A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS’S “OUTLINE OF HISTORY”
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
[Illustration: ECCLESIASTICAL SUPPLY ASSOCIATION E + S + A PUBLISHERS
AND IMPORTERS]
328–330 STOCKTON ST. SAN FRANCISCO. CAL.
1927
Made and Printed in Great Britain at
_The Mayflower Press, Plymouth_. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.
TO
MY BROTHER-IN-LAW
JOHN HOGAN
OF
NAPA, CALIFORNIA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. MR. WELLS AND THE CREATION OF THE WORLD 9
III. MR. WELLS AND THE FALL OF MAN 28
IV. MR. WELLS AND GOD 34
V. WHENCE CAME RELIGION TO MAN? 40
VI. WE COME TO REAL HISTORY 47
VII. MR. WELLS ON PRIESTHOOD 51
VIII. BUDDHISM AS A STICK WITH WHICH TO BEAT THE CHRISTIAN 59
IX. MR. WELLS AND THE INCARNATION 64
X. THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH 72
XI. ISLAM 77
XII. THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES 84
XIII. THE MIDDLE AGES 89
XIV. THE REFORMATION 93
XV. THE FRUIT OF DISRUPTION 103
XVI. SUMMARY 110
APPENDIX 115
INDEX 119
A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS’S
“OUTLINE OF HISTORY”
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
My object in these pages is to follow, for Catholic readers, Mr. Wells’s
_Outline of History_; to point out the principal popular errors, most of
them now out of date, which its author has repeated, and to state the
opposing truths with their supporting evidence and reasoning.
If it be asked why I should devote such labour to a book which is but a
passing fashion, and that not in the classes or districts which count
most, I answer that, though ephemeral, the work has had a wide
circulation, and is therefore of some momentary effect worth checking,
while it is also representative of its type: writing of wide circulation
which repeats as facts for general acceptation theories once respectable
and now exploded. Now to check erroneous statement is always worth
while.
If it be asked why I envisage a Catholic audience in particular, I
answer that the issue in such matters lies between the Catholic Church
and its modern opponents. The hosts of modern writers in all countries,
of whom Mr. Wells is a local example, act more or less consciously in
reaction against the Catholic Church. It is her doctrines they are
concerned to attack; and soon, with the increasing effect of the Church
upon the one hand, the increasing abandonment (outside her boundaries)
of all transcendental belief on the other, there will be but two opposed
camps: the Faith and its enemies.
Already the denial of a Personal God, of Immortality, of the Redemption,
of the Fall, of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, is no longer
directed against some vague “Christianity”—a word with twenty meanings
or none—but against that defined and existing corporation which alone
defends in its entirety that body of dogma upon which our civilization
has been founded and with the loss of which it will perish.
Further, I have the legitimate motive of sustaining others. There are
Catholics into whose hands a work of this kind falls, and it is possible
that here and there a Catholic may be disturbed in his faith by popular
literature of this kind. For the sake of this very small number of
chance Catholics, who may suffer from a popular (though ephemeral) work
of this kind, I desire to examine the book and distinguish its merits
from its absurdities. One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more
important than a host of the average reading public of England and
America, drowsily accepting stuff they have heard all their lives, and
reading it because they have always believed it to be true.
A Catholic disturbed in his faith is like a man troubled with his sight.
A Catholic losing his faith is like a man going blind. One should take a
great deal of trouble to prevent a man from going blind.
I am aware that to aver such a motive reads presumptuous and a little
ridiculous. For faith is strongest in the humble. But the motive is
there, and at any rate the important thing is that Mr. Wells’s widely
read, though necessarily short-lived, survey of human affairs, with its
violently anti-Catholic motive, should not be of effect on any Catholic
mind so far as a Catholic critic can provide the antidote.
Every man, even the idlest, occupies his time with something or other.
The vast majority of men have their energies absorbed by their daily
tasks. So when a man comes forward with a mass of historical facts,
drawn from Encyclopædias (which not one man in a thousand has had the
leisure to look up in those books of reference), and tacks on to these
historical facts all manner of false conclusions (destructive of the
only truth worth having, destructive of the one grasp on reality which
is of any value to men), the reader may well be misled.
He may easily say to himself, “Since all these historical facts are
presumably true, the conclusions tacked on to them are also probably
true.” And in this way a false philosophy is insinuated.
Mr. Wells’s main motive—the honestly held conviction which drives him to
writing matter of this kind—is reaction against the Catholic Church. But
as this motive is not stated—(and, indeed, I fancy, not fully conscious
in the mind of the writer)—the reader may take his work to be neutral
matter. In doing so, false history, and, therefore, false philosophy
(for history is but the illustration of philosophy) may, without his
knowledge, pass into his mind. It is this which it is important to
prevent.
At the outset of my task it behoves me to set forth the great talents
with which Mr. Wells has been endowed by Almighty God, and especially
the talents suitable to the writer of general history. For, indeed, he
seemed from his earlier works admirably fitted for writing a general
outline of history, and would, by the consent of all, have been thought
apt for the task—had he not undertaken it.
First, he writes very clearly; he practises an excellent economy in the
use of words. This, for popular exposition, is essential; and he never
fails in it. He never lapses into verbosity. He is direct, simple,
clear.
Next, he possesses a sense of time. Now in history nothing is more
valuable. Within his lights, within the measure of his limited
instruction, he does see _time_ in right scale; and that is so rare in
any historian that one cannot welcome it too warmly.
Next, we should remark that Mr. Wells has (as his works of fiction amply
show) a strong power of making the image he has framed in his own mind
arise in the mind of his reader. This is, indeed, his chief talent.
It is a talent extremely rare: the very essential of good imaginative
writing, but of particular importance in historical writing. For
History, as the great Michelet finely put it, should be a resurrection
of the flesh. Were I engaged upon a critique of Mr. Wells’s more
permanent literary claims I would dilate on this: for such a gift is of
quite exceptional power in him. None of our contemporaries possesses it
in anything like the same degree. But I am not concerned here with his
style, and must reluctantly leave it.
Next, it is worth noting that Mr. Wells is exceedingly accurate in his
use of reference books and proof-readers. The dates are always right,
and the names and all the mechanical details of the book are similarly
exact. I have a particular right to praise such a quality because in my
own case (as in the case of the great Michelet, whom I have just quoted)
I despair of accuracy. My own writings on History are full of misprints:
“right” for “left” in descriptions of battles, “north” for “south,”
“east” for “west,” transposed letters and the rest of it. Mr. Wells’s
writing is quite remarkable for its freedom from such irritating verbal
blemishes.
But much more important than these advantages which he possesses for a
writing of an Outline of History is his sincerity. He feels the
importance of History to mankind, and especially, I think, to that part
of mankind which he knows best—the mankind of the English Home Counties
and London Suburbs. He feels instinctively that he and his must now
obtain a general view. It is due to Mr. Wells to say that hardly anyone
else in our restricted society feels this as strongly as he does. Our
newspapers, our politicians, and even our financiers, cosmopolitan
though they are, do not feel the need of trying to understand the past
of Europe and of the world. They are still soaked in what is left of the
old self-sufficiency. But Mr. Wells has woken up, and it is to his
credit.
I put his sincerity thus last in this category of his advantages for
writing History, because it is the chief. He is conspicuously and
naively sincere. This good quality is apparent in every line of the work
as it first appeared. It is equally apparent in the first part of the
new revised edition. He does really believe from the bottom of his heart
all that he read in the textbooks of his youth. He does really and from
the bottom of his heart believe that the little world he knows is the
whole world; and that his doctrines of goodwill, vague thinking, loose
loving, and the rest—all soaked in the local atmosphere of his life—may
be the salvation of mankind. It is not vanity or pride (though, of
course, it is ignorance); it is a perfectly honest conviction. He cannot
imagine how things could possibly be otherwise; and that, by the way, is
the root of his recently acquired hatred of the Catholic Church, which
has now become, directly and indirectly, the universally present savour
in his writing.
He is sincerely bewildered and exasperated at the power of Something so
different from the only world he knows. He hopes vaguely that the Church
may be dying: he suspects it is not—the doubt worries him. It moves him
to hatred; but that hatred is sincere. This sincerity of his, even where
it is misguided and untaught, is respectable. He does sincerely desire
to do good to his fellow-men within the narrow circle of his experience
and understanding.
If the reader will add up all these advantages for the writing of
History, he will find them amount, I think, to a very notable sum.
There are few men who could have produced a general history better than
Mr. Wells—had he not suffered from certain graver disadvantages to which
I shall presently allude. To be sincere is essential. To have the motive
of History is both singular and decisive. To have clarity, economy and a
sense of time is rare and of high value. To be accurate in detail of
dates, etc., is a most excellent minor virtue in any historian.
Mr. Wells has called me an inveterate antagonist. He is wrong. From the
first moment that the _Time Machine_ appeared, so many years ago, I have
consistently praised his talents in private conversation and in public
writing, and I shall praise them still.
Before I leave this point of his advantages in the writing of History,
let me deal very briefly with certain false accusations that have been
made against him.
The first and, I think, the stupidest, is that of brevity. I have heard
people say, “Here is a man pretending to write a history of the world in
a few months and in a few pages,” and they have laughed at him on that
ground. The accusation is unintelligent. You can give the outline of the
history of anything in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a pamphlet, or a
book, or an encyclopædia. If Napier, the great historian of the
Peninsular War—perhaps the greatest English writer of History—had been
asked to state in one sentence the outline of that struggle, he might
have replied, “The Spanish national feeling engaged with French
usurpation was supported by a small English regular army possessed of
the command of the sea. These two forces combined achieved, after
Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the driving out of the French from the
Peninsula.” If he had been given a page in which to write the thing he
could have added phrases upon the talent of Wellington as a defensive
General, the misconception of the French upon the Spanish national
feeling, the skill with which the lines of Torres Vedras were drawn,
etc. Had he been given fifty pages, he could have added more details
still—and so on, up to a shelf full of books. But the outline from such
a pen would have been good History had it covered ten lines or ten
thousand. It is thoughtless to say that a man has no right to give an
_outline_ of any movement, however great, in any space, however small.
The Catechism puts the whole vast business of man through time and
eternity into one short phrase, “That we were made to know, love, and
serve God, and to be happy with Him for ever.” You could add to that all
the rest of true philosophy in as much detail as you like, and still
expand; but the original brief outline of less than a score of words
remains true. Mr. Wells has a perfect right to produce an outline of
general History in one volume, or half a volume, or a page, and, so far
as the _manner_ of it goes, he has done it excellently: the drawing is
firm, the intention honest; it is the shape of the Outline that is
wrong.
Again, he is wrongly accused of superficiality. That is an accusation
made by people who see—what, indeed, is obvious—that the book has no
lasting value, and that therefore they can call it hard names with
impunity, secure against the judgment of posterity. The book is
ephemeral, certainly; but no honest critic can call it superficial. The
book is not superficial at all. On the contrary, it goes to the roots of
things, and considers what is really important to mankind. One may
indeed call the writer superficial in so far as he knows nothing of
beauty or tradition—that is due to his unavoidable limitations; but
superficial his effort is not. It is as searching in the matter of cause
and effect as its writer can make it. That is not saying very much, for
its writer has never had the opportunity for digging deep into cause and
effect; but the book does not suffer from that prime mark of
superficiality—_indifference_. Mr. Wells means to say all that is in
him, and if there is not very much in him, that is not his fault.
He has a neutral quality, neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in the
writing of History; or, perhaps, rather an advantage than a
disadvantage, and that is, an intense nationalism. An English scientist
is supreme. An English book changes the world. An English mode of
thought is self-evidently the best. The Catholic Church itself is
hateful mainly because it is foreign. Such nationalism is often the
unconscious accompaniment of limitation, but, upon the whole, it serves
the historical sense. After all, any worker must be himself. He cannot
create unless there is a flame within him. Such flames arise from
intense conviction, and the historian steeped in his own country does
better, in my judgment, despite his inevitable leanings, than one who
pretends attachment to nothing: for attachment to nothing is sterility.
The three great historians whom good judges most admire were all intense
lovers of their country—an Athenian, a Frenchman and a Scotsman.
Now for the disadvantages.
The first and most glaring of these is Provincialism.
But here I must warn my readers that they will not discover in this
criticism any of those personal descriptions or offensive allusions to
private life by which our vulgarians aim at extending their large
circulations. I am concerned only with this one book of Mr. Wells’s, and
with History and Religion in it; not with domestic details in the
Author’s life or the caricatures of them. The mental formation and
social motive of an author must indeed be alluded to in any judgment of
his work, as must his defects of instruction or judgment. The rest is
irrelevant. I have even, in revising the text, cut out anything which
might be _mistaken_ for a personal allusion, and leave it, I believe,
confined wholly to the criticism of historical statement, method and
motive.
* * * * *
I have said, then, that with so many qualifications for writing a
popular general History, Mr. Wells suffers from defects which ruin it;
and the first of these is that his book is Provincial.
The word “Provincial” is a hard one; but it exactly applies to Mr.
Wells’s History; therefore it must be used.
I find it the more difficult to use this necessary and precise word here
because I know Mr. Wells, from an acquaintance of many years, to be
abnormally sensitive to any printed judgment of his work.
Such extreme sensitiveness is not rare in men of vivid imagination,
especially if they cultivate its literary expression. But in this case
it is quite exceptionally developed; and I naturally hesitate to offend
it.
Greatly as I admire Mr. Wells’s scientific romances, and have always
admired them, I am compelled to use exact terms in this criticism. I
cannot do otherwise, because the truth of History is a sacred thing—the
most sacred next to the truths of Religion. If History is falsely
written, the reader not warned of it obtains a distorted view of human
action and comes to misunderstand all the most essential things of life,
including Religion itself; and Mr. Wells’s History is obviously and
fatally distorted through Provincialism.
Provincialism does not mean a limitation of experience to some one small
department of life—we are all of us subjected to such limitations, and
any man’s petty personal experience is always infinitely small compared
with the total possible field of knowledge. Nor does Provincialism mean
seeing things through the medium of one’s own habitat and character,
both necessarily limited. All men must see, and can only see, through
some such limited medium.
No, Provincialism means thinking that one “knows all about it”;
Provincialism means a satisfied ignorance: a simple faith in the
non-existence of what one has not experienced. Provincialism involves a
contempt for anything foreign and, what is worse, an actual denial of
things which the provincial person has not been made familiar with.
It is Provincialism in a yokel when he laughs at you for not knowing the
way to his local railway station. It is not Provincialism to say, “I
don’t know about this. It is new to me. I must examine it before I
accept it.” But it is Provincialism to say, as the Frenchman in the
story did of Joan of Arc, “It can’t be true. If it were I should have
heard of it.”
It is not Provincialism to say, “I far prefer the atmosphere and
institutions of my own country to those of any other.” But it is
Provincialism to think that the Cathedral of Seville must necessarily be
inferior to the Crystal Palace because it was built by Dagoes, and that
anyone who thinks otherwise is either a humbug or a fool. It would not
have been provincial in Mr. Wells to have written “the character of
Napoleon repels me; give me rather the honest Englishman of my
acquaintance than this hard and profound Southerner”; but it is
dreadfully provincial to belittle Napoleon’s immense capacities. It
would not be Provincialism in me, who do not know German, to say that
Heine in translation had not moved me, and that when the German of Heine
was read aloud to me it seemed to me harsh compared with the exquisite
music of Keats; but it would be gross Provincialism in me were I to lay
it down, ignorant as I am of German, that Heine was no poet, that his
reputation was exaggerated, and that, say, Schiller was his superior in
the management of the German tongue; yet that is how Mr. Wells treats
Napoleon.
Now this vice of Provincialism runs right through Mr. Wells’s _Outline
of History_ from beginning to end.
The moment he is on a thing that is not of his own religion and social
experience he rejects it or blunders on it. I shall have many occasions
for pointing this out in my criticism of the book, but I may mention
here, by way of example, one out of these many, to which I shall return.
This is Mr. Wells’s hopelessly provincial attitude towards the
fragmentary record of the Gospels. He can only think of the events
recorded as though they were taking place in the time and place he
himself has known—they took place, as a fact, in the first century and
in the Roman Empire. He imagines them taking place in a world where the
supernatural elements of the story could only have been introduced
gradually and after the death of the founder; whereas, in point of fact,
the atmosphere of that time was in every class of society especially apt
to the reception of the supernatural. There was scepticism among
them—but the scepticism of society in the first century was not like our
scepticism and—quite apart from the question whether such a state of
mind were wise or unwise—the men of the first century accepted the
Thaumaturge and expected the marvellous in connection with religion.
The next disadvantage which I find in Mr. Wells for the writing of an
outline of History is one which he has developed somewhat late in his
life, which is more and more warping his writing as a whole, and which
is quite fatal to any attempt at History. This is his entertaining
unreasoning reactions which one may now without exaggeration term rabid.
These reactions have a common root. They are all provoked by anything
_traditional_. It is _Tradition_, its usage and Nobility which irks our
author. Lineage offends him, and whatever is venerable and great.
He suffers these reactions against the Gentry—especially the Gentry of
his own country—against soldiers, great military characters in history,
against certain contemporaries of his, but, most of all, against the
Catholic Church. To be thus provoked to action by others—not to direct
one’s pen of one’s own initiative, but to have it jerked into action by
the strength of another—is weakening to all authors, but it is death to
the historian. For History, of all forms of writing, most demands a
general and balanced action of the mind, free from all control save that
of a calm, inward judgment.
Here I would have my reader note the exact words I use; for I use them
with discretion and after having fully weighed them. I do not mean that
the dislike of a particular type—such as that of the English
gentleman—or of certain individuals, or of a powerful institution, such
as is the Catholic Church—necessarily makes a man a bad historian. Every
vivid writer must have affections and distastes, and History that is not
vivid is not worth writing. But when the distaste becomes _unreasoning_
through violence, when it has that quality which we call “rabid”—a
quality of impulse and unrestraint, the quality which makes men yell or
pile on superlatives or descend to mere insult—then you have a quality
useful perhaps in pamphleteering, but fatal to the reputation of an
historian.
I do not mean that this quality is to be deplored in all writing or
speaking: far from it. It is of great value in rhetoric; it will often
move men in the direction desired; it is often justly applied to
something evil against which an honest indignation is felt. What I do
say is that in History it is out of place in proportion to its being
unreasoning: and unreason is the very essence of these instinctive
reactions. Cobbett’s _History of the Reformation_, for instance, is a
first-rate piece of literary work, but bad history, because in his
hatred of the Reformation he accepts anything against it—such as the
impossible story of Anne Boleyn being Henry VIII’s daughter—and loses
the faculty for weighing evidence.
To judge by his books, Mr. Wells came up against the English idea of a
Gentleman early in life. He probably thought it an illusion, and a
harmful one, from the first. Very many will here agree with him. But
later on he became obsessed by the thing. He came to hate everything
connected with what used to be called in England “the governing class.”
He grew to hate Latin and Greek because these are, or were, the basis of
a gentleman’s schooling; soldiering, because it was by tradition a
gentleman’s profession—he hates it all, even down to the spurs worn by
officers.
But Mr. Wells’s violent and blind reaction against the Catholic Church
is a much more important matter. Here he is quarrelling with the very
matter of History; for the foundation and career of the Catholic Church
is the chief event in the history of mankind.
To judge (again) by his books, Mr. Wells seems to have come up against
the Catholic Church late in life—he does not yet really know what it is.
But here, again, he found a power opposed to many ideas which he
cherished, and (more exasperating) to many things which he sympathized
with and practised. Perhaps he felt that in a world turned Catholic a
man like himself would have difficulty in carrying on, and therefore
came to hate the idea of a world turned Catholic as a fish would hate
the idea of a world without water. But this mere impulse—this mere
instinctive kick, lacking sufficient knowledge and lacking reasoning
power—this mere attack without any sufficient ammunition of
instruction—this mere impatience—makes it impossible for the man who
suffers thus to write History as it should be written.
For instance, his hatred of the Church makes him wish to believe that
its influence is dying. Instead of looking around him, and seeing that
Catholic influence over the more intelligent of modern men is markedly
increasing, he shuts his eyes and screams his passionate refusal to
accept so plain, if unpalatable, a fact. It has recently led him to
write that sufficient income and interesting occupation would make
Catholic priests pour out of the Church _en masse_: a judgment clearly
ridiculous.
Again, in dealing with the Galileo case, he will have it that the
advance of physical science broke down the Catholic scheme. The motive
of such a statement is clearly to suggest that the Faith is incompatible
with real knowledge and that all extension of ascertained truth tends to
destroy the Christian Religion.
But that is not rational history; it lacks even elementary instruction;
a schoolboy ought to know better than to write thus. The historical
process whereby so much of Europe was lost to European religion was not
_first_ an advance of physical science, _then_ a loosening of the
Catholic authority, and, _lastly_, a wide denial of that authority and
the establishment of various heresies. The historical process was just
the other way—_first_ came the violent explosion of spiritual revolt and
anarchy which nearly wrecked our civilization altogether; _then_, later,
a large but not complete recovery; then, _last_, and principally in
societies which had retained or recovered the Catholic culture, a new
and remarkable advance in physical science.
It is not historically possible that astronomical discovery in the
seventeenth century, the telescope, and the great new development of
mathematics, could lead to the denial of Catholic doctrine in the
sixteenth. Not only is it impossible in History; it could not possibly
be true in psychology. No one with an elementary knowledge of Catholic
spirit and doctrine could conceive that doctrine and spirit to be
affected by any discovery in the plane of physical science. You might as
well say that a man’s judgment on his duties to his country would be
affected by a new ordnance survey, or his admiration of Bach by the
discovery of zinc photography for printing music.
With all this I will deal later in more detail when I come to those
parts of Mr. Wells’s work which specially show his general animus
against the Faith. Meanwhile, let me conclude with another disadvantage
which I find in him for the task he has undertaken. It is the inability
he has shown for consulting the right people.
It is a laudable thing in any popular novelist who has acquired a large
public and can attract its attention to set out with the sincere
intention of instructing his fellow-beings, even in a department wherein
he has had hitherto no practice.
Thus some such popular novelist might say to himself: “I think people
ought to know more about the laws of health. I will therefore use my
wide circulation and my large audience for the purpose of spreading
knowledge upon hygiene.” There is nothing blameworthy in this, nor need
the effort be insufficient. The popular novelist, being hitherto
ignorant of modern medicine, would have to go for instruction to men who
were already experienced in the matter: he would have to read certain
textbooks; he would have to “get up the subject,” and might, if he
selected his tutors and guides with a good _flair_ for the right
sources, produce a really useful elementary treatise upon a matter of
which he had, till lately, known nothing. His name being well known to
the multitude, his little effort would probably have a wide sale, and
that wide sale would do nothing but good. But it is essential that he
should make himself acquainted with the difference between what was
certain and what was hypothetical; with the most recent debates upon
disputed points; with at least the main arguments on either side, etc.,
and it would further be essential that he should hear the latest results
of research. For though a theory is not better than another merely for
being later than that other, yet as there is new _fact_ continually
being discovered, and new arguments concluded, their bearing upon theory
must be appreciated.
Now, Mr. Wells has been very remiss indeed in this duty of consulting
the right authorities, before sitting down to write even so elementary a
history as this “Outline” of his. He had, at the outset, not more
faculty for writing an elementary history than any other best-seller
might have for writing a book on elementary mathematics; indeed, a good
deal less, for our schools give a certain amount of elementary training
in mathematics, but as yet no training to speak of in history. But it
was manifestly apparent from the first issue of his book that Mr. Wells
was rarely given the latest historical theories, let alone the latest
historical discoveries.
What is more extraordinary in a man so interested in such things, he
does not know the modern trend of controversy in Pre-history and
Anthropology. He remains away back in what I may call “the early
Golden-Bough-Period”—that of Grant Allen’s _Evolution of the Idea of
God_ in Pre-history. From internal evidence it would seem, as I shall
point out in the text, that his studies in these matters stopped
short—or at any rate crystallized—in 1893, the date of Ball’s book on
Croll’s Theory of Glaciation and of the Weissmann articles in the
_Contemporary Review_.
And I am appalled to discover that he knows nothing of all the modern
work against Darwinism, in which system—that is, in Darwinian Natural
Selection—he retains the simple faith of the day—over thirty years
ago—when he was “doing” elementary science in a class.
It is the same with the recorded history of Europe. His informers
referred him to no books wherein he might learn what force that Catholic
Church was which made Europe. He did not compare—perhaps he never heard
of—the various sources ascribed to our main political institutions, and
the increasing evidence for their Latin origin.
Now these disadvantages taken together have ruined the book. Had they
not done so, I should have taken for Catholic readers a different line.
I should have said: “This History is full of knowledge; its statements
in Anthropology and Biology are cautious and well balanced, its
conclusions on historical cause and effect are correct; its knowledge of
fundamental historical processes, though slight, is sound: the outline
is just. Nevertheless, do not follow the author in his antagonism to the
Faith, in defence of which we have arguments both historical and
philosophical of such and such a kind.” As it is, my task is an easier
one. I can say to my readers: “Mr. Wells’s sketch of History is not
insincere in spirit; it is simply out of drawing from lack of common
instruction. He has not kept abreast of the modern scientific and
historical work. He has not followed the general thought of Europe and
America in matters of physical science. While, in history proper, he was
never taught to appreciate the part played by Latin and Greek culture,
and never even introduced to the history of the early Church.
“And this is the more remarkable as he assures us that he has a wide
knowledge of modern languages, in which he reads French like English,
and can handle German, Spanish, Italian and even Portuguese.
“With all this Mr. Wells suffers from the very grievous fault of being
ignorant that he is ignorant. He has the strange cocksureness of the man
who only knows the old conventional textbook of his schooldays and
thinks it universal knowledge.”
So much for the general consideration of the author, and of what he has
attempted, and failed, to do. I next turn to the particular
consideration of points in his writing which will illustrate the truth
of the contentions I have advanced in this Introduction.