D 
 
 ^/ 
 
 Errors of H. G. Wells 
 
 </? Catholics Criticism of the 
 " Outline of History " 
 
 By 
 RICHARD DOWNEY, D.D, 
 
 t t t t t t 
 
 4. 
 
Borne Errors of H. G. Wells 
 
Some Errors of H. G. Wells 
 
 atholics Criticism of the 
 " Outline of History " 
 
 By 
 RICHARD DOWNEY, D.D. 
 
 t t t f t 
 
 t t t t 
 t t t 
 
 t t 
 t 
 
 ^, Cincinnati, Chicago 
 
 BENZIGER BROTHERS 
 
 Printers to the 
 
 Publishers of 
 
 Holy Apostolic See Benziger's Magazine 
 1921 
 
To the Reader 
 
 THIS booklet is a revised reprint of three 
 articles which appeared in The Month for 
 August, September, and October, 1920. They 
 are republished by kind permission of the editor 
 of The Month, to whom the author is indebted 
 for many helpful suggestions. The references 
 throughout to The Outline of History are to the 
 edition in two volumes published by George 
 
 Newnes, Ltd. 
 
 R. D. 
 
 
 461923 
 
* 
 
Some Errors of H. G. Wells 
 
 FOR many months the fortnightly parts of 
 Mr. H. G. Wells's Outline of History have 
 dazzled the eye and fired the imagination, 
 and, at last, the twenty-fourth and concluding 
 part, bearing on its cover a coloured map of 
 " The United States of the World," has appeared, 
 some few weeks after the publication of a revised 
 edition of the complete work in one volume. 
 The time is opportune, therefore, for a survey 
 of this universal history. The present pamphlet 
 is not meant to be an exhaustive critique, but 
 rather an antidote to some of the chief errors 
 into which it would seem that Mr. Wells has 
 been betrayed by his prevailing bent of mind. 
 For his literary craftsmanship, his art of presen- 
 tation, his selective judgment, and his courage 
 in attempting such a gigantic task, it is impossible 
 not to have admiration, and on this account it 
 is the more regrettable that he has allowed his 
 preconceived philosophical and religious notions 
 to enter so largely into what purports to be a 
 record of fact. The result is that the outline 
 with which he presents us is, in many places, 
 badly warped. 
 
 " The pre-human ancestor was an ape," says 
 Mr. Wells in his errata to Parts L, II., III. He 
 
'. 4NTHROPOLOGT 
 
 makes this statement with the confidence of a 
 man who has established it beyond rebuttal. 
 Nor is there any substantial modification of this 
 opinion in the note on this point which he prints 
 in his final errata: " There is too much stress 
 upon the lemur in the account of the ancestry 
 of man. The ancestor of man and the higher 
 apes was probably a ground monkey and not a 
 lemur." It is therefore worth while to examine 
 the evidence on w r hich his statement rests, the 
 more so as the examination throws an interesting 
 sidelight on Mr. Wells's method of handling 
 facts. Chief amongst the anthropological data 
 upon which any judgment as to the simian origin 
 of man must be based are the extant remains 
 of " primeval man," and these are usually divided 
 into three groups : 
 
 (I.) Remains supposed to date from the late 
 Pliocene or early Pleistocene epoch (c. 550,000 
 B.C.) the Pithecanthropus, Eoanthropus, Homo 
 Heidelbergensis, and the Galley Hill man. 
 
 (II.) Remains of the Homo Neanderthalensis, or 
 Primigenius (c. 50,000 B.C.). 
 
 (III.) Remains of the Homo sapiens^ or rectns 
 (c. 35,000 B.C.) Aurignacian, Cro-Magnon, and 
 Grimaldi types. 
 
 Mr. Wells's task is to show how the Homo 
 sapiens evolved from an ape. He devotes a 
 xvhole chapter (VIII.) to the Pliocene man of 
 Group I., without shedding the faintest ray of 
 light on his origin. He discourses pleasantly 
 1 P. 762 
 
THE ANCESTOR OF MAN 
 
 of Pithecanthropus, and illustrates his remarks 
 with a picture of the " possible appearance " of 
 Pithecanthropus no mean achievement when we 
 reflect that the entire remains consist of a thigh- 
 bone, two molar teeth, and the top of a skull. 
 What he does not tell his readers, however, is 
 that the Pithecanthropus is the discredited har- 
 binger of the whole family of " missing links." 
 Time was when popularizers of " science," 
 following the lead of Haeckel, insisted on the 
 continuous, gradual development of man from 
 the ape through this very Pithecanthropus. Thus, 
 Professor Schwalbe in 1909 declared from his 
 chair in the University of Strassburg that " what 
 Darwin missed most of all intermediate forms 
 between apes and man has been recently fur- 
 nished. E. Dubois, as is well known, discovered 
 in 1893, near Trinil in Java, in the alluvial deposits 
 of the River Bengawan, an important form repre- 
 sented by a skullcap, some molars, and a femur. 
 'His opinion much disputed as it has been 
 that in this form, which he named Pithecanthropus , 
 he has found a long-desired transition form is 
 shared by the present writer. Volz says with 
 justice that even if Pithecanthropus is not the 
 missing link, it is undoubtedly a missing link." 1 
 Since that time, however, anthropologists have 
 pointed out that it is not at all clear that the Java 
 remains belong to the same skeleton, since, though 
 found in the same strata, they were some con- 
 siderable distance apart. Anatomists, too, have 
 1 Darwin and Modern Science, pp. 127, 128. 
 
NEANDERTHAL MAN 
 
 fallen foul of this " intermediate form," many 
 experts pronouncing the thigh-bone purely human 
 and the teeth and skull purely simian. To add 
 to the general confusion, the date of the remains 
 is a very vexed question; and, finally, the whole 
 status of the Pithecanthropus has been rudely 
 shaken by the recent discovery of several supposed 
 types of prehistoric man which differ essentially 
 from the Pithecanthropus notably the Piltdown 
 man, at present in course of reconstruction from 
 the remains found in Sussex as recently as 1912. 
 As a " missing link," therefore, the Pithecanthro- 
 pus is pretty generally abandoned; but Mr. Wells, 
 though he has not succeeded in finding, another 
 to take its place, holds fast to his faith in the 
 kinship of men and monkeys. 
 
 In the next chapter he addresses himself to a 
 consideration of the primitive men represented 
 by Group II. To these we are somewhat abruptly 
 introduced as follows : " In the earlier phase, the 
 third Interglacial period, a certain number of small 
 family groups of men (Homo Neanderthalensis), 
 and probably of sub-men (Eoanthropus), wandered 
 over the land, leaving nothing but their flint 
 implements to witness to their presence. " ] Cer- 
 tainly in 1857 the top of a skull and a few bones 
 were found in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf. 
 The abnormal shape of the skull led many to 
 suppose that it represented a hitherto unknown 
 type of man, and this Surmise gained support by 
 the subsequent finds of skulls and skeletal parts, 
 
 1 P. 47- 
 
EXIT THE APE-ANCESTRT THEORY 5 
 
 notably in Belgium in 1884, and in Croatia in 
 1899. These are the facts on which Mr. Wells 
 exercises his brilliant imagination. But what we 
 really want to know is, where did this Homo 
 Neanderthalensis come from ? The average 
 reader of Mr. Wells's serial gathers the impression 
 that this second type in some mysterious way 
 " evolved " out of the first, and certainly Mr. 
 Wells says nothing to undeceive him. Yet the 
 gulf between these two groups has never been 
 bridged. Thus Mr. E. O. James, in his recent 
 Introduction to Anthropology (1919), says: " In 
 our opinion Pithecanthropus does not represent 
 either a precursor or an early phase of Neanderthal 
 man, but a development on lines of its own. . . . 
 There is good reason to believe that the Neander- 
 thal type does not represent a development of 
 Pithecanthropus " } And even if it did, it would 
 not help Mr. Wells in the least, since he admits 
 that after lasting out for more than 200,000 
 years the " Neanderthaler race " became extinct: 
 " Finally ... a different human type came 
 upon the scene, and, it would seem, exterminated 
 Homo Neanderthalensis ."* So, in any case, exit 
 the man who was descended from an ape. 
 
 Mr. Wells does not seem to have heard of the 
 modern difficulties against his ape-ancestry theory. 
 In the course of an article on " The Evolution 
 of Man and his Mind," in Science Progress for 
 July, 1920, Major Thomas Cherry contends that 
 " back teeth " are not " evidence of our simian 
 1 P. 12. 2 p. 52. 
 
"HOMO SAPIENS' 
 
 ancestry, but on the contrary, quite the opposite" ;* 
 that " Man's skin is not a monkey's skin minus the 
 hair. It is far better supplied with sweat glands, 
 and man can thus survive a degree of exposure 
 to the sun which is speedily fatal to a monkey. 
 Man's naked skin is a conspicuous contrast to 
 the condition of all the other primates "; 2 and 
 sad blow to Mr. Wells, with his diagrammatic 
 picture of " foot of man and gorilla " " the 
 specialized monkey foot may [thus] be ruled out 
 as a stage in the ancestry of man." 3 All this 
 chatter of Mr. Wells about arboreal apes and his 
 highly imaginative descriptions of Pliocene and 
 Neanderthal man are somewhat beside the point, 
 since " no stage in the ancestry of man may 
 have been very like either one or other of these 
 extinct races." 4 We are relieved, therefore, when 
 Mr. Wells turns his attention, and ours, to the 
 new human type, indicated by the third group 
 of remains, the Homo sapiens, or recens. We are 
 consumed with eagerness to know something of the 
 antecedents of this race; we are thrilled to think 
 that in this chapter Mr. Wells is at last about to 
 solve the knotty problem of our simian ancestry. 
 But all the knowledge that Mr. Wells imparts on 
 this vital question is compressed into one single 
 period : " At present we can only guess where 
 and how, through the slow ages, parallel with 
 the Neanderthal cousin, these first true men arose 
 out of some more ape-like progenitor."' So,/ 
 
 1 P. 89. 2 P. 92. 3 P. 77. * Science Progress, p. 90.7 
 5 P. 52. Mr. Wells's italics. 
 
MR. WELLS IS ONLT GUESSING! 7 
 
 after all, when it comes to discussing the origin 
 of the first true men, Mr. Wells is only guessing ! 
 But to soften the blow the guess is accompanied 
 by a coloured plate of " Our Neanderthaloid 
 Ancestor." Observe the unobtrusive manner 
 in which Mr. Wells bridges the gulf between 
 Groups II. and III. In a parenthesis, mark you, 
 the extinct Homo Neanderthalensis, a type of 
 " nearly human creatures," says Mr. Wells, is 
 suddenly raised to the rank of cousin to the first 
 true men. Mr. Wells is an adept at this kind of 
 logical theft. Having, with the aid of a coloured 
 plate, persuaded the reader that the Homo Nean- 
 derthalensis was almost human, Mr. Wells pro- 
 ceeds to foist him on to the British public as a 
 cousin ! To such shifts is the new logic reduced 
 in the interests of the inspiring belief that man is 
 descended from an ape. Venite adoremus ! 
 
 Most of Mr. Wells's earlier chapters are tenden- 
 tial. Wittingly or unwittingly he conveys the 
 impression that a theistic hypothesis is super- 
 fluous in any rational interpretation of the uni- 
 verse. From Democritus to the latest rationalist, 
 the favourite method of eliminating the Deity 
 has always been to profess to account for the 
 cosmos by describing the manner in which it 
 has evolved. By a sort of legerdemain, descrip- 
 tion is substituted for explanation. It is as if 
 we sought to show that a watch need not have 
 had a maker by giving a minute description of 
 the way in which the hands are moved by the 
 internal mechanism. Evolution, says a prominent 
 
8 NATURAL SELECTION 
 
 rationalist, has made an end of Paleyism. W. G. 
 Ward cleverly illustrates the fallacy of this kind 
 of reasoning by supposing the case of a philo- 
 sophical mouse imprisoned in a piano, instituting 
 an enquiry into the cause of the music. The 
 sound, it argues, results from the vibration of 
 the strings ; the vibration is caused by the blows of 
 the hammers; "and so much at least is evident 
 now viz., that the sounds proceed not from any 
 external and arbitrary agency from the inter- 
 vention, e.g.) of any higher will but from the 
 uniform operation of fixed laws." ] After the 
 manner of the mouse, Mr. Wells accounts for all 
 existing living beings by the Survival of the 
 Fittest, or as he prefers to call it, the Survival 
 of the Fitter. When asked to account for this 
 survival, he points to Natural Selection, which, 
 he assures us, is an established law. Yet, obviously, 
 as Dr. Flint remarks in his Theism, " Natural 
 Selection did not bring about the conditions 
 under which it operates. If the whole earth had 
 been flooded with water only fish would have 
 survived. There is clearly something which 
 Natural Selection cannot account for." As an 
 ultima ratio it is a failure. But is it even a law ? 
 Mr. Wells writes of it with the full-blooded 
 confidence of the sciolist. He would write less 
 confidently, perhaps, had he read the " Essays 
 in Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth 
 of Charles Darwin and of the Fiftieth Anniversary . 
 of the publication of The Origin of Species, edited 
 1 Philosophy of Tbeism,VoL II., pp. 172, 173; 
 
" FROM MICROBE TO MAN r 9 
 
 for the Cambridge Philosophical Society and the 
 Syndics of the University Press by Professor Se- 
 ward, F.R.S." Among the contributors to this 
 volume are Weismann, De Vries, Bateson, Francis 
 Darwin, Thiselton - Dyer, Ernst Haeckel, and 
 other master-exponents of evolution. And Mr. 
 Wells may be surprised to hear that the one 
 subject most hotly discussed by these experts 
 is Natural Selection. Bateson, for instance, 
 says : " The time is not ripe for the discussion 
 of the Origin of Species. . . . We look on the 
 manner and causation of adapted differentiation 
 as still wholly mysterious." 1 This, however, 
 was written in 1909, and things have moved since 
 then but not in the direction of the theory 
 favoured by Mr. Wells. Mr. Bourne, in his 
 Animal Life and Human Progress, published in 
 1919, declares that the popular hypothesis, 
 " extinction of the less fit and survival of the 
 fittest, no longer commands the universal assent 
 of zoologist-. Indeed, it has been seriously 
 undermined by the discoveries of recent years.'-' 
 Nevertheless, it figures in Mr. Wells's illustrated 
 pages as a doctrine beyond dispute, the basis of 
 the drama " From Microbe to Man." 
 
 In the third part of his History Mr. 
 says : " This book is not a theological book, 
 it is not for us to embark upon theological 
 cussion; but it is a part, a necessary and central 
 part, of the history of man to describe the dawn 
 and the development of his religious ideas and 
 
 1 P. 99. 2 P. 56. 
 
 ]r. Wells \ 
 ook, and \A 
 ncal dis- 
 
io ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 
 
 their influence upon his activities." 3 Mr. Wells 
 is here entering on a large subject very much 
 larger than he realizes. Various theories have been 
 put forward by anthropologists to explain the 
 manner of the making of gods by primitive 
 peoples, and of these theories Mr. Wells has the 
 misfortune to select the most unsatisfactory 
 the abandoned theory of ancestor- worship. Of 
 this theory. Professor Jastrow, after dismissing 
 Tylor's animistic theory, says : " Still less satis- 
 factory is the theory chiefly associated with Her- 
 bert Spencer, which traces religion back to the 
 worship of ancestors under the guise of ghosts 
 as its sole factor. The theory rests on the suppo- 
 sition that the deities worshipped by primitive 
 man are, in reality, the spirits of his ancestors."* 
 Mr. Wells is apparently unaware that the theory 
 is chiefly associated with Herbert Spencer, for it 
 is to that modern ysop, Grant Allen, that he 
 refers us for scientific informacion as to how the 
 " Old Man " of the tribe, after his death, became 
 a god. " Grant Allen," says Mr. Wells with 
 evident deference, " in his Evolution of the Idea 
 of God, laid stress chiefly on the posthumous 
 worship of the ' Old Man.' ' Grant Allen, as 
 a matter of fact, simply popularized Herbert 
 Spencer, and as long ago as 1913 a Rationalist 
 Press Association manual, treating of the book to 
 which Mr. Wells sends his readers, said of Grant 
 Allen: " His examples are taken without regard 
 to the degree of culture of the tribes, and it is 
 
 1 P. 77. 2 The Study of Religion, p. 184. 
 
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 1 1 
 
 generally recognized that he has emphasized 
 only one element in the making of gods." 1 It 
 is now generally recognized that what Grant 
 Allen emphasized is not an element in the making 
 of gods at all. Grant Allen set out bravely " to 
 show how in the great Jewish god himself we may 
 discern, as in a glass, darkly, the vague but 
 constant lineaments of an ancestral ghost-deity." 5 
 Possibly Mr. Wells is unacquainted with the 
 exquisite comedy of Huxley and Spencer searching 
 the Scriptures for evidences of ancestor-worship. 
 Huxley's success may be gauged by the fact that 
 the most striking instances he cites are " the 
 singular weight attached to the veneration of 
 parents in the Fourth Commandment," and the 
 Ark of the Covenant, which " may have been 
 a relic of ancestor worship " though how, pre- 
 cisely, he is at a loss to explain. So fruitless was 
 his search that he abandoned it in disgust and 
 took refuge in the highly original theory that the 
 evidences of ancestor-worship in the Old Testa- 
 ment must have been deliberately suppressed by 
 pietistic copyists bent on bolstering up mono- 
 theism presumably on the principle that the 
 end justifies the means. Spencer, having found 
 no evidence whatever of ghost-worship amongst 
 the Hebrews, sententiously remarks that " the 
 silence of their legends is but a negative fact, 
 which may be as misleading as negative facts 
 usually are." Quite so. But nevertheless we 
 
 1 The Existence of God, by Joseph McCabe, p. 24. 
 
 2 Tbf Evolution of the Idea of God, p. 68. 
 
12 DISCREDITED " AUTHORITIES r 
 
 may be excused for not embracing a theory whose 
 only foundation is a negative fact in other 
 words, the complete absence of any evidence 
 in support of it. 
 
 To quote Grant Allen on this subject is simply 
 ludicrous. To-day no reputable anthropologist 
 takes even Huxley or Spencer seriously, much less 
 Grant Allen. It is so objectively unlikely that 
 the idea of a deathless god should have evolved 
 in the savage mind out of the idea of a dead ances- 
 tor that all serious anthropologists, in the lack 
 of any evidence for it, have abandoned the theory. 
 The Supreme Being of the savage belonged to a 
 world that knew no death the ghost of a dead 
 man could never enter there. Ghosts and gods 
 were never confused in the savage mind, however 
 much Huxley, Spencer, and Grant Allen may have 
 confused them. " Ghosts," says Crawford Howell 
 Toy, " are shadowy doubles of human beings, 
 sometimes nameless, wandering about without 
 definite purpose except to procure food for 
 themselves, uncertain of temper, friendly or 
 unfriendly, according to caprice ;" but "the god 
 appears to have been at the outset a well-fcrmed 
 anthropomorphic being. His genesis is different 
 from that of the ghost, spirit, ancestor, or totem." 1 
 The present state of expert opinion with regard 
 to 'the theory advocated by Mr. Wells is thus 
 voiced by Dr. Jevons : " The ' deified ancestor ' 
 theory, however, would have us believe that 
 there was once a man named Zeus, who had a 
 1 Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 266. 
 
THE BUILDING OF RELIGION" 13 
 
 family, and his descendants thought that he was a 
 god. . . . The fact is that ancestors known to 
 be human were not worshipped as gods, and that 
 ancestors worshipped as gods were not believed 
 to have been human." 1 And, again, he says quite 
 bluntly: " Religion did not originate from ancestor- 
 worship, nor ancestor-worship from religion."' 
 The Grant Allen theory to-day is not so much 
 as mentioned amongst anthropologists. Thus, 
 though Mr. E. O. James, in his recent manual 
 of anthropology, devotes a whole chapter to 
 " The Religion of Primeval Man," he says never 
 a word on the theory which Mr. Wells commends 
 to his readers with the calm assurance that it 
 played an important part in building up " a 
 complex something " which " we may call 
 religion" 3 Mr. Wells declares that in the com- 
 pilation of his History he has consulted many 
 experts; but experts in the study of religion do 
 not seem to have been amongst the number. 
 Instead of betaking himself to Grant Allen, he 
 might with profit have dipped into the pages of 
 Toy, or Jevons, or Jastrow, and taken to heart 
 the latter's warning anent theorists " with a 
 decided prejudice against religion, which dis- 
 qualifies them from judging religious phenomena 
 calmly and dispassionately." 4 
 
 A careful investigation of the available material 
 for the study of the history of religion has led many 
 
 1 Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 302. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 197. 3 P. 77. 
 4 The Study of Religion, p, 181. 
 
i 4 W ELLS' S SHORT CUTS 
 
 capable enquirers to conclude that the idea of 
 God did not " evolve " at all, but was gathered, 
 quite naturally, even by primitive man, from a 
 consideration of the phenomena of nature around 
 him. Surely the intelligence with which the 
 Grant Allen school insist on endowing primitive 
 man -an intelligence sufficient to work out a 
 belief in a beneficent Supreme Being from ghosts 
 of doubtful character would have been more 
 than sufficient to enable the savage to discern 
 a mover behind the bolt from the blue as readily 
 as behind the arrow in its flight. 
 
 In his chronicles of civilized man, one hardly 
 expects from Mr. Wells the detail of a Froissart. 
 The latter's voluminous chronicles cover barely 
 eighty years, whereas whole millenniums are 
 generously spanned in single parts of the Outline. 
 This method of writing history has its disadvan- 
 tages, since it involves looking at events through 
 the wrong end of the telescope. It is, therefore, 
 not surprising if Mr. Wells's ornate thumb-nail 
 sketches occasionally bear little resemblance to 
 the spacious scenes they purport to represent. 
 This is a fault common to all bird's-eye views of 
 history, but to it Mr. Wells adds a peculiar vice 
 of his own. His history is purposive, designed 
 to show " that men form one universal brother- 
 hood, that they spring from one common origin, 
 that their individual lives, their nations and 
 races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge 
 again at last in one common human destiny upon 
 this little planet amidst the stars." Where the 
 
HISTORT FOR DEMOCRATS 15 
 
 ordinary historian is content with classification, 
 Mr. Wells, in the light of his guiding principle, 
 insists on unification. His is a history for demo- 
 crats by a democrat. No one is allowed to appear 
 unique in it. All great historic personages are 
 speedily reduced to their least common deno- 
 minator, and Athens, aristocrat of cities, is de- 
 clared to have had " very much the atmosphere 
 of the lower sort of contemporary music-hall." 
 His study of religions is designed chiefly to show 
 that the essential differences between Gautama, 
 Confucius, Mahommed, and Christ, are really 
 not worth writing about. Small wonder, then, 
 if Mr. Wells applies the levelling-down process 
 to Moses, David, and Solomon. 
 
 The story of " The Hebrew Scripture and the 
 Prophets " is told in fourteen teeming pages, 
 to which Mr. Wells prefixes this significant note : 
 " The Encyclopaedia Biblica has been of great use 
 here." This work, on which Mr. Wells relies 
 so confidently, is advertised to-day by Messrs. 
 Watts and Co. as " The Work for all Rationa- 
 lists," and is offered, brand new, to all and sundry, 
 for just half the price at which it was originally 
 published. It is chiefly valuable as exemplifying 
 the views held by the extreme left wing of Biblical 
 critics some twenty years ago. Yet this is the 
 fons et origo of the study in the Scriptures with 
 which Mr. Wells presents the masses. He is 
 nothing if not versatile, and in the sixth part of 
 his History he adopts quite the tone and style of 
 the higher critic. For instance, he tells us that 
 
16 WELLS AND THE EARLY SEMITES 
 
 " there is much about the story of Moses that 
 has a mythical flavour, and one of the most remark- 
 able incidents in it, his concealment by his mother 
 in an ark of bulrushes, has also been found in an 
 ancient Sumerian inscription made at least a 
 thousand years before his time by that Sargon I. 
 who founded the ancient Akkadian-Sumerian 
 Empire." 1 Mr. Wells then gives a translation 
 of the inscription, and rounds off the story with 
 the comment, " This is perplexing." It is, but 
 Mr. Wells himself has introduced the perplexity. 
 Let us look at the known facts. The inscription 
 quoted by Mr. Wells is not Sumerian at all. It 
 occurs in an omen-tablet, which is admitted by 
 all experts to be Neo-Babylonian, and therefore 
 certainly after the time of Moses. Canon Driver, 
 for instance, in his commentary on Exodus, 2 
 assigns it to the eighth century B.C. But that is 
 not all. Professor Leonard W. King, Assistant 
 Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities 
 in the British Museum, and Professor of Assyrian 
 and Babylonian Archaeology in the University 
 of London, has recently discovered the chronicle 
 from which the inscription on the omen-tablet 
 was compiled. Writing in 1916, he says : " Finally, 
 the recent discovery of a copy of the original 
 chronicle, from which the historical references 
 in the omen-tablet were taken, restored the 
 traditions to their true setting and freed them 
 from the augural text into which they had been 
 
 1 P. 164. 2 P. 12. 
 
UNWARRANTED INFERENCE 17 
 
 incorporated." 1 Unfortunately for Mr. Wells, 
 in all that is extant of this Semite (not Sumerian) 
 chronicle there is no mention whatsoever of the 
 vital incident stressed by him the story of 
 Sargon's being abandoned by his mother to the 
 river in a basket of reeds. 2 So much for the facts. 
 But the higher critic is frequently more con- 
 cerned about theories than about facts, and gives 
 us to understand that, though his facts may be 
 wrong, his theories must be right. Now it is 
 more particularly against Mr. Wells's theory and 
 method that we wish to protest. Were: the 
 incident of Sargon's exposure exactly as set forth 
 by Mr. Wells, it would nevertheless not be safe 
 to conclude that the Hebrews must have bor- 
 rowed from the Babylonians. It is precisely this 
 sort of unwarranted inference that has brought the 
 study of comparative religion, as practised by the 
 rationalist school, into disrepute. The compara- 
 tive method has its uses, but, as Professor Rhys 
 Davids remarks, it "will be of worse than no service 
 if we imagine that likeness is any proof of direct 
 relationship, that similarity of ideas in different 
 countries shows that either the one or the other 
 was necessarily a borrower. ... It would, of 
 course, be going too far to deny that coincidences 
 of belief are occasionally produced by actual 
 contact of mind with mind; but it is no more 
 necessary to assume that they always are so, than 
 
 1 A History of Sumer and Akkad, p. 220. 
 
 2 Chronicles concerning Early Babylonian Kings, by Professor 
 L. W. King, Vol. I., pp. 27 if. 
 
1 8 WELLS AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 to assume that chalk cliffs, if there be such, in 
 China, are produced by chalk cliffs in the Downs 
 of Sussex. They have no connection one with 
 another, except that both are the result of similar 
 causes. Yet this manner of reasoning is constantly 
 found, not only through the whole range of the 
 literature of the subject from classical times down- 
 wards, but even in the works of the present day." ] 
 
 It is the manner of reasoning adopted by Mr. 
 Wells, not only with regard to the historical 
 records of the Old Testament, but, as we shall 
 see, even with regard to Christian origins. 
 
 The psycho-analyst would say that Mr. Wells 
 must have suffered, as a boy, from an overdose 
 of the righteousness of David and Solomon, so 
 vigorously does he react at the mere mention of 
 their names. They are the real villains of this 
 Outline, and Mr. Wells exercises his author's privi- 
 lege of abusing them roundly. He would be more 
 convincing were he less reckless in the things he 
 says about them. For instance, the finishing 
 touches he adds to the picture of David as a 
 scheming adventurer are more artistic than 
 accurate: "He married Michal, the daughter 
 of Saul, but there was no love between them. 
 The marriage was an attempt to legitimate his 
 position. She haxed and insulted him he had 
 
 1 The Origin and Growth of Religion., as illustrated by some 
 points in the history of Indian Buddhism (pp. 3, 4). So also 
 M. Cumont : " Resemblances do not necessarily imply imitation. 
 Similarities of ideas or practices ought to be explained, without 
 any reference to borrowing, by community of origin " (Les 
 Religions Orientates, p. 13). 
 
THE CASE OF DAVID 19 
 
 hung her sons and kept her a close captive 
 (2 Sam. vi.)." 1 Now the Bible says: " And 
 Michal, Saul's daughter, loved David" (i Sam. 
 xviii. 20); and again, " Saul saw and knew that the 
 Lord was with David, and that Michal, Saul's 
 daughter, loved him " (i Sam. xviii. 28). More- 
 over, according to the very chapter of the Second 
 Book of Samuel cited by Mr. Wells, " Michal, the 
 daughter of Saul, had no child unto the day of 
 her death." Clearly, then, David could not have 
 hanged her sons. It is Mr. Wells's exegesis that 
 is at fault. He has misunderstood 2 Sam. 
 xxi. 8, in which we read of " the five sons of 
 Michal, the daughter of Saul, whom she brought 
 up for Adriel." Though she brought them up 
 for Adriel, they were not her sons, but the sons 
 of Merob, the wife of Adriel. They are called 
 the sons of Michal because she adopted them 
 and brought them up as her own. (See note to 
 2 Kings xxi. 8, in the Douay Version.) Further- 
 more, there is nothing whatever in the chapter 
 cited by Mr. Wells, or in any other, as to David's 
 keeping her a close captive. We know not to 
 what private sources of information Mr. Wells 
 may have had access, but statements so mani- 
 festly at variance with all historical record need 
 some confirmation. 
 
 His estimate of the influence of the Babylonians 
 
 on the Jews is thus briefly summarized: "The 
 
 plain fact of the Bible narrative is that the Jews 
 
 went to Babylon barbarians and came back civi- 
 
 1 P. 169. 
 
20 WELLS AS HIGHER CRITIC 
 
 lized . . . they returned with most of their 
 material for the Old Testament." 1 One can 
 only rub one's eyes and wonder if Mr. Wells 
 has any idea of what is generally admitted to be 
 pre-exilic in the Old Testament. The list of 
 such writings is a fairly formidable one. In the 
 Hexateuch, the Jahvist and Elohist documents, 
 the Deuteronomist, Josue, and the bulk of the 
 legislative matter in the Pentateuch; Judges, 
 Ruth, Jeremias, Samuel, and Kings; the Proto- 
 Isaias, Amos, Osee, Micheas, Joel, Jonas, Nahun, 
 and most of Sophonias; and, in addition, three- 
 quarters of the Book of Psalms and the Book of 
 Proverbs, to say nothing of the Canticle of Canti- 
 cles. Even supposing that some or all of these 
 were re-edited after the exile, it is surely grotesque 
 to represent the Hebrews as returning from 
 Babylon with the bare materials for the Old 
 Testament. That " some of the later books are 
 frankly post - captivity compositions " 2 hardly 
 justifies Mr. Wells' s wild flight of fancy about 
 the rest. Nor is he any more accurate in de- 
 scribing the leading ideas of these books. He says : 
 " There was the belief first of all that Jehovah 
 was the greatest and most powerful of tribal 
 gods, and then that he was a god above all other 
 gods, and at last that he was the only true god." c 
 Very skilfully Mr. Wells manages to convey the 
 idea that monotheism amongst the Jews was the 
 product of evolution. We seem to detect faint 
 echoes of Grant Allen : " The only people who 
 * P. 173. 2 P. 173. a P. 173. 
 
THE JEWISH IDEA OF GOD 21 
 
 ever invented a pure monotheism at first hand 
 were the Jews. ... It is the peculiar glory of 
 Israel to have evolved God." 1 But where in 
 the whole range of the Old Testament is there the 
 slightest evidence that the Jews, as a people, 
 were ever anything but monotheists ? The 
 view that religion was at first monotheistic and 
 degenerated into polytheism is still more widely 
 held than any rival opinion, because, as Andrew 
 Lang remarked, " it may be an old theory, but 
 facts ' winna ding,' and are on the side of an 
 old theory." Mr. Wells, with showman's ges- 
 ture, represents the god of the Jews as a purely 
 tribal or national deity, but the pre-exilic Book of 
 Amos represents Him, not only as the God who 
 brought Israel out of the land of Egypt, but also 
 as the God who brought the Philistines, the mortal 
 enemies of the Jews, out of Caphtor, and the 
 Syrians out of Kir (Amos ix. 7). Mr. Wells 
 might have given us an explanatory footnote 
 with regard to this passage, for on his theory 
 it has urgent need of elucidation. Also we 
 would like to know how, on his evolutionary 
 hypothesis, he explains the fact that, though 
 the Jews were so susceptible to Babylonian 
 influence, they reacted against the religion of 
 their masters in general culture. Here is a race 
 of barbarians with a tribal god, who after sojourn- 
 ing for some seventy years in Babylon, absorbing 
 culture at every pore, emerge, not astral poly- 
 theists like their masters, but confirmed mono- 
 1 The Evolution of the Idea of God, p. 68. 
 
22 EVOLUTION OF MONOTHEISM 
 
 theists. The evolution of monotheism in such 
 circumstances seems to us a greater miracle 
 than any that Mr. Wells rejects. Considering 
 the psychology of the Jewish race, their intense 
 nationalism, their marked conservatism not to 
 say obstinacy even from a purely naturalistic 
 standpoint, it is much more probable that the 
 Jews came out of captivity pure monotheists for 
 the exceedingly simple reason that they were 
 pure monotheists when they entered it. This, 
 too, is thoroughly in keeping with the portrait 
 of the Jew given by Mr. Wells some two hundred 
 pages farther on : " He remained obstinately 
 monotheistic; he would have none other gods 
 but the one true God. In Rome, as in Jerusalem, 
 he stood out manfully against the worship of 
 any god-Caesar. And to the best of his ability 
 he held to his covenants with his God. No 
 graven images could enter Jerusalem; even the 
 Roman standards with their eagles had to stay 
 outside." 1 An impartial student would be led 
 to suspect that what the Jew was in Rome and 
 Jerusalem, he was also in Babylon, especially as 
 his conservatism was no new trait in his character. 
 In Exodus and Deuteronomy the Jews are de- 
 scribed as a " stiff-necked people," and the psy- 
 chologist has every reason to judge that, had they 
 been anything but monotheistic to begin with, 
 they would, humanly speaking, have remained 
 so to the end. 
 We will now pass on to " The Beginning, 
 
 1 P. 355- 
 
THE PAULINE THEORY ONCE MORE 23 
 
 the Rise, and the Divisions of Christianity " 
 (Part XII.), since Mr. Wells himself ^ links 
 up this part of his Outline with the history 
 of the Hebrews. 1 Here we must confess 
 to a feeling of disappointment that a man 
 of Mr. Wells's undoubted ability should 
 rest content with the tattered theory of the 
 Pauline origin of Christianity: Paul gave to 
 the " Nazarenes " the beginnings of a creed; 
 the " Nazarene " himself was " the seed rather 
 than the founder of Christianity." 2 We had 
 all this ad nauseam a quarter of a century ago. 
 Mr. Wells has evidently not kept pace with the 
 rationalist movement. Nowadays, the fact that 
 Christ was a teacher with a definite creed to 
 which He called upon all to subscribe is made the 
 basis of a charge of intolerance against the " Naza- 
 rene." The mere fact that the commonest 
 expression on the lips of Christ is " Amen, amen, 
 I say unto you " an expression occurring some 
 seventy times in the Gospels is in itself sufficient 
 to dispose of the idea that Christ did not regard 
 Himself as a teacher and a founder. Mr. Wells 
 seems to think that the religion of Christ is com- 
 prised in the Eight Beatitudes. He has forgotten 
 that it was the same Christ who said, " Unless a 
 man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost 
 he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven"; 
 " Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man and 
 drink his blood, you shall not have life in you "; 
 and " If he will not hear the church, let him be 
 
 1 P. 353- 3 P. 355- 
 
24 MR. G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 to thee as the heathen and the publican." This 
 fanciful theory of the Pauline origin of Chris- 
 tianity falls to pieces before the robust common 
 sense of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, who says of 
 Mr. Wells: "Thus he seems almost to revive the 
 suggestion of Renan: that St. Paul founded the 
 Church that was really obeyed too much, while 
 Christ only imagined the religion that was never 
 obeyed enough. This is the sort of thing that is 
 consistent with everything except the facts. It 
 might be the relation between a prophet and an 
 apostle; but it was certainly not the relation 
 between that prophet and that apostle. I could 
 understand a man saying that the Paul of the 
 Epistles was a bumptious, bad-tempered, and 
 meddlesome bishop, wanting too much to boss 
 everything or speed up everything. But the 
 same realistic approach will make it perfectly 
 plain that he is certainly not a person professing 
 to found anything. He has not the tone of a 
 lawgiver even like Mahomet or Moses, far less 
 like Christ. He first persecuted the Church of 
 God ; but there was a Church for him to persecute. 
 Possibly he afterwards pestered the Church of 
 God; but there was a Church for him to pester. 
 He had not made it, and never for one instant 
 did he really talk as if he had. On the other 
 hand, I can understand a man, an atheist or any 
 anti-religionist, saying that Christ was a myth, 
 or was a maniac, or was a liar and deceiver of the 
 people. But I cannot understand any man 
 arguing from the Gospel accounts and denying 
 
AND THE WELLSIAN THEORY 25 
 
 that Christ did talk as if he was founding some- 
 thing. He did talk like a lawgiver, like an origin ; 
 not like a man belonging to something, but one 
 making something for other people to belong to. 
 We may belong to it or not, we may believe a 
 word of it or not, we may like it or tolerate it or 
 not, but that is the critical fact about the records 
 as they stand; he most certainly did, according 
 to those records, speak as one having authority 
 and not as the scribes. " ] 
 
 It is Mr. Wells's desire for unification that leads 
 him to adopt such a theory. He is determined 
 to demonstrate that there is nothing unique about 
 Christianity, and no theory is too absurd if it 
 will only reduce Christ to the level of the founders 
 of other " universal religions." Every bead must 
 be made to fit the string on which Mr. Wells 
 has determined to thread it. 
 
 One imagines that Dr. Bosanquet and Mr. 
 Joseph w r ould not be so anxious to banish the 
 syllogism from our midst after a course of Mr. 
 Wells's non-syllogistic reasoning. It allows of 
 an easy and graceful transition from the possible 
 to the actual order. " It may be that the early 
 parts of the Gospels are accretions," he tells us. 
 He has decided weakness for maybes, which are 
 generally presented with such a wealth of detail 
 that the average reader comes to regard them as 
 facts. 2 But, as a distinguished rationalist has 
 
 1 The New Witness, July 16, p. 209. 
 
 2 Mr. Belloc has cleverly emphasized this characteristic in 
 the Dublin Review, April-May-June, " A Few Words with 
 Mr. Wells." 
 
26 CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 
 
 pointed out, " anything which does not involve 
 a positive contradiction in terms may be. But 
 maybes are not honey bees /" Also Mr. Wells 
 needs reminding that things are not always 
 what they seem. During the first two centuries 
 of the Christian era, he says, " a considerable 
 amount of a sort of theocrasia seems to have gone 
 on between the Christian cult and the almost 
 equally popular and widely diffused Mithraic 
 cult and the cult of Serapis-Isis-Horus." 1 This 
 seems so to Mr. Wells because of a few superficial 
 similarities in the three cults. As we have 
 pointed out, he is apparently quite convinced 
 that similarity of any kind in religious rites is a 
 proof of common origin. A wider acquaintance 
 with the history of religions would make him a 
 little chary of that principle. The vestiges of 
 Mithraism which he discerns in Christianity 
 are faint indeed. The substitution of Sunday 
 for the Jewish Sabbath is one. It apparently has 
 not occurred to Mr. Wells that this change was 
 made by the Christians in honour of Christ's 
 Resurrection, which took place on the first day 
 of the week. Mithraic are " probably also those 
 ideas and phrases so distinctive of certain sects 
 to this day, about being ' washed in the blood ' 
 of Christ, and of Christ being a blood sacrifice. 
 For we have to remember that a death by cruci- 
 fixion is hardly a more bloody death than hanging : 
 to speak of Jesus shedding His Blood for mankind 
 is really a most inaccurate expression.' 5 ' Death 
 1 P. 368. 2 P. 368. 
 
MITHRAISM 
 
 by crucifixion, in the ordinary way, may not have 
 been bloody, but Christ's death certainly was. 
 One would imagine that Mr. Wells had never 
 heard of the scourging at the pillar, the crowning 
 with thorns, and the piercing of Christ's side with 
 a lance. And what sense is there in looking to 
 Mithraism for the origin of a phraseology which 
 is manifestly a modification of that of the Old 
 Testament ? M. Cumont, the greatest authority 
 on the Taurobolium, long ago rejected the theory 
 of which Mr. Wells now gives us a rechauffe, and 
 showed that, so far from Christianity having 
 adopted the ideas and phraseology of Mithraism, 
 it was the other way about : " On the contrary, 
 from the time when Christianity became a moral 
 power in the world, it imposed itself even on its 
 enemies. The Phrygian priests of the Great 
 Mother opposed their feasts of the spring equinox 
 to the Christian Easter, and attributed to the blood 
 spilt in the Taurobolium the redeeming power of 
 the Blood of the Lamb." 1 According to the 
 same authority, pagan mysteries were deliberately 
 approximated to Christian rites. It was claimed 
 for the Mithraic baptism of blood that it was 
 more efficacious than the Christian baptism of 
 water, and the Mother of the gods was likened 
 to the Mother of God. 2 Mr. Wells lays some 
 emphasis on what he considers to be contributions 
 of the Alexandrine cult to Christian thought 
 and practice: "In the personality of Horus, 
 
 1 Religions Orientales, p. II. 
 
 3 Ibid., p. 86. See also his Mysteres de Mitkra, I., p. 341. 
 
 3* 
 
75/5 WORSHIP 
 
 who was at once the son of Serapis and identical 
 with Serapis, it was natural for the Christians 
 to find an illuminating analogue in their struggles 
 with the Pauline mysteries. From that to the 
 identification of Mary with Isis, and her elevation 
 to a rank quasi-divine . . . was also a very 
 natural step." 1 
 
 Now Isis herself has been identified with Mi- 
 nerva, Venus, Diana, Proserpina, Ceres, Juno, 
 Bellona, Hecate, and Rhamnasia. 2 Where is all 
 this identification going to end ? Mr. Wells 
 gives the reader to understand that it was the 
 early Christians who identified Mary with Isis, 
 whereas the " identification " is in reality sheer 
 speculation on the part of modern theorists. 
 From Apuleius we know how the highest attri- 
 butes of every known deity were predicated of 
 Isis, so that it is no difficult matter to find points 
 of resemblance between her and the Queen of 
 Heaven. The differences between the two 
 though far more striking and far more significant 
 in view of the syncretism that went on in the 
 cult of Isis are calmly ignored by the upholders 
 of identity. Isis, like Osiris, was originally a 
 beast, and therefore retains the heifer's horns as 
 a symbol of her primitive nature; she was wife to 
 her own brother; her priests were healers, wizards, 
 and exorcists; all manner of excesses were con- 
 nected with her worship, and yet we are asked to 
 believe that the early Christians confused her 
 with the Mother of Jesus. There is hardly a 
 1 P. 368. 2 The Golden Ass, xi., c. 5. 
 
AND MORE IDENTIFICATIONS 29 
 
 pagan goddess with whom Mary has not been at 
 one time or another " identified," and in selecting 
 Isis Mr. Wells is somewhat out of date. If 
 he wants to keep abreast of " modern thought/ 5 
 he must identify Mary with Virgo of the Zodiac ! 
 The reductio ad absurdum of this kind of thing 
 has been reached by an advanced scholar 1 who 
 " appeals, in support of his contention, to the 
 representation on the side-door of Notre Dame 
 in Paris, where (he says) Virgo is omitted among 
 the signs of the Zodiac because she is identified 
 with Mary !" 2 The analogue alluded to by Mr. 
 Wells is very far from " illuminating." Salomon 
 Reinach speaks of the " inextricable confusion " 
 of Egyptian mythology, 3 and adds : " Hieroglyphic 
 inscriptions and papyri reveal the details of the 
 ritual, more especially that of the dead; but the 
 myths of the gods elude us for the most part, 
 and the only one familiar to us, that of Osiris, 
 was preserved by a Greek author."" It is in this 
 elusive mythology that Mr. Wells seeks for Chris- 
 tian origins. As for Serapis, he was a Grseco- 
 Asiatic deity, analogous to Pluto and identified 
 with Osiris, who was introduced by the Ptolemies 
 to Alexandria at the beginning of the Hellenic 
 domination. In what sense his son Horus was 
 " identical with Serapis " Mr. Wells unfortunately 
 does not explain, and we are at a loss to discover. 
 
 1 Jeremias in his Babylonisches, p. 35. 
 
 2 Primitive Christianity and its Non-Jewish Sources^ by 
 Professor Carl Clemen, translated by Robert E. Nisbet, p. 304. 
 
 3 Orpheus, p. 27. 4 Ibid., p. 31. 
 
30 PFLEIDERER'S THEORIES 
 
 He has, in fact, merely revived the comparative 
 method of Pfleiderer, which is thus commented 
 on in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics : 
 " The comparisons which Pfleiderer so indus- 
 triously makes exaggerate the resemblances and 
 ignore the differences between Christian ideas 
 and the myths and legends of other religions, 
 besides making the curious assumption, that if 
 any similarity, however remote, can be suggested 
 between a myth or legend and what claims to be 
 a fact of Christian history, the fact cannot be a 
 fact, but must be a fiction." 1 It will be found, 
 on investigation, that the parallels cited by Mr. 
 Wells are of the vaguest description. Far closer 
 parallels are not regarded as indicating the kind 
 of religious exchange which Mr. Wells seems 
 to think must have taken place. To take an 
 instance : " The Greeks," says Reinach, " were 
 struck by the similarity of the legend of Osiris 
 and that of Dionysos Zagreus, the young bull 
 devoured by the Titans, to which Zeus granted 
 a new and glorious life. These legends, both 
 based upon sacrificial rites, coincide without 
 having presumably borrowed one from another."' 
 The kind of thing that passed muster when 
 Pfleiderer wrote his Early Christian Concept of 
 Christ will not pass muster now there must 
 be at least some evidence of the borrowing. For 
 the theory of loan-gods, once so popular with 
 anthropologists, is pretty generally recognized as 
 being beset with many pitfalls for the unwary. 
 
 1 Vol. III., p. 582, col. 2. 2 Orpheus, p. 31. 
 
WELLS AND SABELLIANISM 31 
 
 Yet Mr. Wells must find origins somewhere other 
 than in the Gospels, which he thus rules out of 
 court: " Now it is a matter of fact that in the 
 Gospels all that body of theological assertion 
 which constitutes Christianity finds little sup- 
 port. 5 ' 1 It seems to us that this is rather a matter 
 of prejudice, and is the cause of Mr. Wells's 
 excursions from the field of fact into the more 
 congenial realm of myth. One becomes a little 
 doubtful of Mr. Wells's matters of fact when we 
 find him calmly recording that " the Sabellians 
 taught practically that there were three equal 
 Gods, God the Father, God the Son (with whom 
 Jesus was identified), and God the Holy Ghost." 2 
 This is a little hard on the Sabellians, seeing that 
 they went astray with regard to the Persons of 
 the Trinity through over-emphasizing the unity 
 of God, and protested vigorously against the 
 current Platonic speculation about the Trinity 
 lest it should foster the notion that there was a 
 plurality of Gods. 8 Mr. Wells's account of the 
 Sabellians is hardly calculated to inspire con- 
 fidence in his handling of matters theological. 
 
 Nor is he any more at home in the history of 
 philosophy. Writing of the mediaeval period, 
 he says : " It may not surprise the reader to learn 
 that the philosophy of the Catholic Church was 
 essentially a Realist philosophy." 4 This, however, 
 surprises not only the reader, but also Mr. Ernest 
 
 1 P. 358. 2 P. 370. 
 
 3 " Ne videantur decs dicere ": Origen, "On Titus," 
 Frag. II. * P. 510. 
 
32 WELLS AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Barker, who appends this footnote to Mr. Wells's 
 text: " Nor is it true that Realism was the philo- 
 sophy of the Church. It was, in the early Middle 
 Ages; but, after Occam (1330), Nominalism 
 triumphed and was the philosophy of the Church 
 till the Reformation. Luther denounced 
 Nominalism." 3 The plain fact of the matter is 
 that the " Church " never had a " philosophy " 
 as such. Followers of Occam did not constitute 
 the Church, and the most celebrated of them, 
 Buridan, was prohibited from teaching and 
 condemned. With equal justice, the views of 
 opponents of Occam, such as Thomas of Stras- 
 bourg and Raymond of Sabunde, might be de- 
 scribed as the philosophy of the Church. In any 
 case, Occam's Nominalism was not as Mr. Wells 
 conceives it, but the niceties of the matter perhaps 
 do not appeal to him. Occam, however, is best 
 described as " a conceptualist who uses the lan- 
 guage of Nominalism " a Terminist who held 
 that the term, as it exists mentally (not in speech 
 or in writing), is alone universal. Mr. Wells's 
 account of Nominalism is somewhat rough and 
 ready, but his account of Realism is misleading. 
 Thus, " the Realist outdid the vulgar tendency 
 to exaggerate the significance of class." 2 " Class " 
 is a word which conveys a totally false impression 
 when used in connection with Scholasticism. It 
 connotes a definitely positivist outlook which, 
 however familiar to Mr. Wells, was not that of 
 the Realists. The Scholastics held species to be 
 1 P. 510. 2 P. 509. 
 
SCHOLASTICISM 33 
 
 " natural," not a congeries of phenomena by the 
 similarity of which " class " is formed. The 
 point is important, and Mr. Wells is entirely 
 unaware of it, with the result that his home-made 
 illustrations of the Scholastic Realist doctrine are: 
 little better than literary libels. A word of 
 protest against this sort of thing seems called for 
 when Mr. Wells gives his readers to understand 
 that his absurd caricature represents what was, 
 at any time, the philosophy of the Catholic 
 Church. Though Mr. Wells protests against 
 the modern fashion of decrying the philosophical 
 discussion of the mediaeval " schoolmen " as 
 tedious and futile, he adds : " It had to assume 
 a severely technical form because the dignitaries 
 of the Church, ignorant and intolerant, were on 
 the watch for heresy." 1 Unfortunately for this 
 ingenious theory, the said " technical form" existed 
 before there were any dignitaries of the Church 
 it owes its origin to Aristotle, and was adopted 
 in the schools because of its excellence as a 
 didactic method. Leibnitz presumably was not 
 engaged in a heresy-hunt when he wrote to 
 Wagner : 
 
 " I am persuaded that if we acted oftener so, 
 if we sent one another syllogisms and prosyllo- 
 gisms with the replies in form, we could very 
 often, in the most important scientific questions, 
 get at the bottom of things, and dispel a great 
 many imaginations and dreams. By the very 
 nature of the procedure we should cut short 
 
 P. 508, 
 
34 THE CRUS4DES 
 
 repetitions, exaggerations, digressions, incomplete 
 expositions, voluntary or involuntary omissions, 
 mistakes of order, misunderstandings, and all 
 the annoying results that follow from these 
 things." 1 
 
 It is just possible that the " schoolmen " 
 thought so too. However, an account of the 
 " schoolmen," in which there is one passing 
 allusion to St. Thomas Aquinas, need not be taken 
 too seriously. 
 
 Mr. Wells is not a sympathetic chronicler of 
 the Crusades. To him, as a Humanitarian, they 
 are merely foolish expeditions resulting in great 
 loss of human life, interesting only in so far as 
 the " will to crusade " may be regarded as the 
 germ of the " will to power." For him they are 
 merely an illustration of how out of evil cometh 
 good. Contrary to the intention of those who 
 promoted them, the Crusades helped to demo- 
 cratize Europe, since, according to Mr. Wells, 
 the crusaders naturally returned from the East 
 with a lessened regard for Papal authority, and are 
 therefore to be hailed as heralds of revolt. It is 
 perhaps too much to expect a man of Mr. Wells's 
 temperament to show any real understanding of 
 the chivalrous spirit of the crusaders, but one 
 would have thought that a man of his vision would 
 have seen in these much abused Crusades prime 
 factors in the advancement of civilization. Guizot 
 long ago pointed out how much Europe owed to 
 the Greek and Saracenic civilizations, with which 
 
 1 Quoted by Cardinal Mercier in his Logique, p. 171. 
 
AND MR. WELLVS PREJUDICE 35 
 
 the crusaders were brought into contact. The 
 mere linking-up of East and West, and the inter- 
 communication in literature, art, and commerce, 
 brought about by the Crusades, ought to be suf- 
 ficient pragmatic justification even for Mr. Wells. 
 How enthusiastically he would have written of 
 the beneficent effects of these same Crusades had 
 they not been under the aegis of the Church of 
 Rome ! In one of his novels he makes his hero 
 speak of the priests of the Catholic Church as 
 men with faces averted from the dawn and feet 
 set backwards. Mr. Wells believes this. It is a 
 cardinal article of his creed, and much of his 
 history is understandable only as a subscription 
 to it. In this Outline the Catholic Church is 
 always the clog on the wheel of progress. Thus: 
 " 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." 1 An historian who 
 can write thus of the Hildebrand whom Dean 
 Milman bids us regard with awe as a benefactor 
 of mankind has indeed let his prejudice against 
 priests run away with him. But it is perhaps 
 only what might be expected from one who is 
 convinced that " Rome has always had too much 
 of the shrewdness of the priest and too little of 
 the power of the prophet." 2 As Mr. Wells assures 
 us that every chapter of his History has been sub- 
 mitted to an expert, we cannot help wondering 
 who was the expert who passed the following: 
 1 P. 462. 2 P. 461. 
 
36 PAPAL DISPENSATION 
 
 " The Pope might in many instances set aside 
 the laws of the Church in individual cases; he 
 might allow cousins to marry, permit a man to 
 have two wives, or release anyone from a vow." ] 
 Mr. Wells apparently belongs to the same school 
 of thought as the boy who declared that during 
 an interdict the Pope forbids all births, deaths, 
 and marriages for a year. Some expert might 
 have explained to Mr. Wells that there are laws 
 and laws, and that even the Pope cannot dispense 
 from the natural, or from the divine positive, law. 
 Possibly Mr. Wells has in mind some case in which 
 a man, after his marriage has been declared null 
 ab initiOy has contracted a valid marriage whilst 
 his first " wife " was alive. Such cases are 
 contemplated in every modern code of civil 
 law, and the charge of permitting polygamy, 
 which Mr. Wells brings against the Church, 
 might just as reasonably be levelled at the 
 British Constitution. 
 
 By the time his chronicles reach the thirteenth 
 century, Mr. Wells is already surveying the ruins 
 of the Church of Rome : " It now behoves us to 
 attempt a diagnosis of the failure of the Roman 
 Church to secure and organize the good will of 
 mankind." 2 That supposed failure he attributes 
 to the fact that the Church " had become dog- 
 matic." Such passages as the following about 
 Popes and Cardinals are not in the best possible 
 taste : " And it was just because many of them 
 probably doubted secretly of the entire soundness 
 
 1 P. 46*, * F. 464. 
 
WELLS THE PROPHET OF PROGRESS 37 
 
 of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric that 
 they would brook no discussion of it. They were 
 intolerant of questions or dissent; not because 
 they were sure of their faith, but because they 
 Twere not." 1 Such imputations of bad faith are 
 aiore easily made than substantiated, and befit 
 the mud-slinging controversialist rather than the 
 impartial historian. Because we respect his 
 honesty of purpose we regret that Mr. Wells 
 ha? soiled his hands with such weapons. That 
 he is doing his best to be fair to the historic Church 
 we have no doubt. But fair he cannot be he is 
 psychologically unfitted for the task of Church 
 historian. His disqualification lies precisely in 
 the fact that he is himself a religious reformer, 
 zealously propagating a new evangel. With 
 much suffering of soul he has risen from arid 
 agnosticism to a shadowy theism, and found a 
 faith a faitla in a " younger god," struggling 
 and groping to find himself. In the service of 
 that god Mr. Wells has become the Prophet of 
 Progress, preaching that nothing is, was, or ever 
 can be final. Like Nietzsche, he has set out 
 to blaze a new path into the future and back- 
 wards across the ages. Under the spell of his 
 message, facts are moulded to fit theory, and his 
 history becomes little better than a novel with a 
 purpose a thrilling story designed to show that 
 the new faith is higher and nobler than the old. 
 
 In view of the many partisan Protestant 
 accounts of the " Glorious Reformation," which 
 1 P. 465. 
 
38 MONASTICISM 
 
 for centuries have passed as history, we owe 
 a debt of gratitude to Mr. Wells for having made 
 a stand, in a popular work, against what the 
 Cambridge Modern History calls " the long con- 
 spiracy against the revelation of truth/ 3 He 
 may be, and oftentimes is, mistaken in his notions 
 about the Reformation, but he does not degrade 
 his graceful pen by bolstering up " reformed 
 Churches." He is under no delusions as to their 
 origins, and obviously for him it is the historic 
 Church or none at all. 
 
 He discerns the germ of the Reformation in the 
 early Middle Ages, when, in his opinion, the 
 Catholic Church foolishly antagonized " the Nor- 
 dic barbarians " of the North and West by 
 introducing what he regards as distinctively 
 Oriental institutions monasticism and sacerdotal 
 celibacy. A sufficient answer to this somewhat 
 grotesque theory is contained in a footnote to 
 the text, by Mr. Ernest Barker, who says : 
 
 " I do not think this is just. The Anglo-Saxons 
 were not antimonastic. They were converted 
 by Benedictine monks in 600; just after 700 they 
 sent out monks to convert Germany; about 960, 
 under Dunstan and Edgar, they experienced a 
 monastic revival. The Normans, after 1066, 
 introduced the Cluniac and Cistercian Orders, 
 and spread monasticism, while the earlier North- 
 men, after 900, were quite favourable to the 
 Church in England. Note that Gregory's im- 
 position of celibacy on the clergy was accepted, 
 and willingly accepted, by the contemporary 
 
THE REFORMATION 39 
 
 lay- world. William the Conqueror, through 
 Bishop Lanfranc, enforced celibacy in England." 1 
 
 Despite this footnote, and in the face of all 
 historical evidence, Mr. Wells persists in asserting 
 that in the West celibate priests " were regarded 
 with the profoundest scepticism and suspicion." 
 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries he 
 professes to find " an intellectual attack upon 
 the priest as priest, and upon the ceremony of the 
 Mass," 2 without, however, indicating anything 
 particularly intellectual in the noisy brawlings 
 of the Lollards and Hussites. After that, he comes 
 to the Reformation proper, of which he writes : 
 
 " The series of ensuing changes, those changes 
 that are known collectively in history as the 
 Reformation, took on a threefold aspect. There 
 was the Reformation according to the princes, 
 who wanted to stop the flow of money to Rome 
 and to seize the moral authority, the educational 
 power, and the material possessions of the Church 
 within their dominions. There was the Refor- 
 mation according to the people, who sought to 
 make Christianity a power against unrighteousness, 
 and particularly against the unrighteousness of 
 the rich and powerful. And, finally, there was 
 the Reformation within the Church., of which 
 St. Francis of Assisi was the precursor, which 
 sought to restore the goodness of the Church 
 and, through its goodness, to restore its power." 3 
 
 In the princely Reformation, wherein so many 
 Protestant historians have professed to trace the 
 * P. 497. 2 P. 497. ' P. 504. 
 
40 THE REFORMATION 
 
 Hand of God, Mr. Wells, with truer insight, 
 discerns the clutching grasp of the statesman : 
 
 " As England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Den- 
 mark, North Germany, and Bohemia broke away 
 from the Roman Communion, the princes and 
 other ministers showed the utmost solicitude 
 to keep the movement well under control. Just 
 as much reformation as would sever the link with 
 Rome they permitted; anything beyond that, 
 any dangerous break towards the primitive teach- 
 ings of Jesus or the crude direct interpretation 
 of the Bible, they resisted. The Established 
 Church of England is one of the most typical 
 and successful of the resulting compromises. 
 It is still sacramental and sacerdotal; but its 
 organization centres in the Court and the Lord 
 Chancellor, and though subversive views may, 
 and do, break out in the lower and less pros- 
 perous ranks of its priesthood, it is impossible for 
 them to struggle up to any position of influence 
 and authority." 1 
 
 Of the Reformation within the Church Mr. 
 Wells writes with sympathy and insight, pointing 
 out that this movement, which had its beginnings 
 with the appearance of the Black and Grey Friars 
 as far back as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, 
 received a new and powerful impetus when most 
 needed, in the sixteenth century, from the foun- 
 dation of the Society of Jesus. To the Jesuit 
 Fathers, Mr. Wells, as a Humanitarian, pays 
 the highest possible compliment: 
 
 1 P. 504- 
 
AND LABOUR 41 
 
 "They raised the level of intelligence, they 
 quickened the conscience of all Catholic Europe, 
 they stimulated Protestant Europe to competitive 
 educational efforts. . . . Some day, it may be, 
 we shall see a new Order of Jesuits, vowed not 
 to the service of the Pope, but to the service of 
 mankind." 1 
 
 Some day, let us hope, Mr. Wells may realize 
 that these two services are not incompatible, 
 but merge in the service of the Invisible 
 King. 
 
 So far, we are in substantial agreement with 
 Mr. Wells's account of the religious movements 
 of the sixteenth century. But we are moved to 
 ask, was there, outside the Church, a Reformation 
 according to the people, which was " essentially 
 religious " ? Here we think that Mr. Wells has 
 lost sight of that economic interpretation of his- 
 tory upon which he elsewhere lays so much stress. 
 It is curious that he does not pause to ask himself 
 what must have been the effect on the common 
 people of that princely Reformation which he 
 appraises so accurately. Its immediate effect 
 was to accelerate the coming economic revolution. 
 Already, in the fifteenth century, a growing 
 commerce had given rise to " business methods " 
 which clashed with the ethical teaching of the 
 Church. The dawn of commerce was the end of 
 the " Golden Age of Labour." That age, as 
 a Socialist writer has pointed out, "had been 
 mainly agricultural, when the need for wealth 
 
 1 P. 507- 
 
42 ORIGINS OF COMMERCIALISM 
 
 did not exist, nor the means of preserving it 
 when amassed, nor any method of investing it. 
 At such a stage it was easy to enforce the un- 
 worldly commands to hoard not, to lend not at 
 interest, to exploit not, and to inculcate charity 
 and brotherhood, with others of what are now 
 called counsels of perfection. With the growth 
 of manufactures and commerce there came a 
 conflict between the interests of trade and these 
 teachings. The culmination of this struggle is 
 known as the Reformation, the most misleading 
 name ever applied to any movement. It was in 
 no sense a reform, it was a revolt against certain 
 objective Scriptural teachings of the Church to 
 which obedience was only possible for human 
 nature, when the power to exploit another was 
 strictly limited; and its issue was the overthrow 
 of a Church whose morality had become alien to 
 the spirit of the age." 1 
 
 Prior to the Reformation, everywhere in Europe 
 the law of the land was the Canon Law of the 
 Church a law based on Christian principles. 
 In the princely Reformation that law was abolished 
 in the interests of the governing and possessing 
 classes, w r ho promptly enacted new laws framed 
 for the ignoble purpose of enabling commercialism 
 to obtain labour at its own price. Thus, in this 
 country, in 1536; almsgiving was made a legal 
 offence punishable by a fine of ten times the 
 amount bestowed. Davidson, in his Annals of 
 Toil, has shown how, during the Reformation 
 1 A Socialists View of the Reformation, by T, D. Benson, p. 4. 
 
FOUND IN THE REFORMATION 43 
 
 period, wages sunk to starvation-level. The 
 common people were ground down body and 
 soul. The industrial revolution, which began 
 in the fifteenth century, affected not merely 
 man's social life, but, even more radically, his 
 religious life. Add to these altered conditions 
 the fact that three successive visitations of the 
 Black Death had left the people on the eve of 
 the Reformation with few priests to attend to 
 their souls (Mr. Wells himself reminds us that the 
 plague swept away one-half of the priests of 
 Yorkshire), and we readily understand how the 
 wretched conditions of the daily lives of the 
 people must have moulded their religious outlook. 
 Mr. Benson, looking at this period through 
 Labour's eyes, says : 
 
 "The plea that the licentiousness of the clergy 
 and monks caused the Reformation cannot be 
 sustained, for there was but a sectional improve- 
 ment in morals resulting from it, due to the 
 influence of the Puritan movement. This move- 
 ment, like all ascetic religious movements, arose 
 from the industrial conditions of the people. 
 The hours of labour had been doubled, the rate 
 of wages was barely one quarter, and the sad, 
 forlorn condition of the people produced a life 
 of gloom and hardship which decided their 
 religious views and rendered their theology as 
 austere, ascetic, and unjoyous as their own lives. 
 ... In lives where nothing but toil and starva- 
 tion exist, a sympathetic, beneficent Deity finds 
 no place, and bigotry, intolerance, and super- 
 
44 THE CASE OF LUTHER 
 
 stition are the natural results of labour without 
 rest and of starvation without hope." 1 
 
 In dealing with a later period of history, Mr. 
 Wells himself shows how changes in the methods 
 of industry affect the whole structure of society. 
 It is strange that he does not see this principle 
 already at work in the sixteenth century. To 
 describe the Reformation according to the people 
 as " essentially religious " is surely to close one's 
 eyes to one of the most vital factors in the whole 
 Reformation movement the economic factor. 
 If, as Lecky says, " inventions that are purely 
 mechanical ultimately influence profoundly both 
 opinions and morals," the historian can hardly 
 fail to recognize in the industrial revolution of 
 the sixteenth century one of the prime causes 
 of the religious changes of the period. 
 
 In striking contrast with his character-sketches 
 of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Ignatius Loyola 
 is Mr. Wells's treatment of Luther. He barely 
 mentions him, and then only to chronicle that he 
 set up the Bible as a counter-authority to the 
 Church, " a strategic rather than an abiding 
 position," as the modern drift of Nonconformity 
 has shown. One suspects that Mr. Wells endorses 
 Matthew Arnold's estimate of Luther : " a Philis- 
 tine; but a Philistine of genius." It is passing 
 strange that Mr. Wells, with his passion for educa- 
 tion, has nothing to say of the educational havoc 
 wrought by the Reformers. He cannot be un- 
 aware of the classical groan of Erasmus, " Ubicun- 
 
 1 Of. cit. 9 p. If. 
 
EDUCATION 45 
 
 que re gnat Luther anismus, ibi est litter arum in- 
 teritus" (Wherever Lutheranism reigns, there 
 letters die). Education is to Mr. Wells the 
 greatest of all shibboleths. He has written a 
 novel to show that our University system is all 
 wrong, and that our private and public schools 
 are no better. He returns to the charge in his 
 Outline. Gladstone, notwithstanding his " double 
 first " at Oxford, is written down an ignorant 
 man, "with no knowledge of ethnology, no vision 
 of history as a whole, misconceiving the record of 
 geology, ignorant of the elementary ideas of 
 biological science, of modern political, social, and 
 economic science, and modern thought and 
 literature I" 1 
 
 And, " the education of Mr. Gladstone was 
 typical of that ruling-class education which has 
 dominated British and European affairs, so far as 
 they have been dominated by ideas, up to the 
 present time." 2 
 
 Now Mr. Wells himself acknowledges that that 
 University system is a product of the Reformation : 
 " We have told how in England the Universities 
 after the Reformation ceased to have a wide 
 popular appeal, how they became the educational 
 preserve of the nobility and the gentry, and the 
 strongholds of the Established Church." 3 And 
 yet, in another of his fortnightly parts, in the same 
 paragraph in which he admits that " the Catholic 
 Church, through its propagandas, its popular 
 appeals, its schools and Universities, opened up 
 
 i P. 663. 2 P. 664. 3 P. 641. 
 
46 MR. WELLS AS PARTISAN 
 
 the prospect of the modern educational state 
 in Europe," he says of this Church: " Its con- 
 ception of education was not release, not an 
 invitation to participate, but the subjugation 
 of minds." 1 Somewhere in his History Mr. 
 Wells expresses the view that every man is a 
 partisan and certainly he himself is. He cannot 
 well deny that the Catholic Church founded the 
 Universities, which were the cradle of all modern 
 learning, but he would have us believe that in 
 founding them she was under the impression 
 that she was turning out, not a cradle, but a 
 compress something that would hinder and 
 hamper all natural growth and expansion. The 
 kind of people who advocate the abolition of 
 formal logic are fond of telling us that the function 
 of education is " to draw out, not to cram in." 
 There is an obvious fallacy lurking here. Before 
 we can draw out, we must put something in. 
 The mind must be subjugated to something 
 preferably to knowledge, and this is the only 
 subjugation to which minds were treated in the 
 mediaeval Universities. Cramming is acknow- 
 ledged to be a modern " educational " vice, 
 which came in with Examinations, Certificates, 
 Ciplomas, Preceptors, Inspectors, et hoc genus 
 omne. " At Oxford and Cambridge," says Sir 
 Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his recent book On 
 the Art of Reading, " we find in their early days 
 no trace of any examination at all." 2 They were, 
 in fact, in their Catholic days, just such seats of 
 1 P. 496. 2 P. 32. 
 
AND AS FANCIFUL THEORIST 47 
 
 learning as Mr. Wells desires except for the fact 
 that they were " tainted " with dogmatic religion. 
 That is where Mr. Wells falls foul of them. 
 It is the supposed subjugation of minds to dog- 
 matic religion to which he really objects, though 
 why subjugation to the principles of religion 
 should be more inimical (or inimical at all, for 
 that matter) to sound education than subjugation 
 to the principles of " science," he would perhaps 
 find it difficult to explain. It is quite useless 
 to point out to Mr. Wells that there is not, and 
 cannot be, any conflict between science and 
 religion. His quarrel with dogmatic religion 
 is that it is based on a final revelation, and his 
 basic theory of universal progression will not 
 permit him even to enquire if perchance this final 
 revelation be a fact. It is surely better that 
 minds should be subjugated to solid facts than to 
 fanciful theories. 
 
 Mr. Wells's prejudice against dogmatic religion 
 is partly due to the fact that he lays at its door 
 all the absurdities that have ever been perpetrated 
 in its name by misguided fanatics throughout 
 the ages, and, of course, all the literary and scien- 
 tific lapses of ecclesiastics of every and any shade 
 of belief. The doctrine of " special creation," 
 he complains, stood in the way of the acceptance 
 of Darwinism, and Bishop Wilberforce, in the 
 interests of orthodoxy, assailed Huxley on Biblical 
 grounds. Now the theory of " special creation," 
 to which Mr. Wells takes exception, is assuredly 
 no dogma of the Catholic Church. It is, as 
 
48 " SPECIAL CREATION " 
 
 Huxley showed at the time of the controversy, 
 a distinctively Protestant doctrine, which owed 
 its prominence in post-Reformation theology to 
 the vogue of Milton's Paradise Lost, in which 
 creation is thus crudely depicted : 
 
 The sixth, and of creation last, arose 
 With evening harps and matin ; when God said, 
 Let the earth bring forth soul living in her kind, 
 Cattle and creeping things, and beast of the earth, 
 Each in their kind. The earth obeyed and straight 
 Opening her fertile womb teem'd at a birth 
 Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, 
 Limb'd and full grown. . . . 
 
 ##*** 
 The grassy clods now calved ; now half appear'd 
 The tawny lion, pawing to get free 
 His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, 
 And rampant shakes his brindled mane; the ounce, 
 The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole 
 Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw 
 In hillocks: the swift stag from under ground 
 Bore up his branching head. 
 
 (Paradise Lost, Book VII., line 400), 
 
 A conception of this kind is opposed to any 
 theory of evolution, but no such theory was held 
 by the great pre-Reformation scholars. St. Au- 
 gustine formulated a theistic theory of evolution 
 based on the Mosaic cosmogony. 1 St. Thomas 
 thought abiogenesis not incompatible with a 
 theistic interpretation of the universe, since God 
 might have given to matter the power of evolving 
 life. 2 " For centuries after the time of St. 
 
 1 De Genes i ad liter am, lib. V., cap. v. and xxiii. 
 
 2 Summa TheoL, I. Ixix. 2. 
 
NOT THE CATHOLIC VIEW 49 
 
 Thomas, the theory of spontaneous generation 
 was universally held and taught in all the schools 
 of Europe," says Professor Zahn. 1 It was aban- 
 doned only after the experiments of Redi (1668) 
 had demonstrated that the apparent production 
 of life from non-life was due to the action of 
 living germs. The history of the mediaeval 
 controversy with regard to abiogenesis is in itself 
 sufficient to convince any honest enquirer that 
 the Catholic Church did not put barriers in the 
 way of scientific progress. The oft-cited case of 
 Galileo is, as Cardinal Newman says, " the ex- 
 ception which proves the rule." It is, of course, 
 enlarged upon by Mr. Wells, who describes how 
 Galileo " knelt before ten cardinals in scarlet, 
 an assembly august enough to overawe truth 
 itself, while he amended the creation he had 
 disarranged. The story has it that, as he rose 
 from his knees, after repeating his recantation, 
 he muttered, ' Eppur si muove ' c It moves 
 nevertheless. 5 " 2 Of this picturesque story there 
 is no trace whatever before 1761 more than a 
 century after Galileo's death. Though a mani- 
 fest fabrication, it is one of those little artistic 
 touches which not infrequently distract Mr. 
 Wells's attention from the dull business of narrat- 
 ing facts. It would have been more to the point 
 had he endeavoured to give his readers a correct 
 idea of the mental atmosphere of Galileo's day. 
 From Mr. Wells's account of the matter no one 
 
 1 Evolution and Dogma, p. 45 < 
 
 2 p. 513. 
 
S-o THE GALILEO CASE 
 
 would suspect that Galileo's contemporary, Lord 
 Bacon, " the Father of Modern Science," vio- 
 lently opposed the Copernican system. And with 
 him in opposition was Descartes, " the Father 
 of Modern Philosophy"! "In the middle of 
 the seventeenth century and long afterwards," 
 says Hallam, " there were still mathematicians 
 of no small repute who struggled staunchly for 
 the immovability of the earth." In the face 
 of these facts, is it fair to represent the Church 
 as "struggling gallantly against the light"? 1 
 The whole question was then a very open one, as 
 Huxley recognized when he wrote to Mivart 
 (November 12, 1885): "I gave some attention 
 to the case of Galileo when I was in Italy, and I 
 arrived at the conclusion that the Pope and the 
 College of Cardinals had rather the best of it." 
 
 Mr. Wells has always been a keen student of 
 social science, and his diagnosis of the evils that 
 afflict us is penetrating and accurate. We are 
 therefore the more astonished to find him expres- 
 sing the opinion that Marx, as a prophet, " is 
 being more and more justified by events." 2 We 
 have social ills enough, but they are not the ills 
 which, according to Marx, the historic necessities 
 should have inflicted on us long ere this. Thus, 
 Marx prophesied that the trend of industrial 
 conditions would make the lot of the working 
 man worse and worse. It is impossible to deny 
 that to-day there are more working men with a 
 comfortable income than ever before. Wealth, 
 
 1 P. 513 2 P. 647. 
 
KARL MARX 5! 
 
 he maintained, would gradually be concentrated 
 in fewer and fewer hands. 
 
 " It is sometimes argued against Marx," says Mr. 
 Wells, " that the proportion of people who have 
 savings invested has increased in many modern 
 communities. These savings are, technically, 
 ' capital,' and their owners ' capitalists ' to 
 that extent, and this is supposed to contradict 
 the statement of Marx that property concen- 
 trates into few and fewer hands. Marx used many 
 of his terms carelessly and chose them ill, and his 
 ideas were better than his words. When he wrote 
 6 property ' he meant ' property so far as it is power.' 
 The small investor has remarkably little power over 
 his invested capital." 3 
 
 True, but he has some capital and some power 
 over it, and there are far more, and not far fewer, 
 people with capital and power than when Marx 
 wrote. 2 It has been well said that the history 
 of Socialism is a history of false prophecy. These 
 prophets went astray because they neglected one 
 vital factor in the social situation the psycho- 
 logical factor. Paradoxical as it may sound, these 
 champions of Humanity forgot that the proper 
 study of man is mankind. Marx was chiefly 
 concerned with the deification of a mechanical 
 system^ and those upon whom his mantle des- 
 
 1 P. 647. 
 
 2 It may be argued that Marx is justified in the menace of 
 the Trust; but against this must be set the portent of the Co- 
 operative Movement. See Christian Socialism (1920), by 
 Charles E. Raven, chaps, viii.-x. 
 
52 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 cended studied everything and anything except 
 the nature of man himself. That human nature is 
 the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, is a 
 truth which Mr. Wells himself overlooks. He 
 sees no remedy for our present discontents until, 
 many decades hence, we are in a position to set 
 up " a scientifically conceived political system." 
 He assures us that we can no more do that now 
 than our fathers in 1820 could have set up an 
 electric power-station. Why ? Because " our 
 science of human relationships is still so crude 
 and speculative as to leave us without definite 
 guidance upon a score of primarily important 
 issues." 1 It does not occur to Mr. Wells that 
 possibly man knows as much about the principles 
 which govern, or ought to govern, human relation- 
 ships as he is ever likely to know. Such is his 
 faith in progress that he confidently looks to the 
 future to evolve new ethical principles. He might 
 as well expect mathematicians to evolve new 
 numerals. As every problem of arithmetic is 
 worked out by correct manipulation of the figures 
 from one to ten, so, too, every problem affecting 
 the soul of man is soluble by means of definite, 
 unchangeable Christian principles. To plead for 
 more figures, or new figures, to work out a sum 
 would be to plead for an absurdity. If we 
 cannot work the sum, the fault is not in the figures, 
 but in our ignorance of their application. And, 
 if we cannot see our way clear through the 
 problems of the day, the fault is not in the prin- 
 
 * P. 654. 
 
AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROGRESS 53 
 
 ciples of Christianity, but in our not applying, 
 or misapplying, them. The remedy is not in 
 " progress," but in reversion to the principles of 
 Christ. 
 
 In these pages we are concerned with Mr. 
 Wells's History only in so far as it touches directly 
 on religious issues. His record of purely secular 
 affairs lies beyond our scope, and we cannot, for 
 instance, enter into a consideration of his fascinat- 
 ing presentment of the cause and course of the 
 Great War. Suffice it to say that he regards the 
 war as " a necessary consequence of the mentality 
 of the period." The world of 1913, in the 
 retrospect, is seen to be " a world of lost and 
 faded beliefs," and the war " a necessary fulfil- 
 ment of such an age of drift." 1 The present is an 
 age of disillusionment. England has not become 
 a land fit for heroes. The time is out of joint, and 
 as yet we discern no one born to set it right. 
 On every side there is a reaching out, a groping 
 after a vague something which will restore to 
 the world its lost stability. " We call this stir 
 towards a new order, this refusal to drift on in 
 the old directions, unrest," says Mr. Wells, 
 " but rather is it hope which disturbs the world " 2 
 a vague hope of better things, a hope which 
 Mr. Wells warns us will be dashed to the ground, 
 unless religion become once again the leaven of 
 society. There has been, in Mr. Wells's phrase, 
 " a de-civilization of men's minds " through the 
 divorce of religious teaching from organized edu- 
 
 i P. 748. 2 P. 749. 
 
54 THE WELLSIAN UTOPIA 
 
 cation; but, if the race is to be saved, " presently 
 education must become again in intention and 
 spirit religious." 1 Mr. Wells is not eating his 
 words. He is at pains to explain that by religion 
 he does not mean " the old too elaborate religious 
 formulae " which he throws on the scrap-heap of 
 history, but " a common world-religion, very 
 much simplified and universalized and better 
 understood " a religion which is not Chris- 
 tianity, nor Islam, nor Buddhism, nor any 
 specialized form, but " religion itself pure and 
 undefiled; the Eightfold Way, the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, brotherhood, creative service, and self- 
 forgetfulness." 2 This elemental religion is to 
 bring about a Humanitarian Utopia, in which 
 there will be no mad-houses, no custom-house 
 officials, no large police forces or gaol staffs; 
 no cheats, sharpers, gamblers, forestallers, para- 
 sites, or speculators, but in which, nevertheless, 
 there will be no diminution of adventure or ro- 
 mance. 3 We are somewhat dazed by this vision 
 of the " unification of the world," and close the 
 chapter feeling that 
 
 His talk was like a spring which runs 
 With rapid change from rocks to roses; 
 It slipped from politics to puns, 
 It passed from Mahomet to Moses. 
 
 And, after all, what is this panacea advocated 
 by Mr. Wells ? Nothing more or less than a 
 return to the " Ethical Religion " of the early 
 
 ip. 751. 2 P. 754- 3 P.7S7- 
 
AND PAST FAILURES 55 
 
 Victorian Positivists the " Service of Man " 
 of Cotter Morison, or the " Religion of Science " 
 of Paul Carus and history answers, non tali 
 auxilio. It is strange that a man of Mr. Wells's 
 vision cannot read aright this verdict of history. 
 Cotter Morison himself acknowledged with cha- 
 grin that many who, at the bidding of the new 
 ethic, had put off a belief in God, had not put 
 on a belief in Humanity; and he frankly recognized 
 the danger of intellectual and moral anarchy 
 amongst his followers. As a one-time rationalist, 
 Mr. Wells can hardly be unaware that the Ethical 
 and Humanitarian Societies, which preach the 
 gospel that he preaches, were founded to give 
 practical effect to the teachings of rationalism. 
 They were a despairing attempt to graft " re- 
 ligious " sentiment on to the sterilities of Ag- 
 nosticism; and the most conspicuous thing about 
 them is their admitted failure to appeal either 
 to the head or to the heart of man. The essential 
 sanity of the human race rejects the deification 
 of Humanity, and insists that there must be a 
 transcendental ground for the " service of human 
 knowledge, human power, and human unity " 
 advocated by Mr. Wells. We can conceive an 
 Ethicist, such as Mr. Wells depicts, making the 
 best of the painful facts of life, but we can- 
 not imagine him giving enthusiastic service in 
 the interests of the hypothetical progress of 
 Humanity. Nor, indeed, could Huxley, who 
 says: 
 
 " There would be something in talk of this kind, 
 
56 WELLS AS THE 
 
 if, in Chinese fashion, the present generation 
 could pay its debts to its ancestors; otherwise 
 it is not clear what compensation the Eohippus 
 gets for his sorrows in the fact that some millions 
 of years afterwards one of his descendants wins 
 the Derby." 
 
 Man is primarily concerned with himself and 
 with the present, and for that reason alone the 
 religion of Humanity is unlikely ever to become 
 the mainspring of human action. Mr. Wells 
 raises Humanity to the altar under the sway of a 
 naive optimism which is hardly justified by 
 history as he writes it. Like the tyrant of old, 
 he strolls in the garden lopping off the heads of 
 the tallest poppies Caesar, Alexander, Charle- 
 magne, Napoleon, all are made to bite the dust 
 and the real lesson of his history would seem to 
 be trust in God rather than faith in man. 
 
 There is unfortunately no automatic register 
 for the facts of history. They must pass through 
 the mould of the historian's mind and take the 
 impress of his personality. We know of no history 
 in which the personal equation is so pronounced 
 as in this work of Mr. Wells. We have here not 
 so much a record of human affairs as the vision 
 of an artist enraptured with the pageant of the 
 ages; the passion of a democrat railing at kings 
 and princes ; the wail of a pacifist over the strifes 
 of men ; and in it all and through it all, the spirit 
 of emancipation chafing at all restraint. This 
 spirit is in some measure responsible for his atti- 
 tude to the Catholic Church, but his marked anta- 
 
HERACLITUS OF HISTORT 57 
 
 gonism has deeper roots. A Church which is 
 semper eadem cannot well be made to harmonize 
 with a philosophy of change, and Mr. Wells is 
 the Heraclitus of history proclaiming universal 
 flux. The burden of his message is that nothing 
 continueth in one stay everything is in process 
 of becoming something else. Yet, if we are to 
 reason at all, there must be immutable principles 
 of thought, as the most thorough-going evolu- 
 tionist tacitly admits when he builds his theories 
 upon theiji. The principles of Catholicism are 
 " static " only in precisely the same way as the 
 principles of logic, mathematics, or science are 
 static all alike limit the mind to the possession 
 of truth. If for the truth she teaches the Catholic 
 Church claims a divine origin, surely her claim is 
 the more worthy of investigation. Had Mr. Wells 
 investigated that claim instead of merely brushing 
 it aside, he might perchance have found that 
 unifying principle of which his History stands in 
 need; he might have come to realize even more 
 fully than the Prince of Philosophers, that " the 
 Divine it is which holds all things together." 1 
 
 1 Aristotle, Metaphysics, XI. 8. 
 
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