and then to
discard at will and call an “interpolation” or “corruption” any part of
such document as does not fit your theory.

In that connection (the arbitrary and contradictory rejection of all
inconvenient evidence in documents the general authenticity of which is
admitted) let me turn to another of Mr. Wells’s unhistorical lapses: the
strange idea that the assertion of Our Lord’s Divinity did not much
matter, anyhow, and that the violent opposition aroused from the very
origin by Our Lord Himself and by the Catholic Church which He founded,
was due to His bidding men to love one another and recognize the
Fatherhood of God: to the very vaguest and most general precepts out of
all that vast and consistent body of morals and doctrine, most of it
highly particular, for which the Faith stands.

Historically that assertion is ignorant, and, indeed, any man with a
reasonable sense of values might see that it could not but be nonsense.

Why should anyone get very angry with a man for saying that people ought
to love one another? Or for telling them to lead kindly lives? Or for
telling them to acknowledge a righteous Creator? In point of fact, if we
are to reject tradition and only trust the fragmentary records of the
four Canonical Gospels (as Mr. Wells does in everything which is not (a)
supernatural, or (b) favourable to Our Lady), we know that Jesus Christ
was put to death for _Blasphemy_. He was declared guilty of a specific
crime meriting death, and that crime was refusing to deny that He was
the Son of God: “We have a law,” said the Jewish authorities who
demanded His execution, “and by that law He must die.”

We also know, according to the same record, that the Roman authorities
were reluctant to allow Him to be put to death. They yielded to the
intense demand of the Jewish authorities, which demand turned wholly
upon what they regarded as His blasphemy in calling Himself Divine. But
so strong is the power of imagination in your Modernist that he can get
himself to prefer some visionary thing of which he has no record at all
against the plain statement of a text, even when he himself accepts that
text.

Again, the persecution to which the Catholic Church has been subject
from its origins, has _not_ been a persecution directed against such
general doctrines as those of a beneficent Creator, of charity, etc. How
could it be? It has been a persecution directed against a definite,
organized Religion, packed with mystery and affirmation, which Religion
clashed and clashes with non-Catholic Religion and social ideas outside
of itself.

No one persecuted the Jews for believing in one God and refusing to
accept Pagan gods. But then, they did not say that their religion had
universal authority: the Catholic Church and its Founder did say that of
theirs—and do so still. It is simply silly to think that anyone would
have persecuted anyone else for telling people to be gracious and to
look to happiness from a good life: yet in order to fit facts in with
his theory, the Modernist has to descend to that silliness.

The Catholic Church was persecuted because it proposed and practised a
ritual, doctrinal, particular, mystery religion claiming universal and
Divine authority, and therefore antagonistic to the official religion of
the Empire; and the heart of that mystery religion, the pivot on which
it all turned, was, from the very beginning, a belief, right or wrong,
in the Incarnation: that Christ was God. Ignorance of that historical
fact is, I say, a piece of first-class historical ignorance on Mr.
Wells’s part.

Next in importance, though still very important, is what I have already
alluded to, his quite unhistorical way of looking at the Gospels. Here I
must warn the reader that I take up an attitude which would have been
that of but a small minority fifty years ago (when the ideas Mr. Wells
still retails were in their hey-day), and which is still that of a
minority, but a rapidly growing minority to-day. I think the
old-fashioned criticism of the Gospel text has failed. Anyhow, Mr. Wells
takes the Gospels—or what Modernists chose to retain of them—as
contemporary records. In that he is right. He says that they have
miraculous and incredible “additions,” and he only accepts the documents
subject to his right to reject anything in them to which he is
unaccustomed. I know that in this attitude he is only copying what he
finds in a hundred textbooks of our time. But unhistorical such a method
is and unhistorical it remains no matter how widely it is used.

Mr. Wells is careful to say, as all the swarm of his sort continually
repeat, that he is treating the Gospels only as he would treat any other
book. But the historian, when he comes across a book crammed with
statements which he is certain are false, ceases to depend upon that
book. You may indeed say that the man who wrote such and such a document
credulously accepted a lot of nonsense, or got himself to believe what
he was saying or was simply telling lies; but then, by every standard of
historical criticism, documents packed full of falsehood are worthless.

You may say that the Gospels _may_ have behind them some tiny, ultimate
nucleus of fact, but that is all you can say: And you have no right
whatever to single out what you choose to regard as true from what you
choose to regard as false, simply upon the plea of probability. You can
say, “In these stories there does appear a certain human figure: he may
have existed: he probably did. But as he perpetually claims and
exercises miraculous powers, and, as these are incredible, there is no
certitude to be based on such documents.” But you have no sort of right
to say, “He certainly said this. He certainly did not say that,” on the
strength of such documents. Least of all can you exclude matter which is
in no way marvellous or unusual but simply out of gear with some
imagined theory, e.g. the Petrine texts, the intensely vivid touches
concerning Our Lady, Her rhapsody, Her Visitation, Her warning of
tragedy (such things are said to mothers every day), Our Lord’s
recommendation of her to St. John from the Cross, etc. None of these
things are miraculous: they are called “unauthentic” simply because they
support Our Lady and St. Peter—whom the critics don’t like. If the
Gospels had not about them the traditional appeal to the heart and to
the ancestral memories which the Modernist is too weak to strip off, our
author would throw over the _whole_ of them. If they came to him as
documents from another tradition he would certainly do so. Belonging as
they do to his past, he cannot bear to part with them altogether, and so
picks out a few words to retain for his consolation.

Similarly, it is grossly unhistorical to imagine impossible motives at
work in the composition of the Gospels. Suppose the Gospels to be
contemporary, but the work either of people too daft to judge reality or
of people who were telling lies. Then the historical way of attacking
them is to say: “They are contemporary; but they, being written under
such and such a motive consonant to the time, tell such and such
falsehoods, or are subject to such and such illusions for which the
character of the time will account.”

That is how critics with good historical knowledge, but of sceptical
temper, deal with, say, the marvels in The Venerable Bede’s
_Ecclesiastical History_, or in _The Life of St. Martin_. But if you do
not know the motives consonant to the time, you will make a muddle of
it—and Mr. Wells, not knowing the time, has made a muddle of it.

A very good example of his attempt at understanding something which he
has insufficiently studied is his comment on the double lineage given
for Our Lord through His Foster-Father, St. Joseph, and through His
Blessed Mother, “both leading to David.” Mr. Wells remarks: “As if it
were any honour to descend from such a man.”

It is a remark which presupposes that a first-century Jew would present
Our Lord’s descent from David merely as a social distinction. What an
extraordinarily ignorant idea! Yet even Mr. Wells must have heard that
the Jews expected their Messiah to be descended from David, and further,
that lineage was counted among the Jews, not only through a natural
father, but also through an adopted or legal father.

As another example (out of dozens) of the unhistorical character of the
whole thing, you have those descriptions made up entirely out of his
head, in which Mr. Wells excels as a writer of fiction, but which are
hopeless in History. It is admirable to attach imagination to History
for the purpose of giving life to known facts, but it is ridiculous to
try to make History live by inventing facts. How, for instance, does Mr.
Wells know that Our Lord was “lean,” was “strenuous,” or that He was
unkempt? Or that He was “very human”—I mean, with the modern connotation
of weakness in those unfortunate words?

I have said that the consequences between this attempt to “straddle”
between belief and unbelief leads one into muddle-headedness, and we get
muddle-headedness in these pages to the _n_th. Thus our author tells us
that his concern is not with the “spiritual or theological significance
of Jesus Christ”—whereupon he proceeds to spout theology page after
page. He makes certain that the texts in which Our Lord admits Godhead
are spurious; that the cry on the Cross is proof of an only human nature
in Christ; that the supernatural is “incredible”; that the Resurrection
was a false story, which began to be whispered and then talked, and at
last apparently foisted upon people. The whole thing is a theological
tract from beginning to end.

It is the theology of the evangelistic Protestant turned Modernist. The
old evangelical, Bible Christian theology is as deeply impressed upon
Mr. Wells’s work as Catholic theology is impressed upon, say, the poetry
of Claudel. It has all the consequences of that theology, especially in
the very unmistakable rhetoric. We have “The White Blaze of this Kingdom
of His” and the inevitable Oleograph of “Three Crosses on the Red
Evening Twilight.” It is as though all of this had been written as part
of a revivalist address; but revivalist language in the mouth of a man
who has ceased to believe is muddle-headedness gone mad.




                               CHAPTER X
                       THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH


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 Christian 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 American 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 “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 in 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.




                               CHAPTER XI
                                 ISLAM


The end of the Fifth Book and the beginning of the Sixth Book of Mr.
Wells’s _Outline of History_ deals with the early Persian religious
movements after the Incarnation, with the History of China during the
period corresponding to the early Dark Ages in Europe, and with the
rise, first preaching and original conquests of Mohammedanism.

The whole of it is well done; best of all the Chinese part, but also
very excellently the Mohammedan part. And here, as everywhere in the
book, it is in the rapid presentation of a long period vividly to the
reader’s mind that this writer shows peculiar talent.

The reason that Mr. Wells is always at his best when he is dealing with
China is that there is here no complication. He and his readers are on
the same level. We none of us know anything about Chinese history,
except a few experts, and what there is to know is apparently less
detailed, or, at any rate (to our completely foreign minds), less
manifold than what there is to know about our own old world between the
Asian and African deserts and the Atlantic.

Moreover, the temper of China, with its absence of religious enthusiasm,
is sympathetic to a mind which does not understand the qualities of that
emotion, save in the comparatively narrow field of what may be called
“Hot Gospel.” Moreover, Mr. Wells’s way of dealing with the story of
China is moderate and unexcited, because he is here completely removed
from that goad to which he reacts with such violence, the Catholic
Church. With no Catholic Church to send the blood to his head, he can
deal with matters as calmly as the proverbial “Mongolian Dynasties: so
restful; so impartial.”

In the whole of these pages on China I can find but one “jerk” provoked
by a sudden reminiscence of Christian doctrine (though, it is true,
exactly the same phrase is repeated ten pages later rather
irrelevantly)—I allude to the term “Immaculate Conception.” He is
talking of the experience of a Chinese traveller in India during the
seventh century, and in giving a list of “the preposterous rubbish”
attached to the Buddhist negations and despairs (which, by the way, Mr.
Wells never remarks to be negations or despairs), he includes (likening
it to a “Christmas pantomime”) the strange fairy-tales about what he
calls “Immaculate Conceptions” by monstrous animals.

Now, since I understand Mr. Wells does me the honour to read these
careful comments and corrections of mine upon his momentarily popular
work, I will put this in italics, so that he can have it before him in
sharp form.

_The term “Immaculate Conception” does not mean Incarnation._

Mr. Wells thinks it does. He thinks it means a miraculous birth without
a human father, and, in particular, the miraculous birth of a divine
being without a human father, of which central doctrine the instinct of
mankind is full—wherefore, indeed, it does but seem the more absurd in
Mr. Wells’s eyes.

Mr. Wells may here plead that he sins in company; and he may also plead
that, unlike the greater part of his errors, this error is not
particularly old-fashioned. Ill-educated men of the English-speaking
world constantly use the term “Immaculate Conception” under the
impression that it means a miraculous _incarnation_. They do it almost
as often as they talk of Socialism as meaning a wide distribution of
property.

But it will be to Mr. Wells’s advantage if, in future, he does not go
wrong on this point. Insignificant as it may seem to him, it is a very
characteristic test of general culture, and outside the world to which
he belongs everybody laughs at this common blunder. Mr. Wells would be
the first to ridicule a Continental journalist who should talk of “Sir
Gladstone.” But this blunder about the Immaculate Conception—a doctrine
affecting the whole of Christian theology, and a commonplace in the
mouths of all instructed Europeans—is far less excusable. The term
“Immaculate Conception” is a specific theological term, signifying the
absence in a human soul from its first moment of original sin. It has
nothing whatever to do with the idea that the origin of that human soul
is supernatural, save in the sense in which the origin of all our souls
is the effect of a supernatural creative act. Mr. Wells himself, for
instance, believes (as do, I am sure, much the greater part of his
readers) that he was immaculately conceived, and that the whole of the
human race is so.

We Catholics, on the contrary, believe this to be a peculiar state,
attaching to the Mother of Jesus Christ and to no other human being.

Is that quite clear? I hope so; and I hope we shall not see this howler
falling again from a pen so distinguished.

Mr. Wells is also unable, in this very clear, readable, and interesting
summary of the early Chinese story, to avoid two passing references to
his own exceedingly simple theology of “progress.” One is that in which
he makes certain that images of animals and men put into graves are but
substitution for earlier living sacrifices; the other is that in which
he refers to mankind as (in the matter of its conservatism) “still an
animal.” But, on the other hand, he modifies the general commonplace,
mechanical, explanation that the lack of change in Chinese culture is
due to the nature of its script. He modifies such a conclusion (which he
repeats from an earlier page) by the word “plausible.” He says, “There
is much that is plausible in this explanation,” and that is a perfectly
reasonable way of putting it. So also, he keeps his nationalism within
reasonable bounds when he calls the London Royal Society “the Mother
Society of Modern Science.” Many foreigners would be angry at reading
that phrase, and nearly all foreigners would smile at it; but there is
something to be said for it, all the same.

Just before his account of the early Chinese, he has a fairly clear,
though very brief, account of the origin of Manichæism, and clearly
states the very great effect it had upon producing Christian heresy: but
he is, I think, a little out of it in confining that effect to a
thousand years. It is most powerful to-day. The whole of what is called
Puritanism is based upon it. It is probably inseparable from true
religion, of which it seems to be a necessary parasite or poisonous
by-product. He also here brings in his King Charles’s head of Mithras,
and makes the error of saying that the cult was “enormously popular”
among the “common people.” We have no proof of that at all. What we do
find (as Mr. Wells also quite rightly notes) is what I have already
pointed out, its presence in the Roman army; but, as I have said in a
previous chapter, the idea of Mithraism was never really widespread in
the sense of affecting millions, let alone was it ever a serious rival
to the Catholic Church. That was one of those exploded guesses of the
nineteenth century, which still do duty in popular textbooks, but have
lost all serious historical value.

We have in the next sentence, by the way, another of those little
half-informed sneers at the Catholic Church which Mr. Wells seems to be
quite unable to avoid, when he talks of Mithras “proceeding from the
Deity” and gratuitously adds, to relieve his feelings, “in much the same
way that the Third Person in the Christian Trinity proceeds from the
First.” (He prints God the Father, by the way, without capitals—to put
Him in His place.)

Here, again, I can do Mr. Wells a good service, by giving him a little
elementary instruction in the outworn creed of Augustine, Anselm and
Mercier.

The dogma is not what Mr. Wells fancies it to be. He has read of the
“Filioque” discussion, though perhaps he does not know that it was a
pretext and not a cause; he is acquainted with this word “Proceed” in
connection with the Blessed Trinity, and therefore connects it with the
Holy Ghost in procession from the Father alone, thinking this to be the
original doctrine. As an historical fact the doctrine stood thus: that
the Son is born of the Father, and the Holy Ghost proceeds from the
Father and the Son. Also it is a doctrine implied at the origin of our
religion, and one which is found in high antiquity long before the
Greeks broke away from Unity. And though there was _late_ argument
against the double Procession, the complaint against the “Filioque” was
not only, nor perhaps chiefly, that it was innovation in doctrine as
that it was an unwarranted Western addition to the Creed.

I know that all these names and terms sound very ridiculous to Mr.
Wells, just as the etiquette of the gentry seemed ridiculous to Sancho
Panza; but, at any rate, an elementary historian ought to know the
historical facts about a doctrine which fills all History, even if he
thinks it absurd. A man may have no great respect for the Mormons; but
if he is writing a popular history of Utah he must not mix up Brigham
Young with Smith, or think that the Book of Mormon is only another name
for the Bible.

If Mr. Wells deserves praise—and he certainly does—for his treatment of
the Chinese passage, he also deserves it in a high degree for his
treatment of the rise and effect of Mohammed.

He avoids the too obvious temptations of indiscriminate praise (to which
he would naturally be led by the antagonism between Islam and
Catholicism), and he gives a lucid, well-proportioned account of those
famous ten years, their immediate preparation and their astonishing
sequel.

He illustrates the vast sudden sweep of Islam in the best possible
fashion by two accurate, plain and good sketch maps (on successive
pages, 383 and 384), and, what is perhaps best of all, he fully
appreciates and distinctly states the capital point that the success of
Islam in the East was in the nature of a social revolution rather than
of a conquest. There he is perfectly right, and the point is of great
value to the proper appreciation of all our history.

Very few historians have—in the past—seized the fact that the appeal of
Islam was to the slave and small-holder caught in the net of Roman Law
and enfranchised by the new subversive movement.

Mr. Wells sees that clearly and it is a good example of historical
judgment.

Moreover, in the whole of these thirteen pages he admits only two sneers
at Catholic doctrine; one in which he remarks that the plain man cannot
make head or tail of it (on p. 379); the other a few lines further on,
where he discovers a new and strange Catholic tenet to the effect that
Priests and Kings have a place in heaven equal to the great saints, and
superior to the common herd! (What fun it would be to put Mr. Wells
through an elementary examination on that philosophy which the whole of
our civilization once held, and which the more intelligent of us still
hold!)

He emphasizes quite rightly and very strongly the strength of
_simplicity_ in the Arab enthusiasm, and the solvent effect of this upon
the first societies which it approached.

But there is one bad unhistorical note running through the whole
description which spoils it: he does not understand the greatness of his
own people, of Europe: the European religion: the Græco-Roman culture,
even in its material decline. He does understand that its complexity of
social rank, of bureaucratic administration in the East, and of minute
legal regulations everywhere (a complexity inseparable from the heights
it had reached) subjected it to a heavy strain, and that the new
enthusiasm out of the desert relaxed that strain; but he does not
appreciate that the relaxation was also a general breakdown. Nor does he
appreciate the strength and majesty, the toughness and dignity, of this
age-long structure of European civilization now faced with so sudden and
overwhelming an attack of “levellers.”

But there is a worse failure: he does not grasp the fact that Islam,
being but a reaction against the highly developed Christian system of
society, law, and religion, therefore proceeded from that system. Islam
started more as a heresy than anything else, and was talked and felt
about as a sort of heresy. It is a modern error, due to our long
separation from it, which makes it look like a new religion. It is a
pity Mr. Wells has got this fundamental point wrong; but for that
essential misunderstanding of the situation and for his inability to
keep his text quite clean from insults against the Catholic
Church—usually dragged in by the hair—these pages might have had a
permanent value and might have been reckoned among the best pieces of
generalization of our time.

All the doctrines preached by Mohammed are discoverable in the great
body of Catholic theology. Not one came from outside. The Fatherhood of
God, the truth that God is Personal, that He is the Creator of all
things; that He is supremely good; that the human soul is immortal; that
it may attain eternal beatitude or sink to eternal wretchedness; that
the souls of men are equal in the sight of God; and that a man should
regard all other men as his brethren: such a complete “corpus” of
doctrine Mohammed did not find among the Jews (for they were
exclusive—Immortality was not an original tenet with them let alone the
dual fate of man); he did not find it taught in Buddhism, which despairs
and knows nothing of God, let alone of the Immortal individual soul.

Mohammedanism drew of necessity from _our_ culture. There was nothing
else for it to draw from. The Græco-Roman world overshadowed all its
origins. It is the failure to appreciate the magnitude of his own
ancestry, which thus makes Mr. Wells misunderstand the nature of the
first amazing growth of Islam. Or, rather, he understands one-half of
that magnitude, its burdensome complexity; but he does not understand
the wealth of mind out of which alone such complexity could come. That
is why he does not know that Islam submerged and degraded a higher
thing. We have the ruins of column and capital to prove it; but I do not
think that Mr. Wells would understand, say, Timgad. We have the _Veni
Creator Spiritus_ and the _Vexilla Regis_ and all that comes between
them; but I doubt whether Mr. Wells would understand what that great
poetry is or the profound theology that nourished it. He exaggerated
(though it is difficult to exaggerate) the material decline of the early
Dark Ages. For instance, they kept up their roads. Islam could never
make a road.

He does not know in how heroic a fashion our culture was kept alive
until it should again easily dominate the world. He has against his own
civilization something of a twist, like that which makes occasional,
cranky Englishmen anti-English. Nor does he grasp the central truth that
the bad blows which came nearest to destroying us, were not those of the
fifth and sixth centuries, but those of the ninth. He says, for
instance, that “Islam prevailed because it was the best social and
political order the times could offer ... the broadest, freshest, and
cleanest political idea that had yet come into actual activity in the
world.” You might just as well say that of Bolshevism. For, though Islam
was a much finer thing than Bolshevism, yet its appeal was of exactly
the same simple, subversive sort. It did not flood the East, Africa, and
Spain because it was “broad” or “fresh”—words of doubtful meaning. But
when he adds, “It offered better terms than any other to the mass of
mankind,” he is right, especially as regards the first area of its
expansion: Syria. It appealed there to the underworld of a very ancient
and fatigued civilization, and met an army largely recruited from the
Arabs themselves for its then decisive cavalry arm. These Arab troops of
the Empire half-sympathized with the enemy before battle and readily
joined them during and after it.

Nor must we forget that Islam failed to extirpate even in Syria the
religion which it attacked, nor again that in those areas there had been
years of desolation through war and violent religious quarrel with the
central power. It was not till the tenth century that Islam became
universal in Barbary. It swept Spain, because the ownership of land in
Spain was in too few hands; but the mass of the people of Spain retained
the Faith; and, but for their civilized traditions, their Mohammedan
rulers of three hundred years could not have achieved what they did in
building and tillage—for they certainly failed to do anything so great
in North Africa after the Christian culture of Barbary had been killed.

The defeat of Islam in the heart of Gaul had nothing to do with the
“vast line of communications from Arabia.” Can Mr. Wells really think
that the military base of the Arabs in Central Gaul was a base in
Arabia?

No. The victory of Charles Martel which saved all Europe in the eighth
century was a victory of European brain and muscle over Asiatic: not the
last. It was the rally of our people; and from that rally they pressed
forward unceasingly, until at last they undid the greater part of the
evil which had been done.

In his description of the Mohammedan world between the opening of the
eighth century and the great Mongol invasions, Mr. Wells is at his best.

He has an exceedingly difficult task to perform, because the
multiplicity and confusion of details, as well as the area to be covered
are very great; but he has managed to give the main features in good
relief and without loss of proportion. I have already spoken of the few
sentences here and there where his obsession against the Catholic Church
betrays him into folly, sometimes puerile, sometimes mixed with
startling ignorance, but the occasions for this sort of thing are rare,
for he is dealing with a time and place in which the Christian religion
was overwhelmed.

I expected, with some anxiety, the presence in this division of some one
of those anti-Christian sneers (which he might have got from Gibbon or
some other Voltairean authority) upon the Christians in Spain, but I am
glad to say that he has omitted any such—for the very good reason that
he does not here deal with Spain under the Moors.

He does justice, but not more than justice, to the beauty of detail in
Arabic architectural work, and has properly noted in his authorities the
literary beauty of which all those authorities assure us—though very few
of us (and certainly neither Mr. Wells nor I)—can judge it for
ourselves.

His great virtue of accuracy in detail also appears in his presentation
of the Arabic contribution to mathematics. What he quotes tends slightly
to exaggeration (for instance, the measurement of the angle of the
ecliptic is not an Arabic discovery, but was open to anyone to make to
within a fraction of a degree, at any time, for centuries, before
Mohammed. It was as a fact made by the Greek civilization, centuries
before).

He gives his right place to Averroës, though to say of this great mind
that it “made a sharp distinction between Religious and Scientific truth
and so prepared the way for the liberation of scientific research from
theological dogmatism, both under Christianity and under Islam,” is out
of proportion. What Averroës did was to propound a beginning of
something very like atheism or at the best pantheism. Nor was there any
sort of proportion between the restraint upon physical dogmatism and
vagary then exercised (and happily still exercised) by the supreme force
of Catholic theology and the corresponding restraint created by the much
too simple system of Islam.

Mr. Wells is further much to be congratulated upon his contrast between
the universality of writing and reading in the world of Arabic culture
at its height, and the lack of them in the contemporary world of Latin
culture, which was, perhaps, the chief external difference between them.
He is careful to note (in quoting another authority—and this is an
example of his accuracy in detail) the presence of the so-called Arabic
numerals in our civilization long before Islam arose. He very justly
puts down the development of algebra to Islam, and adds, what is much
less known, its possible or probable connection with India. He
emphasizes with right judgment the historic function of Islam in
creating a flux, as it were, between Asia and Europe and making a
passage for ideas between the world east of the old Roman boundary and
our world. But where he is most to be congratulated is in his emphasis
upon the effect of the Mongol irruption upon Europe, and much more upon
the Mohammedan world.

It is true that this feature in universal history has long been
appreciated. It has been fully present in the minds of historians for
more than a lifetime; but an appreciation of it is not yet popularized,
and Mr. Wells, writing for a popular audience, has underlined it much
more than any other contemporary whom I can call to mind. It would
perhaps have been better had he given the origins of the catastrophe (in
so far as concerned Islam) with more emphasis. It is true that the
horrible Mongolian disaster of the thirteenth century was on another
scale, and had ultimately far more effect; but the Turkish beginnings
are very important; he gives a short paragraph to the Kahzars (pp.
411–12) who determined the history of Russia—or at any rate _begin_ the
determination of it. He very rightly says that the second Turkish
branch, the Seljuks, raiding the original Mohammedan Empire of the Near
East, was more important. He gives this barely half a page, but he very
properly emphasizes the supreme importance of their breaking through the
mountain-wall which had hitherto been the defence of our civilization
upon the East from the Black Sea to the Levantine coast; and the few
lines in which he alludes to the battle of Manzikart and its effect, are
striking and just.

I am not surprised at, but regret, the inevitable failure of the author
to note here something which should give pause to every opponent of the
Christian religion such as himself. He perceives (and very well
describes) the breakdown of Islam as a culture after its early
brilliancy. He notes that the second chapter in its power was only begun
by that tide of abominable barbarism in the eleventh century—the Turkish
hordes. He might have noted—it is certainly a thing which every judicial
student of religion should note (unfortunately Mr. Wells cannot possibly
be judicial when the Catholic Church is anywhere within ten miles)—that
the Christian culture alone has not shown this recurrent “fainting
sickness.” Its material circumstance has risen and fallen slowly. It has
had a rhythm, as every living organism must have; but it has not had
fatal fatigues. _Its resurrections have been from within._ Attacks from
without have always strengthened it, whether it were attack upon the
spiritual body—martyrdom and heresy—or attack upon the political
body—Mohammedan and Pagan invasions. This Character in the Catholic
culture is unique. The comparative history of religion will give you no
parallel to this: and I say again that the impartial and really
sceptical student of religion would note immediately in his studies this
mark peculiar to the Catholic Church; account for it as best he could by
some natural explanation, but note it.

The long passages upon the Ottoman Turks, upon the great
thirteenth-century Mongol move, form the opening of Book VII. The
description is full and good, and the accompanying sketch maps
illuminating. Mr. Wells is to be blamed in sparing those men the
epithets which he is ready to fling at any Christian armies and
particularly at those which impose orthodoxy upon the mortal enemies of
our culture. But that is only to be expected; and I think I have wearied
the reader enough with emphasizing this unfortunate feature which
deprives his work of solidity and permanence. Our armies never reached
the barbaric depths of cruelty and mere destruction. They were creative.

The section on the travels of Marco Polo is first-rate. I find in it
again, of course, the silly little sentences against Catholicism which
he cannot avoid, the condemnation of the word “illiterate” coupled with
the word “theologian” as applied to Charlemagne; the contrasting of the
Catholic Church with an imaginary “teaching of Jesus” (p. 443); an
absurd suggestion that the Mongols would have become Catholics if it had
not been for the Priest; a sneer at the Catholic Church in the
thirteenth century (of all centuries!) for its loss of the conquering
fire of the early Christian Missions; a complaint that the Papacy did
not convert the Empire of Kubla-Khan—which he imagines to have been
thirsting for conversion to Papistry, but only willing (apparently) to
accept it in a Protestant form.

Apart from these inevitable breakdowns in judgment, such as fanaticism
can never escape, the description of the period is, as I have said,
good, and that of the travels of Marco Polo excellent. The succeeding
pages which begin the story of the Ottoman Turks I must leave to a later
chapter.

I lay down this, the best of the passages I have yet come across in this
popular work, and I cannot resist an inclination to muse a little upon
the conditions which make it a failure. I hope that I appreciate as much
as anyone the great qualities possessed by Mr. Wells for making it a
success. He need only, for instance, in this excellent summary of the
Middle History of Islam, with its very just and powerful appreciation of
the effect upon universal history of the “Asiatic Tide,” have written
with detachment to have made it a perfect piece of work; and had he
carried a similar detachment with him throughout all his pages he might
have done something enduring, or, if not that, at any rate something
valuable for his own generation.

But his nervous reaction against the Catholic Church is too strong for
him, and the result is that the colouring of the picture is all wrong.
In proportion as a set of known facts are remote from our own
civilization and do not touch upon the philosophy which made us all
(including Mr. Wells), in that proportion his judgment is well balanced
and his selection sound enough. That is why he is best when he talks of
China or Islam, third rate when he talks of his own blood, the European,
and quite below the average level of his popular contemporaries when he
has to deal with the great debate as to whether religion be from God or
from man, and as to whether the Catholic Church be what it claims to be
or a maleficent illusion.

It is perfectly possible to write enduring and, in a fashion, valuable,
historical stuff with as complete a conviction as Mr. Wells himself has
that all religion is from mankind, and the Catholic Faith not only
man-made, but ill-made.

What one cannot do is to write good History under the effect of mere
irritation, and exasperated irritation at that. There is between such
nervous weakness and a proper balance something comparable to the
contrast between the advocacy of a good lawyer and the temper of a
touchy witness. The lawyer, though pleading for a false cause, keeps
himself, if he knows his trade, detached from the passions of that
cause; presents the arguments soberly though cumulatively, throwing
stress upon what will achieve his result, but without betraying loss of
control. And that is what the historian should do: he should so write
that his reader says to himself, “I am reading what actually happened,”
and not so that the reader says to himself, “There he is off again at
his _bête noire_”!

Such criticism is parallel to what one has to say too often with regard
to military history. It is essential to good military history that its
writer should be absorbed in the combinations of the affair, and see
battle and campaign with apparent indifference to either combatant, or,
at any rate, with a major interest only in war as war. While the bad
military historian is he who, however great his interest in the main
affair, cannot avoid a Jingo note—or an anti-Jingo, they are equally
bad—in his writing. It is the difference between seeing human events
from above as on a map—which should be the whole business of an outline
of History—and seeing them slantways from the ground, and therefore out
of proportion.

There, then, is Mr. Wells on one great chapter of History: Islam. He
shows in it both his advantages and his defects. He is quick to grasp
the real meaning of it as a social phenomenon; he shows admirable skill
in simple and lucid concentration upon main historical features. But he
also betrays here his two main weaknesses. He can’t keep off a petty and
violent anti-Christian obsession which ruins his work and deprives it of
any chance of permanence; and he shows occasional examples of quite
startling ignorance in matters which are common knowledge to his
educated contemporaries.




                              CHAPTER XII
                        THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES


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 example 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 United 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 less 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!

I 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.




                              CHAPTER XIII
                            THE MIDDLE AGES


All the end of the Sixth Book of Mr. Wells’s History is taken up with
his judgment on what must properly be called the Middle Ages in
Europe—that is, the period which begins with the great awakening of the
West in the eleventh century and ends with the strains and difficulties
of the fifteenth, to conclude in the crash of the Reformation. It is the
period midway between that great stage of Christendom called the Dark
Ages which ends about the year 1000 and the split of Christendom which
comes after 1500. It covers nearly twenty pages.

It would not be just to criticize the writer for this comparatively
small allotment to what is, in the best judgment of cultivated European
men, the greatest achievement of our race. Mr. Wells would answer that
the Middle Ages were _not_ the greatest period of our race, _nor_ our
race the chief portion of mankind. He has a right to his own theory of
History: to treat the climax of united Christendom as but one episode
(and not a superior episode) in the little we know of human effort and
achievement. He is wrong, but he has a right to be wrong: unless,
indeed, one affirms that no historian may adopt the anti-Catholic view.
The scale, I say, is, in my judgment, warped. I think that an impartial
observer (could such an one be conceived), looking at the world from far
off, himself without religion, and judging things strictly by their
temporal effect, would still say that it was in Europe men did the very
most they ever could do, and that the time they did the most they ever
could do was the 500 years between the year 1000 and the year 1500.

To ask Mr. Wells to see things in that completely detached fashion would
be to ask too much; for he does not seriously pretend to look at the
story of mankind thus detachedly, but rather to interpret it in terms of
Evangelical English Protestantism, gutted of such supernatural doctrine
as it once possessed. I will therefore deal with this chief section of
the human story as briefly as Mr. Wells himself deals with it, although
it certainly deserves a much larger place. For, after all, Mr. Wells’s
whole quarrel is with the Catholic Church; and this was the moment when
the Catholic Church was producing its chief fruits after the long and
desperate siege of the Dark Ages. I think, in decency to such an
opponent, Mr. Wells ought to have made the section more important. But,
on the other hand, I remember that the opponent is an opponent; and if
one regards the Catholic Church as the bane of mankind (which is Mr.
Wells’s hereditary attitude), one would naturally hesitate to emphasize
the centuries of its most _united_ active effect upon our blood.

Three things have impressed Mr. Wells mainly in what he has been told by
his Oxford coaches on this tremendous episode in the human story.

_Firstly_, the spontaneity, energy, and united purpose of the Crusades.

_Secondly_, the apparent futility of the medieval Papacy in handling its
fine opportunity for creating an international (and a merely human)
state.

_Thirdly_, the decline and breakdown of Christendom, inevitably ending
in the shipwreck called the Reformation.

In the first of these points, he is right—though very restricted in
vision. In the second, he is historically quite wrong: the Middle Ages
were not a period in which a particular insufficient and later somewhat
tyrannical institution called “The Papacy” was trying to achieve, or
ought to have tried to achieve, a merely temporal unity, careless of
Catholic doctrine. In the third, he is still more wrong historically.
The Reformation was not an inevitable climax led up to by greater and
greater weakness in Christendom and not to be avoided. It might have
been avoided; and all that it did was very nearly undone again by the
recovery of European sanity after the first delirium of a minority had
passed. The destructive work of the Reformation would have been repaired
altogether but for the shortsightedness (from a European point of view)
of Richelieu in backing up the defeated Protestant Principalities of
Germany against the Empire; due to his considering nothing but the
advantages of the French Royal house and forgetting Christendom.

Mr. Wells is genuinely impressed by the first Crusade. He uses in
connection with it the novel German idiom “will to” crusade, and that is
the highest compliment he can pay it. He is impressed by these great
masses of men going eastward. He calls it a spectacle such as “had never
before been seen in the whole history of the world.” He does not,
indeed, appreciate that the thing was a vast French movement (for he
would not like any great movement to be French); he prefers to think of
it as Norman, under the old Victorian superstition that the Normans,
being vigorous, could not be really French at all. But he admires it,
because it was popular, because it was spontaneous, and, above all,
because it was big. He sees in just perspective the gradual
“officializing” of the Crusades, and he appreciates the fact that the
violent Moslem feeling of the later twelfth century was a reaction
corresponding to the Christian enthusiasm of eighty years before. He
puts the episode of Saladin well. But what I think he does not
appreciate is the way in which medieval civilization continued to hold
the crusading idea. He says in so many words that (by the third Crusade)
the “magic and wonder had gone out of these movements” and that “the
common people had found them out.” He ought to have been told by those
who coached him that, though changing conditions had made united popular
support more and more difficult, yet, right on into the fifteenth
century, the Holy Sepulchre was the ideal goal. Even in England (a
country which had little to do with the Crusades), you have Henry IV
dreaming of it all his life, and you have Henry V, 230 years after the
time when Mr. Wells thinks the ideal had been lost, complaining, as he
died, that he had not retaken the holy places.

However, he does appreciate and feels the Crusades, especially the first
one.

What he does not understand is the medieval Church, its necessary unity;
and that the Papacy was the condition and guardian of that unity. There
he is altogether wrong. He is out of perspective, and misses the
elements of the affair.

Here, again, I must make myself clear by yet another of what I fear my
readers may call ceaseless repetitions of an obvious principle.
Unfortunately it is not a principle obvious to Mr. Wells, or to the
readers for whom he writes, and it must be repeated again and again, for
it is almost certain to be misunderstood.

The principle is this. We are not primarily concerned in an historian
with his philosophy but with his history. No doubt bad philosophy must
always make bad history. And there is no true history, in the absolute
sense of the word “true,” which is written upon the basis of, or to
prove, a false philosophy. But in ordinary language, when we say “bad
history,” we do not mean “bad philosophy”; we mean a statement of facts
in false proportion: a bad outline. And it is most emphatically a bad
outline which those who coached Mr. Wells have given him of the medieval
historical period. He seems to think of it as something dominated by the
old “Giant Pope” of his traditional Bunyan. He shows some admiration for
the idea of the Papacy uniting Christendom because that subserves his
Comtist ideal of humanity-worship. But what he doesn’t understand at all
is that the real point of issue was not the Papacy—which is the central
organ of the universal Church—but the conception of the universal Church
itself: and of a Church not only universal, but visible and corporate.

To read these pages one would think such an idea of visible, corporate
unity had never existed—and yet it is the whole historical point and
meaning of the Catholic Church: then, now and for ever. He seems to
think that the Papacy was a particular institution doing something on
its own, artificial, like the League of Nations, and through defects in
organization failing to pull it off. But the Papacy was nothing of the
sort. It was original in the foundations of the Church. It remains
dominant in the Church to-day. It is the exemplification of unity, and,
to put it shortly, of the prime historical truth that the Catholic
Church is not a theory, but a thing.

For instance, he gives at great length the quarrel between the Popes and
Frederic the Second. He does not appreciate the elementary point, that
if Frederic the Second had won the Church would have broken up. It was a
life-and-death duel in which religion was at stake; and though naturally
a modern heir of Little Bethel sympathizes with Frederic merely because
he finds Frederic in opposition to “Giant Pope,” yet the historian
should take a larger view. He may dislike our Christian civilization,
and wish it were destroyed. He may rejoice to think how nearly the
successes of Frederic came to destroying it; he may praise Frederic for
“irrigating us” with anti-Christian ideas—notably Moslem—and regret that
our civilization won; but to represent it as a mere struggle between two
sovereigns, Pope and Emperor, is not history at all. It is like making
the struggle between revolutionary France and aristocratic England a
struggle between the tyrant George III against virtuous Republicans; or
the monster Robespierre against the Three Jolly Englishmen of the song.

All through this dealing with the Papacy in the Middle Ages, Mr. Wells
continues to show that intense local Protestant feeling, in which he was
trained, and misses the wide historical view altogether. He does not
recover it by his phrases—which are numerous—upon the grandeur of an
international ideal.

Popes have no international ideal, because the Catholic Church has no
international ideal. There might be no such things as nations (any more
than there were under the Roman Empire): perhaps in the near future
there will again be no such things as nations. But there would still be
a Catholic Church, and there would still be a Papacy.

This provincial attitude towards the Papal position appears in all
manner of phrases scattered up and down this part of Mr. Wells’s work,
as, for instance, that “men of faith and wisdom believe in growth and
their fellow-men; but Priests, even such Priests as Gregory VII, believe
in the false ‘efficiency’ of an imposed discipline.” Here is a phrase
which might have been written by a man in his sleep as to the first
part, and which is composed of mere chapel doctrine as to the
second—“believing in growth and one’s fellow-men” means nothing; nothing
whatsoever. It is gas. And, on the other hand, it is not a special sort
of lurking animal called “Priests,” who believe in the efficiency of an
imposed discipline, it is everyone who ever organized Man for any end
whatsoever; from coming down in time for breakfast to the salvation of
the human race.

I wonder that a man of Mr. Wells’s desire for intellectual distinction
should lend himself to such things.

But the worst historical blunder in all this is the repetition, at this
time of day, that the simple faith of the Dark Ages gradually broke down
through the increasing knowledge and intellectual activity of the Middle
Ages until at last it came to the complete disruption of the
Reformation.

That sort of thing was already blown upon when Froude was writing a
lifetime ago. To-day it lingers in a local tradition, but it has quite
disappeared—and for ever—from intelligent discussion of that great
religious catastrophe, from which we are at last, perhaps, slowly
recovering.

We all know, of course, what really happened. A civilization bursting
into increasing vigour, the rise of nations and of vernacular
literatures, an expansion of knowledge, all these tended, as does all
growth, to disrupt unity. Something much worse than any good force (and
learning is good), the catastrophe of the Black Death, shook society,
yet unity was preserved. Even the great schism of the fourteenth century
was healed.

The shipwreck called “the Reformation” came, as all shipwrecks come, by
blundering. So little was it inevitable, that once it had taken place
the warning was immediately taken to heart. The Church recovered itself,
only failed by an error of French policy to recover all Europe, is still
(if Mr. Wells will look about him) remarkably alive, and is increasing
its hold upon the intelligence of Europe.

Why, that is the very commonplace of our time! Yet, in these pages Mr.
Wells talks as though he were the contemporary of those worthy gentlemen
who cheered for the victory of Garibaldi in Exeter Hall and thought the
Faith would die with Pio Nono.

Thus he discovers with joy in certain ecclesiastics of the Dark Ages
“the spirit of Jesus still alive in them” (p. 422). He is persuaded that
Salerno (i.e. Physical Science) “cast a baleful light upon Rome” (p.
425). He will have it that the Church “had become dogmatic,” as though
(Great Heavens!) it were not dogmatic in the Earliest Fathers. He will
have it that “Jesus of Nazareth” and His preaching was “overlaid,” and,
worst of all, he’s back at the old nonsense that “Priests”—that is the
organization of the Church—think only about “their own power,” and not
about the Divine, unique thing which it is their business to preserve.

What on earth does Mr. Wells think that the average Catholic from the
beginning (say, in the second century) to the present day has accepted
in the matter of the Hierarchy? Does he think that this vast body called
the Catholic Church (vast in time, as in space, as in numbers) is a pack
of dupes, run by a few supernaturally cunning rogues? That he should
think us wrong and mistaken, subject to illusion in our doctrines, is
fair matter for discussion; but the idea of our being fascinated by
insincere conjurers is asinine.

That word is violent. I will repeat it. For it is exact. It is asinine
to judge of the Hierarchy (Innocent III, Gregory the Great, Anselm,
Langton, Ximenes, Bossuet, Leo XIII—I pick at random) that it is a
conspiracy of charlatans, and of the laity (St. Monica, St. Louis,
Lamoricière, O’Connell, Maritain, St. Francis, Pasteur) that they are
gaping yokels who swallow any tale.

What is this, again (on p. 427), of Catholic “contempt for the
intelligence and mental dignity of the common man”? If there is one
conspicuous contrast between your elementary, half-educated,
pseudo-scientific, “modern thought” and the Catholic Church, it is the
contempt of the former for the common man, and the fact that the latter
is based entirely upon the common man. The former—pseudo-science—is for
ever trying to prevent the common man from getting a drink, marrying,
having children, running his own house, living his own life, criticizing
the mandarins of politics or of sham statistics; the latter—the Catholic
Church—lives its whole life by consulting and realizing the common man.
To attack the Catholic Church as being too subservient to the common man
might be understandable; to attack it as contemptuous of the common man
shows a complete ignorance of its character.

It is in the same spirit that we have (upon p. 429) the remark that the
Catholic Church was, in the Middle Ages, “heading to its destruction.”
It is not destroyed. Really, I do assure you, Mr. Wells, the Catholic
Church is not yet destroyed. Will you not believe me? Must I give you
proof? It is arduous collecting proofs of the obvious.

It is in the same spirit that he says of Wycliffe that he was a much
abler man than St. Dominic.

Now I am sure Mr. Wells has never read a word of either. If he will read
anything proceeding from St. Dominic and anything proceeding from
Wycliffe, and put them side by side, I shall be content. He might as
well say that Proust was a greater writer than Molière.

It is in the same spirit that he tells us Wycliffe translated the Bible
into English “in order that people should judge between the Church and
himself,” not knowing that a vernacular translation of the Bible existed
in French, in German, in Bohemian, and even (probably, or certainly) in
the newly-coalesced English tongue.

It is in the same spirit that he postulates “organized dogma” as in
conflict with the “quickening intelligence and courage of mankind.” How
can intelligence act upon any problem without resulting in organized
dogma? How else did intelligence act on the problems of Astronomy? Is
there no dogma to-day on the rotation of the earth? What on earth has
“courage” to do with lack of dogma? Where is the courage in nourishing
mere doubt in a woolly brain?




                              CHAPTER XIV
                            THE REFORMATION


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 doing 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 the 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 passion 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 guaranteeing 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.
It 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 Reformation 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.

To 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 describe 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 they 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 in 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._”




                               CHAPTER XV
                        THE FRUIT OF DISRUPTION


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
Catholic 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 the
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 of 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 ideas 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 of 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 pleasant 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?




                              CHAPTER XVI
                                SUMMARY


I propose at this conclusion of a long examination upon Mr. Wells’s
_Outline of History_, first, to present a summary of the author’s work
as a typical popular teacher of our time in the English-speaking
countries, and then to end on a much more important note; the attitude
of the popular mind in that same world with regard to the only questions
which are of ultimate moment in human life: the decay of Christian
religion in that world, and the pace at which Christian truth is being
lost in it; the religious revolution through which the English-speaking
Protestant culture is passing, and the pace of that revolution.

The two subjects are closely connected, for it is clear that a man could
not be a popular writer on these things unless he agreed more or less
with his audience. Yet they are distinct; because the Follower of the
Herd, the popular expositor of which Mr. Wells is an example, is not
quite the same thing as the average of the Herd. It is in tune with the
average of the Herd; but it presents a separate object of study from the
Herd. You find in the Author the way in which reading and evidence react
upon a certain kind of mind: you find in his innumerable readers what
kind of faith or philosophy must be inhabiting them that they should
devour wholesale the stuff thus delivered to them as food.

First, then, as to the Author. The most prominent point I discover in
Mr. Wells as an historian is the acceptation of authority. It is a false
authority, and it is an acceptation bearing everywhere that mark which
is to the Catholic mind almost incomprehensible: blind acceptation of
textbooks. He does not reason with himself, and say: “What are my first
principles? Why and how have I come to believe in them”? On the
contrary, he takes them for granted, as though they were something so
native to the human race that no class of reader could question them.

For instance, all through his work he takes it for granted that the
supernatural does not exist; that the conception of it as real is an
illusion—particularly in the case of miracles.

He holds then, unconsciously, a certain philosophy and certain first
principles: to wit, what is called materialist _Monism_; that effect
follows fatally from material cause. That, therefore, we are in the
hands of fate and have no free will. That the words “right” and “wrong”
in human decisions are meaningless.

Yet he has no idea of what his own first principles are; for he
contradicts them at every turn. He is full of indignation—against the
Catholic Church, for instance—and indignation involves an idea of right
and wrong. He has a strong moral sense—as, for instance, of man’s duty
to his fellow-men. Again, his attitude towards the miraculous in the
story of Our Lord, and particularly towards the Resurrection, is not
only that of a man who disbelieves—which is natural enough—but that of a
man who thinks that everybody else will disbelieve the moment the
unusual character of such events is pointed out to them. Mr. Wells
thinks that people who believe are simply people who have not yet had
the advantage of being told that the things in which they believe are
not obvious nor of daily occurrence. He starts from a first principle
that only the obvious or the common can be true. Yet if he set down that
first principle in black and white its absurdity would appear, even to
him.

This inability to tell you what his first principles were or why he held
them, this taking for granted as admitted what all the best minds of
humanity have discovered to be worthy of profound questioning and
anxious debate, I call blind faith—faith which accepts without question
and without even the knowledge that question is possible. I have heard
it discussed whether such faith even in _true_ authority is an advantage
or a disadvantage. You get it in little children, and in some morally
admirable but intellectually over-simple minds. But to have that faith
in various _false_ (and conflicting) authorities which have no common
basis of intelligible theory is a very bad mark indeed against a man’s
intelligence.

The next major quality I discover in Mr. Wells’s historical writing is
one closely allied to the first. It is ignorance of the other side: not
knowing what is to be said for the case which the author not so much
rejects as remains unaware of.

For instance, Man imagines Gods; therefore, it would seem, the Gods he
worships are illusions: therefore any God he worships, including the
supreme God of Catholic theology, is a man-made illusion.

Well and good. That has been the attitude of a great many people, from
the remotest antiquity. But people worth arguing with know that there is
another, exactly contrary, attitude which may be stated thus: Men make
up Gods precisely because they have an instinctive recognition of the
existence of a God and of subordinate spirits: the process is one
corresponding to reality, though led into errors of appreciation. Both
positions may be argued, and have been argued, by the strongest of human
intelligences. One man will say, like Diderot, that the whole affair is
a mere projection of Man himself by his own imagination upon the void,
and be confirmed in this view by every new discovery of men’s gods in
various eras and places. While another will say, like Newman, “On the
contrary, if I find in all false religion something in common with true
religion, it does not weaken my hold on true religion; it confirms it.”

Now we find Mr. Wells in strange ignorance of the fact that this
opposite point of view exists.

Nor is this all. Over and over again he shows ignorance of general
European movements, of the results of modern scholarship, of definite
discoveries which have changed all our thought since he was young. Not
only does he not know his Europe: he does not know his books.

A very striking example of this I have noted in the early part of this
book. Mr. Wells thought, when I spoke of a widespread European (and
American) criticism of Natural Selection which is making that theory
untenable, that I had imagined the whole thing! He denied the existence
of such authorities and challenged me, in a violent pamphlet, to quote
names. He (and the reader) will find a few of the most prominent in an
appendix to this book.

Next I notice a violent necessity in him for simplification. The general
lines of History must indeed be simple; an outline must never allow
confusion through too much detail. But I do not mean that our author has
a powerful grasp of general ideas; I mean that he suffers from a weak
simplification due to an inability to grasp the multitudinous complexity
and the inhabiting mystery of things.

One example of this extreme simplification through weakness is the
facile reference of everything social to race. Thus the “black-white”
races of the Mediterranean have certain devotions, as, for instance, to
Our Lady; the superior “Nordic” stock has not. Then, what will you do
with the fact that the one province in Europe where there was the most
passionate devotion to Our Lady for century after century was Britain?
The desperate need for simplicity leads Mr. Wells to leave it out
altogether.

I might multiply instances. They abound throughout the work.

Now, all these characters are allied to, or rather spring from, that
quality which I noted in my author at the beginning of this long
examination, and which I have called “Provincialism.” It is an essential
insufficiency for his task. He does not know his Europe; he does not
know the world. He writes in the few terms and with the few conceptions
of a man going by the labels he finds in the newspapers and textbooks of
his native place: certain printed generalizations which he read in his
youth and never questioned. He is, therefore, when he talks of the great
world of Man, out of touch with the stuff of his subject. It is this, no
doubt, coupled with an excellent economy of words and lucidity of style,
which has given him his wide public for this book; it is also this which
makes the book read second-rate to minds of a higher culture, or of a
deeper and more varied experience; and it is this which confines its
existence as a book to a very brief period of time.

We are reading in this _Outline of History_ the work of a mind closely
confined to a particular place and moment—the late Victorian London
suburbs. Such a mind has an apparatus quite inferior to the task of
historical writing.

And that is why I said in my first review of this book, what I here
repeat: “It will have a vast circulation, especially in the New
World—and an early grave.”

I must end upon a much graver note. What are we to say of that world in
which a book like this has a sale which, however ephemeral, is at any
rate enormous?

The question is one that my contemporaries do not seem to have put to
themselves sufficiently. I mean, my Catholic contemporaries (for outside
the Catholic Church very few people nowadays put any questions to
themselves ultimately: they are content to drift and feel).

There has not, in my judgment, been nearly enough astonishment, alarm,
or even aroused and curious interest in the vast social transformation
of which we are the spectators.

Some of my contemporaries have criticized me with indignation when I
have said that, outside the Catholic body, the last fragments of
Catholic doctrine were rapidly dissolving before our eyes: yet surely
the huge sales of such a book as this are proof enough that what I have
said in this matter was true.

Within my own memory there remained of the Catholic scheme a most
insufficient, but still solid, skeleton structure maintaining society in
the English-speaking non-Catholic world. Within my own memory the
Incarnation was commonly held by rich and poor in England and America,
and very much of what the Incarnation implies was taken for granted in
the structure of society. An attack upon that doctrine, stated in so
many words, would have been violently offensive not forty years ago. As
for a mere taking for granted that it was false, the books doing this
were then thought eccentric. By a curious irony, the non-Catholic
English-speaking world connected such blasphemy with the specifically
Catholic cultures which were (in those days) alluded to as
“Continental.”

Side by side with this fundamental doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity,
which certainly such a brief time ago was the commonplace of all our
society, it possessed sundry other essential dogmas of Catholic
truth—the Personality of God, His omnipotence, His creation of all
things, the Immortality of the Human Soul, _and_ the dual destiny of
mankind: the conviction that man by his own free will might lose the
grace of God, and that if he lost it his eternal existence would be
marred and deprived of the end for which it was created. In plain
English, men believed in Heaven and Hell: particularly wicked men—upon
whom such ideas have the most salutary effect. The whole range of
emotions which arise from such doctrines as surely, and are as
inseparable from them, as a scent from a flower or the emotions of
landscape from the living eye, permeated society.

Not only were these doctrines retained with all their effect, but the
chief Catholic social disciplines still had value. Property was still
held to be a right, not a mere arrangement or a system. Its proper
distribution was thought a good: its capture by a few, an evil: the
Socialist attack on it as a principle, inhuman. The family was still the
unit of the State. The control of the parent over the child was taken
for granted and the action of the State, or of any other authority, was
regarded as a delegation, and a perilous delegation at that. Marriage
was normally regarded as indissoluble.

Behind all this remaining grasp of the last but most essential factors
in the general scheme of Catholic society—all that by which men could
still vaguely be called “Christians”—went the common-sense appreciation
of the truth that Man was Man: that we could not deal with Man by
experiment as a changeable being, that he was not a mere phase in
process of passing, but a fixed type with a known nature.

Man was—within my own memory—even to the highbrow non-Catholic world,
what he still is (I am glad to say) to the populace—the most certain,
the most fixed, known thing in the world; for Man knows himself as he
knows no other thing. Hence was there a security in the sense and
application of justice; hence was there a powerful comprehension of the
past. For it was rightly taken for granted that men had always acted
upon much the same motives. Hence was there a hearty recognition of the
human conscience (which every man discovers in himself), and a
corresponding contempt for sentimental excuses of misconduct.

Not only was this true of the dogmas, the disciplines, and the social
effect of such remains of the Catholic Church as survived in the
non-Catholic English-speaking world about us; but it was true of the
intellectual heritage. Plain logic was accepted. The reason was given
its due place. Men did not move by suggestion or by repetition; they
still examined; and the presentation to that older generation (which I
and all my contemporaries can remember) of statements unproved, the
confusion of scientific hypothesis with scientific fact, were ridiculed.
They were less and less ridiculed, it is true, as the nineteenth century
drew to its close. Confusion of thought became more prevalent, and the
swallowing whole of the last unproved and improbable affirmation in
Biology, Pre-history, or Textual Criticism was already growing to be a
habit. But the habit was not yet universal.

Now the lesson to be learnt from the immense sale of such a second-rate
popular book as Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ is that the old
doctrines, for the great mass of our modern English-speaking
non-Catholic population have gone. Mr. Wells ridicules the Resurrection;
the Incarnation he could, of course, not grasp, but _also_—and here is
the significant point—he does not think that others really entertain it.
He does not admit any part of the Christian scheme. On the intellectual
side he proposes as true things of which we know nothing; and as
obviously untrue things on which the best minds of Europe have long been
assured.

Note you, in all this he is not an innovator. He challenges no one. He
risks nothing. He follows the sheep. Mr. Wells makes no attempt to be a
leader. He merely puts, in a nice, clear, simple fashion, that which the
myriads to whom he addresses himself already believe—that there is no
Creator, no Saviour, no Resurrection, no Immortality, no Communion of
Saints.

Is not this a portent? In my judgment it is. It is not true that the
modern world as a whole has suffered such a revolution. The Catholic
culture in the continent of Europe not only stands strong, but is
rapidly increasing in strength. The two branches of reaction against it
(the German Protestant reaction of which Prussian atheism was the
climax, and the more respectable anti-clericalism of French and Italian
tradition) are both manifestly weakening. The doctrines that would
dissolve society have been exposed and are now counter-attacked with an
increasing vigour. Europe—the Soul of the world—is hesitating whether it
will not return to the Faith: without which it cannot live.

But is that so in the world to which we belong, or at least of which we
Catholics are exceptional inhabitants? Is it true of that
English-speaking culture which was founded upon the Bible and whose
peculiar virtues and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages (many of
them alien to us Catholics, but all well comprehended by us), were the
texture of life in England and Scotland, in the English Dominions, and
in the United States?

I think not. Men hesitate to say it; they are afraid of facing the truth
in the matter, but truth it is: the foundations have gone.

I do not mean that in their place other foundations may not be
discovered. I do not predict chaos, though chaos is a very possible
result of it all. What I do say is, that Christian morals and doctrine,
and all that they meant, are, in our English-speaking world much more
than in any other part of contemporary white civilization, in
dissolution.

This is no place in which to discuss the remedies (if any practical
remedies be available) or even the probable results of so vast a
revolution; but it is the place in which to emphasize the truth that the
revolution has taken place.

It is a revolution in doctrine, discipline, morals, and intellectual
action, as complete as any that we can find recorded in History since
the conversion of the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church. It applies
only to a section of the modern world, the section which I have
mentioned: Britain, America and the Dominions; but that is a very
important section of the modern world, and (what is of chief interest to
us) it is the section wherein we live, of which we are citizens, to
which we owe allegiance, and with whose fate our own and that of our
children is bound up.

I will add no more.




                                APPENDIX


It is cumbersome to load a book intended for general reading with
quotations from Authorities and a mass of footnotes. Moreover, a reader
of intelligence desires to hear the arguments rather than a mere list of
expert names.

On this account, in the first draft of this book (which appeared in the
form of a series of articles in the Press), while giving some of the
main arguments against the old Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, I
omitted particular names, and only alluded in general terms to that mass
of modern criticism, increasing in volume, which has undermined it.

Mr. Wells was foolish enough to write a hurried pamphlet in which he
made the strange affirmation that my arguments against Natural Selection
were of my own invention and that I cited no modern critics of Darwinism
because no such critics existed: the intellectual movement of which I
spoke was a figment of my brain, and I could quote no authorities
supporting it.

From this it was clear, though astonishing, that Mr. Wells had
undertaken to write popular stuff about Evolution without so much as a
casual acquaintance with the advance of biology in our generation.

I therefore append here the names of some few among the many authorities
upon biological science who have exposed the error of Natural Selection.

It is a short list, drawn up at random, and in no particular order of
date, and containing only some forty odd names such as a man of quite
ordinary general education like myself with only a general interest in
such matters can jot down from memory. It could, of course, be extended
indefinitely by anyone setting out to make a complete total of the
first-class scholars who have left Darwinism the wreck it is to-day. I
do not pretend, of course, to more than a very slight reading among any
of these few. I give them only as sample names out of an increasing
roll, professors in the great universities (Paris, Vienna, Leipzig,
Harvard, Montpellier, Tübingen, Amsterdam, Columbia, Bologna, etc.
etc.), a President of the British Association, men eminent in special
research, and famous biologists who have determined the current of
modern opinion in the course of my lifetime:—

                            CUÉNOT
                            DELAGE
                            ROSA (DANIELE)
                            KOLLIKER
                            DIAMIARE
                            CARAZZI (DAVID)
                            BATESON
                            CHAUFFARD
                            HENSLOW
                            HYATT
                            COPE
                            EIMER
                            PIEPERS
                            HARTMANN
                            DE VRIES
                            NÄGELI
                            PACKARD
                            JAECKEL
                            GOETTE
                            HABERLANDT
                            SACHS
                            KASSOVITTZ
                            STROMER
                            DEPÉRET
                            VOGT
                            MORGAN
                            DAVENPORT
                            LE DANTEC
                            FLEISCHMANN
                            DRIESCH
                            DENNERT
                            DI BARNARDO
                            WIGAND
                            WOOLF
                            SCHMARDA
                            SERGI
                            PFEFFER
                            VIALLETON
                            CONN
                            OSBORN
                            DACQUÉ

A few quotations may not come amiss:—

            “We [biologists in general] have come to the
            conviction that the principle of Natural
            Selection cannot have been the chief factor in
            determining species....”

(PROFESSOR BATESON, President of British Association, 1914, speaking in
Melbourne.)

            “Natural Selection never explains at all the
            specifications of the animal and vegetable forms
            that are actually found....”

            “For men of clear intellect Darwinism has long
            been dead....”

(DRIESCH.)

            “We have now the remarkable spectacle that just
            when many scientific men are all agreed that
            there is _no part_ [my italics] of the Darwinian
            system that is of any great influence, and that,
            as a whole, the theory is not only unproved, but
            impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses
            have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted
            as a fundamental fact....”

(DWIGHT, Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University.)

            “Selection does _not_ [my italics] bring
            about transgressive variation in a general
            population....”

(PROFESSOR MORGAN, Professor of Experimental Zoology at University of
Columbia, writing in 1919.)

            “Animals and plants would have developed much as
            they did even had no struggle for existence
            taken place....”

(NÄGELI.)

            “Selection is in no way favourable to the origin
            of new forms.”

            “The struggle for existence, and the selection
            that goes with it, restricts the appearance of
            new forms, and is in no way favourable to the
            production of these forms. It is an inimical
            factor in evolution.”

(KORCHINSKY.)

            “On the question of knowing whether Natural
            Selection can engender new specific forms, it
            seems clear to-day that it cannot.”

(DELAGE.)

            “One could possibly imagine a gradual
            development of the adaptation between one muscle
            cell and one nerve-ending, through selection
            among an infinity of chance-made variations: but
            that such shall take place coincidentally in
            time and character in hundreds or thousands of
            cases in one organism is inconceivable.”

(WOLFF, _Beitrage zur Kritik der Darwinischen Lehre._)

            “The Darwinian theory, favourably received till
            of late, has lost ground more and more, and may
            now be said to have failed.”

(ROSA, Professor of University of Padua, _Lamarckismo_, etc. Bulletin of
the Italian Entomological Society, 1910.)

            “In conclusion, we may say that the Darwinian
            theory has completely failed.”

(CARAZZI, writing in 1919. See also his speech at Florence in November
of the same year.)

            “Never yet has it been possible to refer [to a
            common origin] methodically and without error
            any two types or even large groups.”

(DACQUÉ, _Paleontologie Systematik und Descendenzslehre_. Jena, 1911.)

            “It is pretty clear that we must wholly abandon
            the Darwinian hypothesis.”

(CUÉNOT, _La Génèse des Espèces Animales_. 1921. Second edition.)

I think that is enough.




                                 INDEX


 Albigenses, 97

 Alphabet, 53

 Alva, 100

 Andaman Islanders, 38

 _A priori_ Arguments, 20, 21–4

 Arabs, 80–3

 Arian Heresy, 76

 Aryan tongues, 48

 Augustine, St., 32, 95

 Austrasia (Neustria), 85–6

 Averroës, 81


 Bear, Polar, 16, 21

 Bernard Shaw, Mr., 10

 Bible Christian, 10, 13, 31, 32, 43, 50, 90

 Buddhism, 59–63


 Carthage, 45, 57, 64

 Catholic Church, 6, 7, 31, 49, 58, 70, 72–4, 82, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98

 Cato, 64

 Cave drawings, 43

 Charles V, 101–2

 Chinese Culture, 52, 53, 56, 77–9

 Clovis, 86

 Cobbett, 6

 Coleman, Professor, 29, 30

 Count, Roman Title, 87

 Creation, 9 ff., 12

 Croll’s “Theory of Glaciation,” 8, 29

 Cromwell, Oliver, 105–6, 109

 Crusades, 89, 90


 Dark Ages, 84–8

 Darwin, Charles, 12, 13, 73

 Design, 11–15, 17, 22

 Driesch, 11, 27

 Dwight, Professor, 26, 27


 Elephant, 17

 Eoanthropos, 30

 Evolution, 10, 17, 48.
   _See also_ Natural Selection

 Experience, Argument from, 20


 Fall of Man, 28, 32, 33

 Fathers of the Church, their support, of Evolution, 12, 26

 Feudalism, 84

 Filioque clause, 78–9, 87

 Franks, 86

 Frazer. _See_ “Golden Bough”

 Frederic II, 91

 Fustel, 86


 Gentry, 6, 49

 Geological argument, 21, 26

 God, 11–13, 27, 34–9, 40

 “Golden Bough,” 8, 45

 Gospels, Mr. Wells’s attitude towards, 5, 68–72, 87

 Grant Allen, 8, 36


 Huc, Abbé, 62–3

 Huguenots, 100, 102

 Human Sacrifice, 45–6.
   _See also_ Sacrifice

 Huss, 95, 96


 Ignatius, St. 73

 Immaculate Conception, 77–8

 Immortality, 42, 61, 80

 Incarnation, 62, 64, 67–72

 Islam, 77–84, 87, 88, 97


 James II, 106–7

 Jewish Race, 39, 59

 Julius Cæsar, 65–6


 Kingship versus Priesthood, 55, 56, 57, 58, 91


 Lamarck, 11, 27

 Lang, Andrew, 39, 45

 Language, Development of, 47, 48

 Lichfield, Strange case of Commercial Traveller in, 103

 Luther. _See_ Reformation


 Man, Age of, 26

 Marco Polo, 82–3

 Marie Antoinette, 108

 Materialist, 31, 42

 Medicine, Practice of, in Dark Ages, 85

 Mediterranean, 49, 52

 Mesopotamian Culture, 52

 Middle Ages, 89–93

 Mithras, 74–6

 Modernist, 35, 61, 68–9, 75, 108

 Mogul Empire, 98

 Mohammed. _See_ Islam

 Mongols, 82

 Monism, 110

 Morillet, 42

 Muret, Battle of, 97


 Napoleon, 5, 109

 Natural Selection, 10 ff., 14
   Arguments against, 19 ff.
   Implication, 15
   Summarized, 18

 Neanderthal Man, 30, 44, 49

 Nestorians, 87

 Normans, 86


 “Old Man,” Supposed origin of God, 35–6

 Original Sin, 31, 32

 Ottoman. _See_ Turks

 Our Lady, 71, 75

 Our Lord, Mr. Wells’s description of, 68–73


 Palæolithic Man, 30, 42, 43, 44

 Parliament, 104–5

 Paul, St., 72–4

 Persecution, 70, 107–8

 Persian Gulf, 52

 Pig, 25

 Piltdown, Fossil fragments of, 30

 Popes, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 100

 Priesthood, 51 ff., 54, 55, 56, 57–8

 Protestant Culture, its present attitude, 110–14

 Provincialism, 4


 Recapitulation, Theory of, 28

 Red Sea, 52

 Reformation, 89, 92, 93, 97–103

 Resurrection, Mr. Wells on, 74–5

 Robespierre, 108–9

 Rome, 64, 65–8

 Russians in England, Legend of, 75


 Sacrament, 40

 Sacrifice, 40, 41, 45, 74–5

 Savages, Evidence from, 38

 Shakespeare, 102–3

 Stonehenge, 46

 Sumerian kingship, 56


 Thomas Aquinas, St., 34, 95

 Trinity, Doctrine of Mr. Wells’s ignorance upon, 34, 78–9

 Turks, 82

 Type, “Fixed” or “Stable,” 16, 21, 24–5, 26, 38


 Veneration, 40, 41

 Vialleton, Professor, 12, 28, 29


 Wallace, biologist, 12, 13

 Weissmann, 17

 Wells, Mr. _See also_ Bible Christian, 3–4
   Attitude to Christ, 68–9, 75–6
   Disadvantages, 5–8, 43–5, 49, 51–2, 64, 67, 73, 74–6, 83, 97, 103–4
   Dislike of Catholicism, 2, 3, 6, 47, 54, 58–9, 64, 85, 89, 93–4, 99
   Dislike of Rome, 65–6
   Linguistic gifts, 8
   Out-of-dateness, 29
   Summarized, 110–12
   Talents, 2, 3–4, 50, 51–2, 64, 82

 Westphalia, Peace of, 107

 Wycliffe, 92–3, 96

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 Page           Changed from                      Changed to

    8 thought slight, is sound: the    though slight, is sound: the
      outline                          outline

 ● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
 ● Used numbers for footnotes.
 ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.





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