Chapter II: Introduction (2)

We Catholics are interested in this Animal Man, because we think (making clear use of our reason) that it is more important for man to know what happens to man and what man really is than for man to know any other subject. We believe that he has been created by an omnipotent God, to whom he is responsible for good or evil action committed by his own free will--for in man’s free will we also believe; we believe his soul to be immortal, and to be tested for eternal beatitude or eternal loss thereof.

Anyone is free to say “These doctrines are particular, you admit yourself that you hold them on Faith and not on positive evidence. I for my part do not accept them.” There is no lack of reason in making that negative statement.

But a mind that can imagine that there is no such thing as man and indeed no such thing as a thing; a mind (to put it in the old language) which is nominalist in that degree, is in great peril of ceasing to be a mind at all.

The particular point on which Mr. Wells comes his worst cropper in connection with the Catholic Church is a blunder to which he devotes a whole chapter of his pamphlet, and over ten pages of print furiously reviling me.

He has got hold of the idea that the discovery of Neanderthal skulls and skeletons destroys Catholic theology. He imagines that we wake up in the middle of the night in an agony of imperilled faith because a long time ago there was a being which was as human as we are apparently in his brain capacity, in his power to make instruments, to light fires, and in his reverent burial of the dead, but who probably, perhaps certainly, bent a little at the knee, carried his head forward, was sloping in the chin. He thinks that unless a private individual like myself, with hardly any more reading on anthropology than Mr. Wells himself, can give a definite theological definition on whether the owners of these skeletons were true men or not, all the theological statements about man as we know him are worthless.

I can understand many a blunder about the Catholic position on the part of people living in a world where they do not meet Catholics and who know next to nothing of the past of Europe or of the way in which our civilisation is a product of the Catholic Faith. I often come across even well-educated men who have surprisingly little knowledge of the Church; but what I cannot understand is that a man thus ignorant should also be ignorant of the ordinary rules of thought.

A man’s Faith may possibly be shaken by some philosophical argument--though my own experience is that when it is shaken, still more when it is lost, the cause at work is not intellectual but always moral--the Faith is lost through wrong doing. But that the Faith could conceivably be lost through not being able to define at what exact moment true man appeared, is to me quite inconceivable. I confess I cannot understand the mental processes of a writer who puts a test of that kind.

We are arguing as to whether Wordsworth is a good poet or no. One man says he is, quoting from his best; another man says he isn’t, quoting from his worst. There barges in a third party who says cheerfully, “The whole discussion is futile. There was no such person as Wordsworth as a writer at all. And to prove that, here is a record of what he was like and what he did at the age of six, and another when he was inarticulate upon his death-bed. Where do you draw the line?”

We are discussing whether an individual is responsible for a particular action; for instance, writing a confused book. One man says, “It was not his fault; it was due to bad training.” The other says, “It was his fault, for any rational being ought to write more clearly than that.” A third party barges in, and says, “The whole discussion is futile, for there was no such writer. I can prove it by a photograph of him as a baby, in which it is quite clear that he couldn’t write books at all.”

But Mr. Wells’s manifold lack of acquaintance with his most serious opponent is seen in plenty of other lights.

For instance, there is his idea that scale destroys the Faith. “Only let me convince you,” he pathetically urges, “that the material universe existed long before man, and that the scheme of redemption only applies to the comparatively brief human period in geology. Only let me convince you, and you will see how foolish all this Christian talk is.” But we have all of us known all about that, not only since first the Church began, but since first man began to trouble himself about divine things at all. Is not the sky at night sufficient evidence of scale? Is not the brevity of human life? Is not the magnitude of the world upon which we live--of even a part of which no man could have comprehensive knowledge in a thousand years?

There is I think in all of this an honest desire upon Mr. Wells’s part--I may say a burning missionary zeal--to convert us to Atheism, something on the same level as that of those from whom he derives. They were convinced, you will remember, not so long ago, that to turn the inhabitants of Wugga-Mugga into honest folk like themselves attending chapel, meeting at tea-fights, and even keeping one or two servants, all that was wanted was a translation of the Old Testament in Wugga-Mugganese--which translation they then did order in prodigious quantities and export to Wugga-Mugga by the ton, to the huge profit of a great number of salaried officials in the W.M. Bible Society, and to honest rum-drinking sea captains as well; but to no appreciable effect upon Wugga-Muggaland, its monarch, aristocracy and common folk.

So I fear it will be with this effort at conversion of the Catholic to Atheism by an exceedingly insufficient rehash of text-books thirty years old. Mr. Wells sometimes pleads that all this doesn’t matter, because the Catholic Church no longer counts. Well, that plea itself is a very good example of ignorance. If he had a general acquaintance with Europe he would know, not only that the Catholic Church counts, but that it is beginning to count more and more. That is no proof of its right to the claim it advances of a divine authority; but it is proof that there is a great social phenomenon present to the eye of every educated and travelled man to-day--the resurrection of the Catholic Nations, the new attitude of the academic youth on the Continent, and particularly in Paris; the new wave in literature; the breakdown of the nineteenth-century materialism in philosophy--which is not present in the experience of Mr. Wells.

He tells us rather pathetically that he must know all about the Catholic Church, because he now winters on the Riviera. I answer that the experience is insufficient. If every rich Englishman who wintered on the Riviera acquired thereby a general grasp on the modern spirit of Europe, we should have among them a public to be envied; but from what I have seen of those who thus escape the English winter, the Monte Carlo Express and the Cosmopolitan hotels do not make for common culture, let alone for an understanding of divine things.

I have no space to enlarge on the point. Mr. Wells knows as much about the Catholic Church as he does of the classical spirit, of great verse, of the architecture inherited from the ancients, or indeed of any other noble tradition. Yet it should be a commonplace with anyone who attempts to write upon European history that some general knowledge of what the Faith may be is a first essential in his affair.

That knowledge is rare and fragmentary in many considerable anti-Catholic historians; in Mr. Wells it is absent.

IV

MY ERRORS

I owe it to Mr. Wells that any error or misstatement I may have committed in the great bulk of work which I did showing up the paucity of his knowledge and the confusion of his mind, should be corrected.

I now, therefore, deal with the specific, particular points, in which he says that I have misrepresented him or misunderstood him; and these I will take in their order, as they appear in his somewhat hysterical protest.

Of these alleged misstatements Mr. Wells manages to scrape up exactly six, out of I know not how many in the detailed and destructive criticism which I directed against his work.

But even six alleged misstatements (out of perhaps some hundreds of critical remarks) should in justice be dealt with, and I will deal with them here.

I will take his complaints in their order as they appear in his angry little pamphlet.

(1) I recommend him occasionally to a translation of foreign work, though he is, as a fact, better equipped than I am in the reading of Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese; while French comes to him much the same as his native tongue.

I accept his statement unreservedly, and beg leave to tell him that in German, Italian, Spanish, and even Portuguese, I am no use at all; and that I am altogether his inferior in French. For I have perpetually to consult better scholars than myself on the meaning of French words which I come across; I write the language painfully, and, on the few occasions when I have to speak it in public, I spend a vast amount of effort and am a burden to my friends before I can get my paper ready for delivery.

But it is only fair to myself to give him the reasons for my deplorable blunder. I honestly took it for granted that he was ignorant of Continental languages. I had no idea of his quite remarkable linguistic achievements, which are excelled only by two men out of my wide circle of acquaintance. And the reason that I fell into this error was that his _Outline of History_ betrayed no acquaintance with general European culture. My own acquaintance with that culture is no more than the general familiarity with it possessed by all men of average education, and average experience in travel, and average meeting with their fellows. Why Mr. Wells should have concealed far greater advantages I do not know; but, at any rate, he has certainly done so most successfully. No one reading his _Outline of History_ could imagine for a moment that he had an urbane and comprehensive view of Christendom based on the reading of French, German, Italian, Spanish--and Portuguese.

However, I was wrong, and I duly apologise.

(2) He accuses me of having put into his mouth the words “climbing up the family tree,” as applied to the embryo; which words, as a fact, he never used. Here, again, I am to blame--not, indeed, for having said that Mr. Wells used words which he never used, but for not having written with that clarity which the occasion demanded. I had no intention of saying that Mr. Wells had used this particular phrase himself. I quoted it between inverted commas, not because I ascribed it to himself, but because it was a sort of current slang phrase familiar enough when Mr. Wells and I were young and were both being taught the nonsense which he still so loyally defends.

The idea was that the embryo reproduced in various stages of its development the various stages of its ancestry in the evolutionary process. The proper scientific term for this conception or theory is “Recapitulation.” To this theory of Recapitulation Mr. Wells amply commits himself in his book. He brings it out specifically in connection with man. How his allusions to Recapitulation look in the light of modern scientific work we shall see in a moment. The particular point here is that he did not use the particular phrase “climbing up the family tree.” He did not, and I never intended to say that he did. I readily apologise for any misconception that may have arisen on that head. But I confess I cannot for the life of me see how the matter can be of the least importance!

Supposing Mr. Wells were to write a criticism of my book, _Europe and the Faith_, and were to say, “Mr. Belloc is for ever referring the main institutions of Europe to the Roman Empire,” and then were to add, out of his wide acquaintance with French literature, that fine expression from Verlaine, “O Rome! O Mère!”

I don’t think I should rush into print and protest that I had been abominably maligned. I should say that I was not the author of the expression (if anybody bothered to ask me), but that it put my opinion more tersely than I could have put it myself.

However, if Mr. Wells cannot bear the misunderstanding, he will be relieved to know that in my book I have got rid of it by the simple process of adding the words “as it was called in Mr. Wells’s youth and mine” before the offending phrase (and a very good epigrammatic one it is) “climbing up the family tree.”

(3) Mr. Wells complains that I accuse him of not having read Vialleton, and brings forward, in triumphant proof of my own ignorance of that great scientist, the fact that I passed an error in proof, allowing “V_ai_lleton” to stand for “V_ia_lleton.”

Here it is I that must defend myself.

I bought Vialleton’s great book (which is a destructive criticism of Darwinism of a 17-inch calibre) the week in which it came out, and have consulted it ever since. If Mr. Wells is reduced for ammunition to the picking out of one misprint in some hundred thousand words of matter, he must be in a terrible way.

But on the attached point, that I accuse him of never having read Vialleton, and that (as Mr. Wells himself roundly affirms) Vialleton does not knock Recapitulation sideways, I can only repeat that I have made no error at all; but that, on the contrary, it is clear Mr. Wells has never read the book, and probably never heard of it until he saw the name quoted in my criticism. Had he really read Vialleton he could not have had the face to pretend that this great authority did not oppose the old-fashioned views Mr. Wells was putting forward.

Mr. Wells is foolish enough--and ignorant enough--to say that this leading European authority, one of the greatest living authorities on his subject, “_may_ have seen fit in _one_ of his works” (my italics) to set right some “French student” (why French?) who had imagined that the embryo reproduced in detail all its ancestral life.

I might as well say that Darwin “may” in some one of his works have seen fit to set right some English student who imagined all animals to have been created out of mud in a week.

Why! the whole of that great book is nothing but one continuous bombardment of everything--let alone Recapitulation--which Mr. Wells was taught in his youth.

He will hear all about it in my book, and I am sure that he will wish, when he reads what modern science really says, that he had never talked about things of which he knows so little.

(4) He complains that I have abused him for stating as dogma (with large diagrams) Croll’s astronomical theory of glaciation as propounded--thirty-three years ago!--by Sir Robert Ball. But I did right to expose anything so monstrous. Not that astronomical factors may not, or rather must not, have been at work; but that the particular theory which he puts forward for his innocent readers as admitted scientific fact, has been dead and done for since 1894. Surely one has a right in 1926 to point out that the popular teacher laying down in that year as fact an hypothesis which was exploded over thirty years ago should be exposed.

(5) He says that I have attacked him for not accepting the theory that times of high glaciation were also times of high sea-level, and vice versa. He says that he has followed in this authorities later than the authorities of twenty years ago which I quoted.

He is perfectly right. I owe him an apology for this, and when my book comes out the passage shall be wholly modified in consonance with recent work. I over-emphasised the certitude of Boule and others; I admit that the point is in doubt and ought not to be treated as certain. Mr. Wells was obviously wrong in treating it as certain upon his side, for the whole debate still remains doubtful (as, for instance, in the latest work of all, Professor Coleman), but that does not excuse me for having been too positive on my own side.

(6) The last accusation Mr. Wells brings against me is that I misrepresent him in similar fashion upon two points, the Neanderthal quality of the Tasmanians (now extinct) and the use of the bow by Paleolithic Man.

As both these accusations turn on the same point (to wit, whether I was justified in reading confused writing as I did), they are essentially one accusation, and I will treat them as such.

In the matter of the bow being used by late Paleolithic Man the position is this.

Mr. Wells gives a long description of later Paleolithic Man (pages 51–56). In the course of this description he tells us (on page 54) that later Paleolithic Man disappeared and that a new culture took his place, possessing (what Paleolithic Man had not) domesticated animals, a knowledge of husbandry, bows and arrows, and the rest of it.

This, of course, is the orthodox doctrine of the famous Gap between Paleolithic Man and Neolithic Man on which our generation were all brought up. It is true that there are now guesses at the discovery of a link between them; still the gap is very marked.

He ends up with a summary of the whole affair on page 55, carried over to page 56, where the section ends.

Now, _in the middle_ of this description of later Paleolithic Man (who, remember, had no bows and arrows), he has a set of paragraphs (on page 53) describing the well-known fact that these men executed drawings on rock surfaces. On the same page is given a specimen of these drawings, and above it, by way of title, the caption, “Mural Painting by Paleolithic Man.” This mural painting is nothing else but bows and arrows! It is a picture of four men hunting with large bows, three of them actually shooting arrows, and the unfortunate animals stuck full of arrows so that there may be no doubt.

Yet in the course of this very same description he says that it is “doubtful if they knew of the bow!” And that phrase comes on page 55, two whole pages _after_ the description of Mural drawings and pictures of bows and arrows.

The division about later Paleolithic Man--who, he has told us, was supplanted by Neolithic Man--comes to an end and a new division begins.

In this new division Mr. Wells suddenly starts to describe a type of Paleolithic Man upon whom the guess has been made that he came at the very end of the process and had a more advanced culture, including bows and arrows.

What is any man to make of such a confusion?

First, Paleolithic Man as an artist, illustrated by a picture of him shooting away like the devil. _Then_, the casual remark that he was too degraded to shoot at all. _Then_ the end of Paleolithic Man and his replacement by Neolithic Man. _Then_ Paleolithic Man reappearing, pages after, with bows and arrows all complete?

It looks uncommonly as though Mr. Wells had written his first section, putting an end to Paleolithic Man and introducing Neolithic Man, before he had been told of the supposed later Paleolithic men who had bows and arrows: that he put in these latest Paleolithic men as an afterthought.

But that is only an inference from reading his confused order, and if he tells me that what he had _meant_ to say was that there were two kinds of late Paleolithic men, one of whom had bows and arrows and the others had not, of course I accept what he says. Only, he should have written it plainly, and he should not have illustrated the part describing the men who had no bow and arrows with a large picture in which bows and arrows are the main thing.

The other case of the Tasmanian is a similar example of confused writing. Let the reader judge.

We have on page 43 and what follows a description of Neanderthal Man.

It is, as is usual with Mr. Wells, a mass of vague guess work, on very little evidence, put forward as certain facts. We have also the judgment of the author that those who regard Neanderthal Man as no ancestor of ours, but a side-line of development, have his approval; though he admits that the other view is held. This on page 49.

Then Mr. Wells steps sideways again. “No doubt” our own breed, “which includes the Tasmanians, was a very similar and parallel creature.” There is, of course, no ground for that “no doubt,” but that is by the way. He next goes on to say that some imaginary ancestor of ours and of the Tasmanians (whom he generously admits to be men), is not so far from us as to have allowed contemporary types to have eliminated, not indeed Neanderthal but the Neanderthaloid types. Then, on page 52, there is a smart return to the original position that Neanderthal Man was not an early type of our own breed, and that true men did not intermix with him.

Mr. Wells may protest against my calling all this sort of thing a rigmarole, but I think that is the right word for it. It is certainly not history, and, above all, it is not clear.

The confused impression left upon the reader’s mind by the confused writing is that Neanderthal Man was not true man, and yet that true man must have passed through a Neanderthal stage, having been both Neanderthal and not Neanderthal: as it were, so to speak, and somehow.

However, a critic’s misreading, though caused by the confusion of the author’s style and the lack of orderly arrangement in his mind, is none the less a misreading, and Mr. Wells may rest assured that when my book appears it shall be corrected. My perplexed guess at what Mr. Wells really meant shall be replaced by his own statement of what he meant, and I will, in these two cases of the Bow and the Tasmanian, emphasise the muddlement of his method while apologising for the error into which it led me as to his intention.

With this I conclude my review of Mr. Wells’s specific grievances of misstatement.

They are, as I have pointed out, only six in number. Out of a prolonged examination--covering nearly a hundred thousand words--he could find no others.

Of these six, only one (the fifth, that on the connection of sea level with glaciation) is a definite error of over-emphasis upon my part.

The first, my ignorance of his remarkable proficiency in modern language (including Portuguese), is more than natural, because he had made no use of such knowledge: nevertheless, I shall correct it in my book.

The second is wholly insignificant, and turns merely upon Mr. Wells’s misunderstanding of my use of inverted commas in a particular case.

In the third, about Vialleton, he is simply wrong, and, what is worse, pretends acquaintance with a book of which he clearly knows nothing.

So is he wrong about the fourth. Mr. Wells’s definite affirmation for popular consumption of a theory exploded more than thirty years ago was disgraceful.

On the sixth point, misreading due to Mr. Wells’s own confused order, I have promised him the small necessary redress, which he will receive.

Now, let me ask my reader, in conclusion, is it not remarkable that a man setting out to inform a large audience that God, and our Lord’s Divinity, and our own immortal destiny are all nonsense, doing so by a pretended “science” and favouring me as an insufficient critic of his book, can only find in some scores of my exposures of him six points, half of which tell heavily against himself, while two of the remainder are due to his own confusion and only one--my over-emphasis on glacial sea level--has any substance in it?

V

MR. WELLS SHIRKS

The most violent _positive_ part of Mr. Wells’s attack upon me is, as I have said, his challenge upon the matter of Natural Selection, his jeer that my arguments are wholly my own, ridiculous and unsupported; and his amazing assertion, which he makes, quite naïvely and sincerely, that there has been nobody in modern criticism opposing the Darwinian theory. I think I have sufficiently exposed Mr. Wells in these particulars.

But quite as important as this huge positive error on his part is the _negative_ factor in his pamphlet which I here emphasise for the reader.

In my articles, which are about to appear in book form, I took his _Outline of History_ section by section, examined, turned over, analysed, and exposed failure after failure in historical judgment and information.

One challenge after another--I know not how many in all, but certainly dozens on dozens--was put down by me clearly and, I hope, methodically throughout a series of articles originally twenty-eight in number, and of such volume that they still will form when rearranged a book not less than 70,000 or 80,000 words.

Of all this great mass of destructive criticism which leaves his _Outline_ limp and deflated, Mr. Wells knows nothing. He leaves it unanswered, and he leaves it unanswered because he cannot answer it. All he can do is to fill a pamphlet with loud personal abuse.

I do not think it difficult to discover his motive or the calculation upon which he worked. He said to himself: “I have a vast reading public which will buy pretty well anything I write, and very few of whom have seen or will see Belloc’s work. For to begin with he has no such huge popular sales as mine; and on the top of that his work is only written for his co-religionists, who are an insignificant body. Also it only appeared in a few of _their_ Catholic papers, which nobody reads.

“Therefore, if I write a pamphlet against Belloc holding him up to ridicule in every possible fashion, slanging him with the violence so dear to the populace, making him out to be a grotesque fellow--and yet shirking nine-tenths of his criticism--I am in no danger of exposure. The pamphlet attacking Belloc will be very widely read, people will believe anything I say in it about his articles, because they will not have read these articles and because, in their simplicity, they think me a great scientist.”

This calculation is partially justified.

I suppose that for ten men who may read Mr. Wells’s pamphlet against me, there will not perhaps be more than one who will read this, my reply.

But I would like to point out to Mr. Wells that success of this kind is short-lived. No one can read what I have said in the second section of this pamphlet, no one can read that list of authorities of whom Mr. Wells has not even heard, and whom he loudly proclaimed not even to exist, without discovering that the author of the _Outline of History_ was incompetent for his task. Very few people, I think, faced with chapter and verse of that sort, can refrain from passing on the good news.

If you take the history of opinion upon matters of positive fact, you will generally discover that the discovery of the truth affects at first but a small circle, and that a popular error may cover a whole society. But it is the truth that wins in the long run, because the truth is not soluble: it is hard and resistant. The number of people who continue to believe that there has been no modern destructive criticism of Darwinism by the greatest of modern biologists, anthropologists, and scientific men, bearing the highest names in our civilisation, will necessarily be progressively lessened as time goes on. The half educated of any period are always cocksure of things which the real science of that period has long ago abandoned; but their situation is not a stable nor a permanent one. Sooner or later they learn. So undoubtedly will it be with Darwinian Natural Selection.

Mr. Wells’s incompetence in that one department of his history has been exposed. I have exposed it. But note that he was here on his own chosen ground. He boasted special instruction in these affairs of physical science, and particularly in biology; he contrasted his education with my own, which had been so deplorably limited to the Humanities, and in his attack upon me he was fighting wholly upon a position chosen by himself.

What then would it have been had he attempted to meet the rest of my criticism, filling up as it does much the greater part of my book?

How will he meet my objection that the man who tries to talk about the Roman Empire, and our civilisation which is its product, without any mention or conception of Latin literature and its effect, is incompetent?

How would he deal with the simple and obvious but conclusive fact that physical discovery was not the cause of religious disruption, as may be proved by the simple fact that it came after and not before that disruption?

How will he handle my pointing out that he knows nothing of the history of the early Church and has no conception of what the Christian traditions and sub-Apostolic writings were?

What will he make of my showing him to be ignorant of Catholic philosophy and Catholic definition, and yet absurdly confident in his attack on what he supposes them to be?

Anyone can see how he deals with my criticism of him in all these things. He is silent. He does not rebut it, because he cannot rebut it. If he could have done so even in the briefest and most elementary fashion, there would have been at least a few sentences to that effect in his pamphlet. There were none except one vague phrase on the contemporary doctrine of the Incarnation.

In plain English Mr. Wells shirks. He shirks the great mass of my attack. He submits in silence to the bombardment--because he has no power to reply.

Yet surely these proved absurdities on recorded history, and not his backwardness in biological science, are the main thing he has to meet.

It is principally through recorded human history and not through guess work upon the unknown past, that he should rely, in order to upset the Christian Faith of his readers.

The history of our race becomes a definable and concrete thing only after the establishment of record, and if he fail there manifestly--as he has failed--he fails altogether.

Mr. Wells must, I think, have heard the famous dictum of the late Master of Balliol upon his _Outline_--a judgment which has already been quoted by more than one critic, and which I am afraid he will hear repeated pretty often before he has done with it. That very learned historian remarked: “Wells’s _Outline_ was excellent until it came to Man”; and upon the whole it is about the truest epigram that could have been written. Save perhaps this. Mr. Wells’s _Outline_ is excellent until he begins to deal with living things--somewhere about page ten.

VI

THE GREAT ROSY DAWN

The last factor in Mr. Wells’s pamphlet is one that we must always expect from your Bible Christian who has lost his God. He becomes a materialist troubled with Pantheism, and very eager to get away from the Puritan disease of his youth--yet a vision remains. He comes forward as the “Seventh Monarchy man,” which is, indeed, the natural term of your Bible Christian--even after he has lost his God.

“I see knowledge,” says Mr. Wells at the end of his diatribe, “increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limit set to it at all. Existence impresses me as perpetual dawn. Our lives as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.”

We have had this before over and over again, not only from the enthusiasts of the seventeenth century, but from the enthusiasts of the early heresies. There was a glorious time coming. Reality--that is the Faith--is a delusion. Now that you know it to be a delusion you are naturally down in the mouth. But cheer up, I have a consolation for you. All will yet be well; nay, much better. All is going forward. My donkey will soon grow wings.

I need not waste my reader’s time on that sort of thing. It is sheer stupid enthusiasm, indulged in to fill the void left by the loss of reason: by a man losing himself in a fog of cheap print and becoming fantastically unaware of things as they are.

When, in that connection Mr. Wells tells me that we of the Faith are backward people, who “because it is necessary for their comfort believe in Heaven and Hell” (a comfortable place Hell!) I answer that he appreciates the Faith as a man born blind might appreciate colour. When he tells me that this Catholic sort (to which I belong) are besotted to stand by accepted morals, beget children honestly, love one wife and live decently, I answer him that he is becoming disgusting. When he says that we believe in immortality “because we should be sorry to grow old and die,” I answer that he is talking nonsense on such a scale that it is difficult to deal with it.

When he goes on to say that we think we live on a “flat World” it becomes worse still, and one can’t deal with it; it is no longer nonsense, it is raving.

When he tells us that the Catholic has about him “a curious defensive note,” I am afraid he must be thinking of the Church Congress. There was certainly no “curious defensive note” in my demolition of his own ignorance, vanity and lack of balance.

When he tells us that I, as a Christian, “must be puzzled not a little by that vast parade of evolution through the immeasurable ages,” he clearly has not the least grasp of the very simple principle that eternity is outside time, and that relative values are not to be obtained by mere measurement in days or inches. When he says that “my” phantasy of a Creator....

Really, my dear Mr. Wells, I must here interrupt. Why “_my_” phantasy? Not that he uses the word “phantasy,” but he implies that I invented God (another enormous compliment to me). Does he not know that the human race as a whole, or at any rate the leading part of it, including his own immediate honourable ancestry, pay some reverence to Almighty God, and humbly admits His creative power and Sustained Omnipotence? But I must resume.

... that my phantasy of a Creator has worked within disproportionate margins both of space and time; when he tells me if I reach beatitude I shall feel like a fish out of water; when he speaks like this, I recognise the unmistakable touch of the Bible Christian who has lost his God.

Mr. Wells has never met anybody, I suppose, of sufficient breadth of culture to instruct him in these things. He does not know that the truths of the Faith cannot be visualised; he does not know that the Faith is a philosophy; he does not know that our limitations are no disproof of an infinite Creator.

He boasts that his education was a modern one, and taught him things that were unknown a hundred years ago. So was mine. I also was taught that the Earth was a globe, that geological time was prolonged, and the rest of it, but I was also taught how to think, and I was also taught a little--not very much--history.

For instance, I was taught enough to know that the doctrine of immortality did not arise in the Middle Ages, as Mr. Wells thinks it did, nor even the doctrine of eternal beatitude. But I was taught enough to regard these great mysteries with reverence and not to talk about them as preposterous. In other words, I was taught not to measure the infinite things of God, nor even the great things of Christendom, by the standards of the Yellow Press.

When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying, “I strut to no such personal beatitude,” and then goes on to say, “the life to which I belong uses me and will pass on beyond me, and I am content,” he does two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with the imaginary (for whether he will attain beatitude or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with his opinions upon the subject), and next he falls into the very common error of confused intellects--the personification of abstract ideas. “The life to which we belong uses us” is a meaningless phrase. God may use us or we may use ourselves, or some other third Will, not God’s or our own, may use us: but “the life to which we belong” does not use us. Talking like that is harmless when it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets up to be definition.

He accuses the Christian of being anthropomorphic: it is just the other way. It is we who are perpetually compelled to drag back inferior minds to a confession of their own apparently ineradicable tendency to talk in terms of their own petty experience; to imagine that the whole world has “progressed” because they have daily hot baths and bad cooking, while in their childhood they had only occasional hot baths, but better cooking; that more people voting is “progressive” as compared with people not voting at all; that a lot of rich people going from England to the Riviera every year is “progressive” compared with staying at home in the hideous surroundings of poor old England.

This leads Mr. Wells, as it always does all his kind, to prophecy. We are all of us approaching what I may call The Great Rosy Dawn: a goldmine: a terrestrial Paradise.

This sort of exaltation is the inevitable first phase of Bible-mania in decay. But it is a very short phase. It is the shoddy remnant of the Christian hope, and when it is gone there will return on us, not the simple paganism of a sad world, but sheer darkness: and strange things in the dark.

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

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC

CONTENTS

CHAPTER