MR. WELLS ON PRIESTHOOD
When a man is talking of a social class whereof he knows nothing, you
will notice that he does two things. First of all, he goes very much by
the current statements about it which he has seen in print or on the
stage: what he has met in the books and plays he happens to come across.
Baronets are wicked, Dukes haughty, great Ladies disdainful and
dazzlingly fair. Next, his imagination plays on that unknown world,
creates out of the void, and then takes for granted a number of habits
in it which are, as a fact, nonexistent and wholly of his own imagining:
as, for instance, Cabinet Ministers wielding awful power in whispered
conclaves.
But when he comes to talking of his own world, of his own class, of the
things he really knows, his manner changes altogether. He becomes, for
one thing, much more interesting, and, for another, much more definite.
In _that_ region, one can judge his style and credentials by real
standards.
Something like this change from romance and misjudgment to appreciation
and reason takes place in Mr. Wells’s book when he turns from what is
called to-day “Pre-history” (of which we know hardly anything) to
recorded History (of which we know a great deal, and which is in a
totally different category).
This change takes place in Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ with the
opening of Book III.
In the first two books, where he was dealing with the world before Man,
and Man before History, he went by such textbooks as he had come across
(all of them anti-Catholic, few or none of them continental, and most of
them old-fashioned stuff thirty or forty years old, the theories of
which are to-day, for the most part, exploded). He filled up the gaps
with guesswork, rather confused, even contradictory, and often in direct
conflict with the evidence—had he known or noticed what the evidence
was. He romanced, and he romanced out of the map. The world he saw in
his vivid imagination was an unreal world, much as the English
aristocratic world of a popular novel is an unreal world comically
unlike the thing itself.
But when it comes to real and tangible stuff, record and monument, and
still better, record in writing—in other words, when it comes to real
History—Mr. Wells’s excellent qualities as a writer appear in a much
better light and are put to a much better purpose. His narrative, which
even in its misshapen prehistoric part was lucid, vivid and well put,
capable of holding the reader’s attention, retains all these characters,
and now becomes in great sections really informing without distortion.
There is also a very successful packing of a great deal of information
into a short space without redundancy of detail and without too much
repetition. The order is well observed, and the survey is as wide as the
Author intended it to be—that is, world-wide.
Unfortunately, in this second part of Mr. Wells’s account, he cannot
help suffering from the disabilities of the modern industrial town
world, under which he naturally labours. He has never experienced the
great part played by popular memory and impressions handed down from one
generation to another, as the counterpart and corrector of documentary
Record. He is, therefore, too prone to treat what is handed down by
masses of men living familiarly in neighbourhood (they still do so in
our villages) as being, on its large lines and in its general sense,
misleading; whereas it is, on its large lines and in its general sense,
true. He has no appreciable knowledge of the Catholic Church, and,
therefore, does not know how History falls into line under that
philosophy which alone properly explains it. He also suffers, as we
shall see, from that unfortunate tendency to violent personal hatred for
the nobler things, especially for the great and united succession of
civilization in Europe: Tradition.
But the merits, at first, outweigh the faults. Until he runs up against
the beginnings of Rome—with all the irritation which the mere name of
Rome provokes in him—he keeps his head and writes excellently. The thing
is well balanced and of real value. The exceptions which must be made,
even to the part before Greece and Rome, to this praise do not colour
his story of early record as a whole. He gives a rather imaginary
account of the beginnings of agriculture, but much of it is more
probable than improbable; and he modifies it well enough by conditional
adverbs proper to our necessarily speculative attitude towards these
early and uncertain things.
Now and then, in a sentence or two, he is unwise enough to abandon this
conditional attitude and bolts away again into fiction: for instance, he
tells us that when man settled down to agriculture, the Red Sea was
still connected with the Mediterranean (p. 91). We do not know that; it
is mere guesswork, and ought not to be put up as historical fact. On the
other hand, an immediately following remark, that “the Persian Gulf then
extended much further northwards than it does now,” is real history; for
there is sufficient proof of that.
Again (on p. 92), he puts down as historical fact the invariable
conquest of settled populations by barbaric and nomadic populations
outside. He treats it as a necessarily recurrent phenomenon and as the
only process. Of course, we all know from History that in plain recorded
fact the converse is just as common, and far more lasting in its
effects. Subjugation of the barbarian by the civilized man is very much
more the rule of recorded History than its opposite. And as for
agricultural work being regarded as the lot of an inferior, that is a
false generalization from our own suburban conditions. On the contrary,
the tradition of the Mediterranean peoples, as of the Chinese, is just
the other way. Agricultural work was the basis of their society and was
clothed with moral dignity.
The account of early Mesopotamian civilization (including in that term
the earliest culture before the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris
systems) is excellent, and the subsequent short section on the
beginnings of Egypt is equally good—with a paragraph on the causes of
the difference of record (on p. 98) between the Nile and the Euphrates
Valleys particularly well put.
In order to keep the survey parallel and marching on one front, there
follow a few lines on the early civilization of India and on the early
history of China; in which, by the way, Mr. Wells rightly rejects the
somewhat shadowy hypothesis put forward of late years, which gives a
Mesopotamian origin to the Chinese culture.
If only Mr. Wells had also rejected from these first stones of his
building in real History such pure guesswork as the supposed
“heliolithic” culture—an imaginary matrix for all future
civilization—this early part might be called completely well done. It is
a pity he yielded to that temptation, for it is one of the things that
will “date” the book most seriously in a few years. Theories of this
kind come and go, like the weather. The passage (pp. 107, 108) in which
he quotes from another authority upon the development of the rowing ship
in the Mediterranean, is a good example of sane reasoning and informing
conjecture. While the conclusion—a rapid review of the Cretan
discoveries and of the Phœnician civilization—is on the same high level.
Unfortunately, the reader is, of course, left under the impression that
civilization of any complexity came very late, a judgment which the
author has to make in order to fit it in with his Messianic ideas—his
ardent inherited faith in a Millennium for which we are only beginning
to prepare.
In point of fact, we do not know how far back the origins of our complex
civilization may stretch, and these very Cretan discoveries should give
us pause before we make any confident statement upon the point.
It is not forty years ago that all popular history was roundly affirming
the original semi-barbarism of the Greek world at a time long after the
culture of the Labyrinthine Palace fell—if fall it did—or decayed. The
really interesting thing about the whole affair is that we cannot find a
transition from barbaric to civilized conditions. We find civilization
in all essentials fully present at the very origin of research. We have
not yet, and probably we never shall, have final information upon the
phase by which it passed from embryonic to mature. On the analogy of
nearly all other development we may believe that change to have been a
rapid leap. But where it took place or when, whether Egypt or Western
Asia arose of themselves or whether there lay behind them some tradition
of culture, far older, which they inherited, or which one of them
inherited, and which later either by submergence or in any other way
disappeared, we simply do not know.
The next section, Chapter XV, is, so far, the best of all. It deals with
the development of the various forms of writing, and will be read with
the greatest profit. It has all the qualities of Mr. Wells’s close
précis writing at its best. Nor should the Author be blamed for having
left out the theory (Sergi’s, if I remember right) that the alphabetic
system had an origin of its own, connected neither with the Egyptian
script nor with the Phœnician, but rather one from which the Phœnician
itself derived. He has put the necessary facts simply and clearly and in
the right order. He notes the reaction of writing on thought, and even
(as in the case of China) upon social systems and method of government.
And he has done well not to confuse so short a catalogue with too much
consideration of learned theories.
But even this first-rate chapter is somewhat marred by a conclusion
based upon the false hypothesis of a perpetual change in human nature.
Writing is made to play a part far too great in the creation of
something like a new man. That is not, historically, what happens to Man
through any of his own inventions. Man’s inventions do not change Man in
essentials. Man remains Man throughout. And when Mr. Wells goes on to
say that the very widespread use (and abuse) of printing to-day will
create a further apocalyptic transformation of our poor minds, he is
going right against the common experience of all cultivated men, and
living in an unreal newspaper world of his own. The modern mind, in
countries where this quite recent habit of promiscuous and universal
reading has arisen, has not improved; it has visibly degenerated; it
thinks less clearly, it has a less intelligent grip than had the more
sparing readers of the past.
You have only to contrast the peasant or fisherman to-day against the
average newspaper-skimming townsman artisan, with an equal or higher
material revenue, to appreciate this truth. In the popular appreciation
of life and philosophy it is self-evident. The peasant is immeasurably
superior. When, therefore, Mr. Wells concludes this admirable little
section with the confident remark that “our world to-day is only in the
beginning of knowledge,” he must be told that all that is mere Messianic
stuff, part of a false religion, and worthless. It is the mood in which
the same false Puritan religion from which he comes produced the Seventh
Monarchy men, Second Adventists, Jump to Glory Jane, and the rest of
them: the facile and contemptible mood of “The Good Time Coming” as an
imaginary escape from this _Lachrymarum Vallis_: the “Great Rosy Dawn.”
The detail of what will happen to Man in the future we do not know. One
thing we do know quite certainly: he will be Man in the future just as
he has been Man in the past. The type will not change. He will yield to
the same temptations, be strengthened by discipline and renunciation,
weakened by indulgence and excessive opportunity—especially weakened by
his own material creations when they are abused. And we further know,
from all the records of our race, that a contempt for the past and a
planting of standards in an imaginary future is the destruction of
culture. Of all popular moods which a failing civilization can catch, it
is the most fatal.
At the end of this section comes in again (with Chapter XVI) that note
which is the principal motive for these comments. For it is with this
Chapter XVI of his third book that we come again upon the Author’s
reaction against religion and particularly against the essential idea of
a Priesthood. Mr. Wells’s sixteenth chapter is entitled, “Gods and
Stars, Priests and Kings.”
He introduces it at the beginning of his account of recorded History,
and it is the first example in this account of that personal and violent
reaction of his against true religion which I am following throughout
these articles.
His reaction is, of course, only part of the general spirit of our time
outside the Catholic Church, and in his attitude towards all religion
properly so-called—especially in his contempt and dislike of the high
religious functions of ritual, hierarchy, sacrifice and the rest—Mr.
Wells is but one individual in the millioned English-speaking Protestant
public for whom he writes, and whose ideas he repeats to their
satisfaction. But he feels this hatred with a particular animosity where
other people nowadays feel it but vaguely: he is stirred by an antipathy
to the Catholic Church which they also feel, but do not feel so
pointedly or so continually. And he can express it in a very readable,
popular fashion, which enables the average reader of his own sort to say
“This is what I have always thought, more or less, but more forcibly and
better put than I could have put it.”
He here declares himself fully for the first time on the special point
of _Priesthood_. What he thinks about it in general his readers had
already heard on an earlier page, where he made an imaginary picture of
its origin (p. 72 of the _Outline of History_). He there tells them that
“bold men, wise men, shrewd and cunning men, were arising” (in neolithic
times) “to become magicians, priests and kings.”
There is, of course, no evidence at all as to how mankind first
connected a Priesthood with the general idea of religion; and this
specific attachment of it to the neolithic period (itself a very vague
term, for who can tell that men using polished stones were everywhere
earlier than men using metals?) is not History, but arbitrary assertion.
However, it is a guide to what Mr. Wells, and the myriads who have had
the same education as he, in England and America, feel with regard to
the institution of Priesthood. It was wholly man-made, seeing that
religion itself is man-made; and it proceeded from the same sort of very
unpleasant origins as religion itself. Mr. Wells, on the same page, is
careful to say that the Priests were not to be thought of as cheats; he
wisely admits that they “usually believed in their own ceremonies,” but
the innuendo is that _any_ “ceremony” performed by _any_ Priest in _any_
religion is bunkum.
Now _that_, of course, is a mere assumption the opposite to which may
equally well be true: that _all_ ceremonies of _all_ Priests had
something in them, and that, in a true religion, the ceremony would be
efficacious and the Priestly office justified.
So much for his first attack on page 72 of his _Outline_.
On page 120, he goes in some detail into the matter; and with a better
basis for discussion, because he is talking of things historically
certain, and not copying the story from nineteenth-century writers who
made it up out of their own heads. There were full Priests in the old
Pagan religions, or at any rate in the finest and most civilized of
them; and for that matter in nearly all of them there were Priests in
some form or another. The theory Mr. Wells repeats with regard to the
early recorded Priesthoods may, like so many of his repetitions, be
called “The theory of the eighteen-eighties”: the theory current about a
generation ago. It is the contention that the Priest came first when man
was inferior and was at last ousted, as man advanced, by the King—the
innuendo being that the power of the Priest essentially belongs to an
earlier time, and therefore to a more degraded period in human History;
for to the man who believes in a childishly simple theory of “Progress”
(as Mr. Wells believes in it, and as do the great majority of his
readers), whatever is earlier must be worse than what comes later.
At this point I repeat what I have had to say so often in the course of
these comments. It cannot be said too often in the ears of our
opponents, because we know by experience that the modern half-educated
mind, nourished on masses of print and without that capacity of clear
thinking which our fathers had, feels a difficulty in grasping the
distinction between two connected ideas. Once it hears the same word
used in connection with two separate ideas it tends to confuse the two
ideas together. So we Catholics who have the privilege of inheriting the
higher culture must always patiently explain our position to our
opponents, lest we should merely antagonize them instead of teaching
them. The following, then, is the point I wish to emphasize:
When we are presented with any _universal_ statement which is (1)
hypothetical (i.e. not a matter of ascertained fact); (2) of an
exaggerated simplicity and therefore very easily swallowed; (3) motived
consciously by a contempt for true religion, that is for the Catholic
Faith, we Catholics do not deny the portion of ascertained fact
contained in the universal statement. _What we deny is the universality
of the statement._ When we, who can reason, are told that London and
Carthage were great seaports, and that _therefore_ all the capitals of
high civilizations are great seaports, we do not deny the character of
London and Carthage; what we deny is that they are the models of all
other capitals. What the trained and clear Catholic intelligence finds
intellectually repugnant is a false simplicity imposed on highly complex
organic phenomena, especially social phenomena. What we particularly
complain of is the apparent inability of our opponents to recognize
their own motives, and to see that they are putting things in a
particular and artificial fashion in order to fit in with their theories
instead of honestly inducing theory from fact.
Let me give an example drawn from a sphere where there is less violent
emotion aroused, and which therefore can be calmly examined by anyone of
our opponents. Supposing a man to maintain that the shorter races in the
history of mankind had always conquered the taller races. He is putting
forward a universal statement. He is putting forward, because it is
universal and because it has so few terms, a statement absurdly simple.
Finally, he is putting forward this absurdly simple universal statement
with some motive. If we find that the man is himself a member of a short
race, we at once divine what the motive is. It is the motive of
satisfying self-esteem.
Now a statement like that put to the member of a race as short as you
like, put to an intelligent dwarf, _ought_ to rouse him to immediate
contradiction: however flattering he might find it. So it ought to rouse
a man of average stature to even stronger contradiction, and still more,
I suppose, a tall man. But it is contradicted, not because the
contradictor favours tall men as against short men, but because the
statement is in itself false and ridiculous. Sometimes short races have
conquered tall ones, as the Romans the Germans, or the Normans the
Saxons, or the Japanese the Koreans. Sometimes it has been notoriously
the other way about.
The putting forward, then, of a statement (1) as universal (when as a
fact it is just the opposite), (2) as absurdly simple so that it can be
easily swallowed (when as a fact the situation being human is
exceedingly complex), (3) with a motive which is not acknowledged, is a
thoroughly unscientific way of going to work; yet that is what we
Catholics are perpetually finding in the attacks made directly and
indirectly against Catholic truths by popular writers on what these
writers believe to be “Science” or “History.”
So it is with Priesthood. You can cite cases of Priesthood revered in a
very simple state of society and cases of a Priesthood dispossessed of
power by an advancing lay organization. But so also can you find ample
examples of the opposite: Priesthood powerful in a very high
civilization and Priesthood overcoming lay power.
How a Priesthood arose we do not know: presumably after the same fashion
as all other functions of religion. These functions being awful and
sacred, there would, in the nature of things, be a special class of men
attached to them. But, anyhow, the relations between the idea of a
Priest and the idea of Civil Government are most emphatically _not_ the
relations between earlier and baser social functions on the one hand,
and more developed and higher social functions on the other. You can
cite cases where the power of a Priesthood (or, rather, of religion, for
it is never the Priest who imposes his religion, but always the religion
that needs the Priest) was mastered by the civil power; but you can also
cite cases where the exact opposite took place; and you can cite
intermediary cases innumerable.
Now, what Mr. Wells does in this sixteenth chapter of his is to put
forward _one_ leading case—the Sumerian—in which (quite probably) an
earlier Priestly power yielded to (though it was never downed by) what
was in that one time and place a later kingly power. He first of all
gives us (on p. 125) a purely imaginary account of Kings arising through
the quarrels between Priests or during the inability of Priests to
withstand foreign conquerors. He then proceeds, on the same page and the
following, to present the Sumerian Kingship as becoming in time superior
to the Sumerian Priesthood. The thing is, of course, neither recorded
nor ascertained History, but it is a fair guess. It may very well be
History; and if it is so, then it is one particular example of the
process going one way. But that is no sort of argument for the process
never going the other way. When Mr. Wells comes to talking of the
Egyptian development, he admits that the King was divine, and in that
quality superior to and including both Priest and King. He again admits
it in the case of China in another form. The Chinese civil ruler was
also High Priest.
How, then, without any evidence to go on save _one_ particular (and
purely hypothetical) case, is this ridiculously simple theory made
justifiable to the reader as a universal process? How can Mr. Wells use
it to prove that Priesthood goes with base undeveloped minds and yields
to “Progress”?
By the usual practice of allusion. In the case of the Sumerian King, the
plain statement that the gods entrusted him with power is called by Mr.
Wells his “doing it with the utmost politeness to the gods”—the innuendo
being, of course, that the King’s power arose in spite of the
Priesthood, that the King being later in development, and therefore more
“enlightened,” despised the gods, and that all he did was to compromise
somewhat with old decaying superstitions in order to strengthen his hold
on government. But we have no evidence of that; it may be the right
interpretation, or the exact opposite may be the right interpretation.
The Sumerian King may have been sincerely devoted to the gods—as he says
he was—and have risen through that devotion.
We are told (on p. 121), with regard to the early Priesthoods that “it
is clear” the Priesthood early developed political powers. But it is not
clear at all. It is merely stated. True to the wearying puerility of his
black and white “Progress” idea (Wednesday superior to Tuesday, Tuesday
superior to Monday), Mr. Wells tells us that the temples began with an
idol, “usually a somewhat monstrous half-animal form.” Why “usually”? We
know nothing about it at all. We know the half-animal legend in
Babylonia, or, rather, the purely animal legend that a fish started
culture. We know the animal and half-animal deities of the Egyptians.
But no one can say that the Greek or Italian shrine began with a
half-animal figure, or that there was anything “monstrous” about it. No
one can say that the primitive worship to which the Bible bears witness
was that of a monstrous or half-animal figure. The thing is only set
down thus in order to confirm the statements already gratuitously made
that religion, like all other human affairs, begins in something
offensive.
It is the characteristic of these thin and erroneous theories, first,
that they quote only what is in their own favour; secondly, that they
bring in every possible indication, no matter how remote, which may be
twisted into a support; and, thirdly, that those who promote them either
are (as is usually the case) ignorant of, or (as is less common) refuse
to mention, still more to study, any opposing evidence. They refuse to
weigh the _full_ record of the past or (what is equally available) to
make a _full_ examination of the present.
Take this case of the fading away of Priesthood and the mastering of it
by a civil power as a necessary part of human “Progress.” It is not what
happened in our European community. It is not what happened in the
history of our own race during the last twenty-five centuries, of which
we know infinitely more than we do of the Euphrates or the Nile Valleys
thousands of years ago.
What happened in the history of our own race is very well known: the
religions of Pagan European antiquity had Priesthoods—all of them. Those
Priesthoods were of very varying political power, and the variation in
their political power had nothing to do with the stage of culture. You
do not find Priests more powerful in the lower stages of culture, less
powerful in the higher stages of culture; you certainly find them more
powerful in Gaul, for instance, than you do in the more barbaric world
beyond the Rhine. There is hardly a trace of any Priesthood among the
lowest of all, the Scythians.
What Priesthood was in Etruria we do not know, but we do know that in
the Roman religious origins which were probably Etruscan there is a
curious rigidity and strength attaching to the hierarchic function, a
union (again) between civil rule and Priestly action, and yet certainly
not a government of Priests. We know how powerful was the horrible
Priesthood of Carthage, but we know that government was civilian. There
is every sort of type and degree in the power, the character, the rise
and fall of Priesthood, and no indication whatsoever of a monotonous,
regular elimination of the Priest by “Progress” such as Mr. Wells was
taught in his youth.
When the great change comes over the recorded history of our race—the
conversion of the Roman Empire to Catholicism—it is _not_ the power of
any Priesthood that weakens; it is the hold of the local Pagan religion
that weakens. The Pagan Priest is in no way conquered by the civil
power. There is no trace of such a thing. On the contrary, it is the
civil power which, as Paganism dies, works hard to keep the Pagan Priest
going. Next arises the Catholic Church. It has a Priesthood, and a very
strong organized Priesthood, from the earliest records of it that we
possess.
In the later centuries you find, in the West, that Priesthood acting
together under a personal Chief and at last dominating society in the
main struggle between this head of the hierarchy and the nominal head of
civil society. It is the head of the hierarchy (the Pope) who wins, and
the head of the civil society (the Emperor) who loses—not the other way
about.
With the destruction of religious unity and the introduction of
widespread differences of belief into Western Europe the civil power
naturally preponderates. There came a maximum when the civil power might
almost be said to have obliterated its rival during the nineteenth
century. But it is pretty clear to people who know their Europe that
something of a turn of the tide is already apparent.
What the future holds in the matter we cannot see; but it is plain
detailed History of the most glaring and obvious sort that during these
_known_ two thousand five hundred years, there has been _no_ regular
process one way or the other. There has been _no_ gradual fading away of
Priesthood in the growing light and its replacement by an anti-Priestly,
“progressive” civil power. What has actually happened is what a sound
intelligence, shy of too easy theories, would expect—a complicated,
eddying, series of changes, swelling gradually up towards maxima of
strength on the one side, and then to maxima of strength on the other.
It is here as everywhere. When Mr. Wells touches on the point of
religion, even when he has recorded History to go upon, he at once
begins to repeat the popular theories of the anti-Catholic world and to
repeat them crudely and in a fashion convincing only to those who had
already been told what he tells them. What is more interesting for the
Catholic reader in this kind of thing is to remember out of what an
atmosphere it arose. Put in a different dress, it is really nothing more
than the old cry of “Priestcraft,” which the more provincial sort of
anti-Catholicism perpetually repeated though with failing accents during
the middle third of the nineteenth century.
It is no safeguard against this for Mr. Wells to say—and he says it
quite sincerely—that the Priests in some measure, some of them, believed
what they taught. That is only part of the urbane tolerance which is
used as a sort of oil to smooth the downward passage to destruction of
such outworn things as the Faith. When they know our strength we shall
have less of such courtesy.
Of two things, one: either Priesthood being a normal function of
religion, like Veneration, Sacrifice, Sacrament, Shrines, Ritual, and
the rest, will be found present in a true religion and is no argument
against the truth of that religion; or, there being no true religion,
Priesthood began as a man-made cheat, like all the other functions of
religion—since (by this theory)—all religion and all its attendant
functions are wholly illusion.
There cannot be in the nature of things any recorded evidence to decide
between the two positions. Faith asserts that one religion is true, is
of Divine origin, has authority to affirm the only things really worth
man’s knowing. From that position it is rational to expect as a rule in
all religions, vague or precise, amiable or detestable, the concomitants
of what will also be found in the one true religion. The Catholic is not
disturbed, but confirmed by the discovery of parallels to his own
practice in contemporary or past Paganism. On the other hand, Un-faith
affirms that all these things are shams; that Priesthood, along with the
rest, is part of the sham and must be rejected.
But there is this great difference between the two positions, and it is
one to be particularly noted in the great quarrel of the modern world.
The Catholic argues out his position, knows what his own first
principles are, distinguishes between Faith and Science, does not
pretend to prove that for which proof is not available, does not
confound the possible with the probable, or the probable with the
ascertained. Above all, he does not confound first principles which are
beyond proof with things known by deduction or by observation.
There was a time, not so long ago, when general intelligence was on a
higher level; it was a time in which our opponents met us as equals.
Nowadays they do not. We are compelled to meet them as inferiors. They
put forward arguments in a circle; they assume their own conclusions.
They are not aware of their own first principles. They take it for
granted that their own first principles are accepted by their opponents.
They generalize from instances not only few, but often actually
abnormal. They compel fact to meet theory instead of basing theory upon
fact. Above all, have they that especial mark of unintelligence, the
hunger for over-simplicity, the determination to be quite sure of
everything and to make everything fit in with a mechanical formula.
It has been well said by the greatest of modern Spanish artists that the
chief need of the Catholic Church to-day is an opponent worthy of her
stature. She has hardly found one in Mr. Wells.