THE REFORMATION
As we approach the break in Christian Unity, generally called the
“Reformation,” I look with interest at Mr. Wells’s work to see whether
his combined intelligence and instruction will stand the strain.
He writes, of course, as a local and intensely Protestant man who has
lost the doctrine of his immediate ancestry, but preserved most of their
catchwords and all their odd isolated philosophy. Nevertheless, his mind
is alert, his intelligence, as always, conspicuously sincere, and his
power of visualization quite exceptional.
Therefore, I hoped that he would, when he came to this critical test,
rise superior in some degree to his limitations. But he has not done so.
On the contrary, he has failed here more conspicuously than in any other
department of his work with which I have hitherto had to deal. And the
reason is this, that he is here right up against the Thing that
distracts him: the Faith.
His other blunders are, as a rule, no more than his repetition of old
errors which he did not happen to know had been exposed by modern
scholarship, coupled with his sporadic outbreaks against the Church. But
when he comes to approach the Reformation, we have something very
different. We have an ignorance of (or aversion from) the fundamentals
of the position, which ignorance (or aversion) is fatal to his History.
For to understand modern times (which have drawn all their trouble from
the break-up of Christendom that followed, and all their energy from the
renewal of discovery that preceded the Reformation), one must understand
what the whole thing was about. A man who merely repeats the old
Protestant formulæ is useless; and that, unfortunately, is exactly what
Mr. Wells does. He misappreciates the quality of the problem. He goes
wrong here on the main outline more than he does in any other department
of his work, and he goes wrong because he is in the “No Popery”
tradition. To exemplify this I will quote.
In the first place he always speaks of the Catholic Church as something
separate from Europe, something, as it were, imposed upon Europe like an
alien conqueror; a man who thinks in those terms of Europe before the
Reformation manifestly ignores the nature of all our History. A man who
thinks in those terms is like a foreigner talking of England as an
aristocratic tyranny grinding down a mass of rebellious people. Many
Frenchmen have talked of England in those terms, and have made
themselves laughing-stocks by doing so. They have not understood the
aristocratic state. So does a man who speaks of united Christendom as a
thing to which the Catholic Church was an external, alien thing make a
laughing-stock of himself. The Catholic Church was Europe and Europe was
the Catholic Church. In so far as the break-up of Christendom succeeded,
in that degree has Europe lost its unity and therefore its being. Nor
shall we recover our being save by a reunion in religion.
Let us look at the phrases which betray this ignorance of the European
past.
“Though it is certain that the Catholic Church opened up the modern
educational state in Europe, it is equally certain that the Catholic
Church never intended to do anything of the sort. It did not send us
knowledge with its blessing; it let it loose inadvertently.” “Us”!
“It”!—but “we” _were_ “it.”
Again:
“At first the current criticism upon the Church concerned only moral and
material things.” Criticism whence? From those who were themselves of
the Church!
Again:
“The Church was losing its hold upon the consciences of Princes and rich
and able people. It was also losing the faith and confidence of common
people.” But Princes and common people _were_ the Church!
Again:
“The revolt of the Princes was essentially an irreligious revolt against
the world rule of the Church.” It was a scramble for loot of Church
Goods undertaken by avaricious men within the Society of Catholic
Europe—not by men from something outside.
I might quote many such sentences which we come across by the hundred in
the sort of textbooks upon which Mr. Wells and the vast bulk of his
readers have been brought up; they are all (to the historian)
lamentable.
The Catholic civilization of Europe broke up from within, because the
evil will of men was, at one moment, too strong for their conscience of
good, and the opportunity for loot too strong for man’s underlying
knowledge that the Church was the salvation of mankind. To talk of
criticism of the clerical organization and its abuses as an attack on
“the Church” is unhistorical. It is thinking of the past in modern
terms. To contrast Catholic Christendom with some ideal, impossible (and
unpleasant) system, of vague, enthusiast religion, and to imagine the
latter suppressed by the former is, historically, unreal. One might as
well imagine English cricket rules persecuting an imaginary ideal
cricket in which there were no rules. The Catholic Church, in any
society which is Catholic, no more stands outside the community as an
odd tyrant than the social habit of the Londoner stands outside the
Londoner as a tyrant, or than the public school system stands as a
tyrant outside the man trained under it. The whole thing is one.
That unity may suffer attack. It may break down. It may suffer the loss
of certain portions while maintaining the rest intact. But to regard any
vital principle (such as the Church) as something _outside_ the body
which it vivifies, is bad history. It is exactly the sort of bad history
written by anyone who doesn’t understand the personality, the identity,
the spirit of his subject. Mr. Wells and his readers (and those who
wrote the textbooks on which he has been trained) are not themselves
Catholics; but cannot they exercise enough imagination to call up a
world in which their ancestry and their blood were Catholic? Apparently
they cannot; and in so far as they cannot, their history is worthless;
for they miss the main fact that Catholic Europe was still Catholic
while the disruption was proceeding, and that the idea of the Church as
an alien thing was only possible _after_ the full effect of the
break-up.
So much for the first piece of bad history. This obsession of the
Catholic Church as an alien tyrant of Catholic men.
Now for a second more detailed point. Mr. Wells is obsessed, as the less
intelligent part of Protestant society was obsessed a lifetime or more
ago, with the extraordinary conception that the Catholic Church
restricts the powers of reason and the action of the human mind.
A man who writes that of the Catholic Church is like a man who should
say (and indeed there are nowadays some men who do say it) that a
formula in mathematics restricts the freedom of the human mind.
Here you have a popular novelist dealing with what he himself has
vaguely heard to be one of the great phenomena of History, and what
every educated man knows to be the greatest phenomenon of all History,
the Catholic Church; and yet, in attacking it, he does not know what it
was. A little while ago the greatest purely political phenomenon in the
world—it is still, perhaps, the greatest—was the sudden expansion of the
British Empire; with its unique bond of a nominal crown, its vast
territorial extent, its exceedingly rapid growth. What should we say of
a foreigner who, writing of this phenomenon, should judge (because he
hated it) that it was all due to tyranny?
We should say of him exactly what I say of Mr. Wells. He does not know
what he is talking about.
The Catholic Church propounds certain truths, and those who accept her
authority accept those truths. They do not accept Her authority by
discovering the truths and piecing them together. They do not accept Her
authority like your modern reader who accepts whatever he reads. They
discover Her authority by Her character. Then, and only then, and as a
consequence, not a cause, of such recognition, they accept Her teaching.
Those born into Her society inherit that knowledge of truth and have it
taught them in childhood, as other truths are taught; but it remains
knowledge of truth none the less; not meaningless suggestion. The Faith
is not imbecile acceptation of something heard before the age of reason;
on the contrary, it is the highest act of the intelligent will. Mr.
Wells seems to be sincerely of the opinion that Lacordaire and Newman
accepting the mystery of predestination and free will, did so through
some base itch for obeying blindly. It is as though one in admiration of
the Heavens and Earth were told he was but repeating an art critic’s
essay.
Here is Mr. Wells telling us with wearisome reiteration that at the end
of the Middle Ages the common man began to “think for himself.” The
Church, he tells us (p. 464), had for its object the “subjugation of
minds.” Again, in the thirteenth century, “a new arbitrator, greater
than Pope or monarchy, had come into the world.” “Public opinion.” (P.
465.) John Huss is a martyr “not for any specific doctrine, but for the
free intelligence and free conscience of mankind.”
And so on: all the tags of a long lifetime ago, as they ran current once
in Exeter Hall.
It is a hopeless thing to argue with those who do not know the nature of
their material. Perhaps I can best put it thus: Does Mr. Wells himself
(as does certainly his great uneducated public) believe that the
Catholic has not examined his own first principles? Is not interested in
intellectual discussion? Does not perpetually criticize, weigh, and
judge? Does he think that there are two kinds of men: (1) the
Catholic—say Pascal—who is forbidden to think and can produce nothing
intellectual; (2) those who, like Mr. Wells himself, have reached the
summit of intellectual achievement through an exceptional intellectual
freedom and power? I suppose he does. But the sight of such a man so
complacent is a dreadful eye-opener on universal free laical compulsory
education in elementary schools.
Does he think that St. Thomas Aquinas shirked the use of the brain?
Does he think Suarez merely repetitive? Lanfranc a parrot? Augustine a
repeater of set phrases? Does he think that they are still shirking
intellectual problems at Louvain, in Paris, in Lyons, in Angers, in
Maynooth to-day? Apparently he does.
I have done Mr. Wells the justice of saying here and elsewhere, that in
the matter of detail, date and incidental points he is remarkably
accurate. But here, in the matter of the period before the Reformation,
even his literal accuracy, his chief merit, breaks down. The reason is
that here his passion runs away with him, and he will not be patient to
discover even from common books of reference, what might clash with
Protestant legend. For instance, having got into his head that chastity
was in some way horrible to an imaginary thing called the Nordic race,
he tells us of “the peculiar bias of the early Anglo-Saxons and Northmen
against the monks and nuns.”
This is wild. Of what the pirates in the fifth century did against
monasteries we know nothing, absolutely, and for this good reason: that
monasteries had not yet been founded in Eastern Britain. We do know that
the specially Teutonic belt—the North-Eastern coast—was devotedly and
splendidly monastic beyond any other part of Anglo-Saxon England.
What the Scandinavian pirates did, we know too well. They attacked the
monasteries because they were full of wealth, because they were
comparatively defenceless, and because they were centres of
civilization. But immediately after conversion they revere and endow the
monastic institution even more than does the South. And if there is one
thing more clear in history than another it is that the moment men
accept our civilization they show a respect for its signal monastic
institution.
It is incredible to me that a man professing to write even a cursory
popular history such as this should not know that the monastic
institutions especially flourished in the ancestry of those to whom Mr.
Wells applies the term Nordic (which simply means modern Protestant). It
does not flourish among them _now_; but to imagine that the past was
like the present is the very test of historical incompetence.
Or again, take what he says about Wycliffe and about Huss. These two
worthies fill the greater part of a whole page (466), and they might be
taken straight out of a Kensitite tract. He repeats the ineptitude that
Wycliffe “translated the Bible into English in order to set up a counter
authority to that of the Pope.” He appealed to the Bible, of course, and
he and his followers certainly translated the Bible (though their work
has probably disappeared), but can he be so ignorant as to think that
Vernacular Scriptures were unknown to the fourteenth century? I suppose
he is thus ignorant. If that is so he ought not to attempt history at
all.
Wycliffe wanted a Bible as a textbook out of which to cite particular
quotations against developments later than the Canon. But he was not
speaking to a society ignorant of the Canon. He wanted to make an idol
of the existing Bible—but he did not fashion that idol. Probably he put
in particular phrases and interpretations of his own, as all heresiarchs
have; but what they were we shall never know, for they have disappeared.
And there is more. Mr. Wells imagines that Wycliffe started the
heretical doubts on the Blessed Sacrament, making them the principal
part of his teaching. What lamentable history! It is as though I were to
say that Mr. Snowden started Socialism in Europe and made it the great
message of his glorious career.
Wycliffe’s main doctrine—the only thing that really counted in the mass
of contradictory things which he put together—was a doctrine which he
got from people of a century before, the doctrine that the right to
holding property depends on our being in a State of Grace. What he
thought about the Blessed Sacrament I defy Mr. Wells or anybody else to
elucidate. He never touched upon the matter until quite late in his
career, and it was more as a piece of intellectual gymnastic than as
anything else. But because, generations later, the main attack was upon
the Blessed Sacrament, Mr. Wells imagines that Wycliffe was in the same
case.
He shows the same fundamental ignorance about the Hussite movement. He
thinks of it lovingly as Kensitite. The Hussite movement was a Slav
anti-German movement, for which heresy was but the pretext. It was not a
heresy which happened by some strange accident to be coincident with the
Czech dislike of Germans. I even find here the hoary howler about the
“safe conduct” of Huss. Huss never had a safe conduct guaranteeing him
against trial and condemnation. I should have thought that by this time
everyone knew that. Huss had a safe conduct to attend the Council, i.e.
to pass through the territories leading to Constance; as a rebel he
would naturally have been arrested or killed save for such safe conduct,
but he was never given a guarantee against trial. He arrived for the
purpose of trial.
But though I quote these startling examples of ignorance in detail, I
think they are quite unimportant, compared with the inability of the
writer, whether from lack of opportunity, or from anti-Catholic
enthusiasm, to understand what he is dealing with.
The distinction between the good and the bad historian is the power—or
lack of power—to survey things detachedly from above. A bad historian
can only write in terms of his present experience; the good historian,
or even the tolerable historian, writes from his fullness in the past.
Mr. Wells intended, quite honestly, to write history. He has failed,
because, naturally opposed to the Catholic Church by training and social
circumstances, he did not know the nature of what he was opposing.
So much for the Preliminaries: now for the Reformation itself. The
Reformation is the most important incident in the history of our race
since the Incarnation; and that for this reason: That Christendom
disunited is wounded; that the unity of Christendom was broken by the
Reformation after a different and more lasting fashion than in all the
breaches which had hitherto occurred.
The separation of the East from the West was mainly a political
separation and is mainly a political separation to-day. Such doctrinal
differences as were pleaded, are an excuse, not a cause. The great
heresies one after the other (of which the Arian was much the most
important) did the harm they did and rocked the ship of Peter, but they
never created what may be called a “separate realm” in Christendom; a
whole with its own heretical traditions, its own roots in its own soil,
and producing evil fruit.
Any one of them might have done so, and the Albigensian very nearly did
so. Had not the Albigensian Crusade been tardily but successfully
fought, and had not the Battle of Muret (which English boys are never
allowed to hear about in their textbooks—it was as important as
Marathon) saved European culture, the Albigensians would have swamped us
all. At an enormous expense of energy and by a Providential good fortune
that disaster was avoided.
But the general attack from many sides delivered in the sixteenth
century was not repelled in time. There arose from it a division in
Christendom, a wholly new culture, in which the ancient doctrines were
but partially held, had but a partial effect upon social life and, by
the very principle of the new departure, were destined slowly to be
dissolved; so that to-day one may fairly say that nothing of doctrine
remains for the mass of Protestant men and women save a certain respect
for the personality of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity—regarded
of course as only a man—some vague conception of a personal God, and
some vague idea of a future life: but on condition that it shall
minister to the individual’s certitude that so fine a fellow as he is
bound to be happy in the long run.
It may be objected that the great heresy of Islam (for, I repeat, it was
a heresy, not a new religion; it drew all its life and all its true
doctrines by selection from the Catholic Church) had an effect as
permanent or more permanent, than the Reformation: effects often similar
to Protestantism, as, in its contempt of Sacraments and of Priesthood,
of symbol in imagery and of all the best part of the supernatural; and
its distaste for having to think hard and to appreciate Mystery.
But I distinguish between the two, and I call the Reformation the much
greater event because it happened in what is at once the head and the
heart of the world: Europe.
The Reformation broke up and degraded that culture of our race which has
the leadership of mankind: Europe. Islam did not do that. It ruined
whole provinces. It destroyed our complete hold upon the Mediterranean.
It spread its blight over the edges of our civilization, Roman North
Africa and the Greek East; but it did not set up a parody of Christian
tradition. There came a time when it desired to destroy Christendom as
an external thing, whereas the heirs of the Reformation have always
attempted and are still doubtfully attempting to destroy it _from
within_.
It may well be that we have lived out the disease. It may well be that
we are on the threshold of a time when we shall be immune to it, and
when Catholic unity shall return. Certainly that is the only hope for
our civilization. But on the other hand there is a possibility of yet
greater peril, of a yet increased decline in our culture. In that case
the high tradition of Europe will have to stand at siege again, as it
did in the Dark Ages: restricted to some small body which shall still
maintain the unbroken Catholic culture.
One of these two futures lies before us.
At any rate the huge upheaval of the sixteenth century, ending in the
final breakdown of the seventeenth, is what I have called it: the chief
event in human history since the Incarnation. It may be compared to some
geological upheaval in which the whole countryside bursts up into flame,
eruption, and chaos, but instead of settling down again into one
landscape as it was before, breaks asunder, leaving an impassable gulf
between two now wholly separate districts.
Now Mr. Wells does not appreciate what the Reformation was, because he
does not appreciate what it destroyed.
Those little sneers at the united Catholic civilization, that perpetual
Tin Chapel talk about the “Teaching of Jesus of Nazareth,” that
ceaseless use of the word “Christianity” in the sense of whatever is
common to the Protestant sects of his acquaintance—as though the test of
Being were not Unity!—all this shows that he does not appreciate what he
is dealing with. He never sees the Catholic Church as a unique
Institution, and a unique historical phenomenon.
He is always putting it (as do the most of our textbooks) into sham
categories confused in a sham similarity. The Catholic Church is to Mr.
Wells (as to all his kind) one religion out of many religions. It talks
(he thinks) of but one Incarnation out of many incarnations; it has (he
thinks) but one sacrificial system out of many sacrificial systems—and
so on.
But the whole point of the Catholic Church is that, true or false, it
stands quite apart from anything else in the history of our Race. It
assumes as no other system ever did a universal Divine and absolute
authority: and that authority not vague but detailed, specialized,
insistent, manifold, covering all human life.
The Catholic Church says “I am of God, none else is of God. God (made
man for our sake) intended and created me. By His voice in me are you at
unison with all God’s works, and so with your own end and nature. I am;
and I bear witness for ever.”
The claim may be true or fantastic: but not to know what it is nor what
a hold it had (and has) on men, nor how it made Europe, is the prime
cause of Mr. Wells’s inability to grasp the history of his own race.
The history of other races he can deal with better. All that he has to
say on the Mogul Empire of India, for instance, is admirable, save, of
course, when he tries to think; as, for instance, when he pronounces
that education is information upon “realities”—without having,
apparently, heard that, upon what philosophy you hold, depends what you
call reality—and upon your scheme of values what is worth teaching.
He is excellent in his little sketch of the gypsies on page 457. He is
picturesque on Tamerlane. But when he comes to the contact between Asia
and Europe Giant Pope appears again. He thinks the conversion of Asia to
have been a very simple matter, merely missed because Giant Pope was
trying to save that imperilled Europe of his instead of talking at large
on “Jesus of Nazareth.”
The second point in which Mr. Wells fails to understand his task is in
his idea that the Reformation was an inevitable event. It is the curse
of nearly all our modern popular writers (who are most of them inferior
to, and outside the Catholic culture) that they read history in terms of
that physical science which is the model for all their thought. They
cannot understand the effect of Free Will: they cannot understand that
spiritual good and evil come to men, not of fate, but from their own
choice.
Europe was not shaking and breaking up before the Reformation. Europe
was imperilled before the Reformation, as it had often been imperilled
before, but it might easily have been saved. Only a very few political
incidents turned the scale against the recovering of unity, and produced
the trouble from which we are increasingly suffering to-day. Each of
these events depended upon certain perverted human wills. The folly of
looting the Church lands in England came from the immediate impulse of
greed in a few, and _that_ was what, sorely against their bewildered
hearts, stole the Faith from the English. The principal incident in the
tragedy, without a doubt, was (let me repeat) the policy of Richelieu,
of which, so far as I can make out, Mr. Wells has not heard. Had
Richelieu backed up the Empire, the whole of Europe would be Catholic
to-day.
It is worth remarking that Mr. Wells on account of this defect in his
historical vision (which is a defect of Provincialism) does not
appreciate the fact that the Catholic Church still carries on.
I have already pointed that out to him. You can say that the unity of
Christendom was wrecked, but you cannot say that Christendom was
wrecked. The Divine Authority is not now universal over Europe, but it
is universal over its own very wide, exalted, and increasingly active
department of the European mind. We are still numerically the majority
of Western Europe and, in intellectual weight, the centre of gravity
lies within our sphere. The intellectual centre of gravity of Europe
to-day does not lie within the culture of Britain and North Germany
aided by the moribund French anti-clericals and Scandinavia. It lies
most certainly in those who have always accepted, or are now again
beginning to reaccept the full doctrine which made the culture by which
we live.
I have not the space to quote at length sentence after sentence in which
the inability of the writer to deal with this prime matter appears. But
take such a sentence as “Cease to be ruled by Dogmas and Authorities!”
Mark the underlying conception that Authority merely means force and
that Dogma is necessarily a falsehood; mark the characteristic inability
to grasp what should be, to the thinking mind, an obvious truth: that
all teaching is dogmatic, all acceptation of all truth necessarily under
some authority, of reason, of judgment, of sense, or of accepted
experience in others.
Perhaps Mr. Wells’s most characteristic error on the Reformation (for it
is a common one) is the conception that there was in the early sixteenth
century (and earlier) a great popular movement—a sort of tide—against
Catholic doctrine. There was nothing of the sort. I know this statement
sounds too strong and exaggerated in the ears of many of my readers,
because the myth of such a popular tide of protest against the Faith is
taught on all sides.
But my statement is true. There was no popular uprising against the
Faith. There was popular indignation against indifference and corruption
in the administration of the Faith.
There was a small enthusiastic and sincere minority arising in the late
Middle Ages against abuses. There was no general movement against
doctrine. There was nothing remotely resembling a great popular feeling
such as the great popular feeling against capitalism to-day. It is a
myth. Here and there a few fanatics, here and there a few extravagances
(all of them due to reaction against abuses in the use of Sacerdotal
power) were apparent. Of widespread popular feeling against doctrine
there was none. On the contrary, where doctrine was attacked at last by
a few highbrows, the populace was its defender.
To men of Mr. Wells’s intellectual furnishing it seems mere common sense
that sooner or later people should wake up and say, “After all, can this
doctrine of the Real Presence be true?” or, “After all, can this mystery
of the Incarnation (or of the Trinity or what not) be anything but a
fairy tale made up by men”? This was not the attitude of the mass of our
fathers.
Scepticism upon the supernatural was current in the Catholic Culture
from the beginning, and is current to-day. It was not peculiar to the
sixteenth century—the Middle Ages were full of it. What was special to
the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century was what may
properly be called a _political_ reaction against the sterilization, the
fossilization through the process of time, not only of the
Ecclesiastical, but of the lay social machine.
Mr. Wells is perfectly right when he repeats the commonplace that the
annoyance of the people with the Papacy was not that it governed
religion, but that it did not govern religion enough: that it was not
religious enough. But he is perfectly wrong—I mean historically wrong,
writing bad history—when he prints (upon p. 497—writing of the end of
the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth century) that “only
the Spaniards, fresh from a long and finally successful religious war
against Islam, had any great enthusiasm left for the Church.” He does
not know the time.
The bulk of men all over Europe had any amount of enthusiasm for the
Church, and any amount of vigour to react against those new pedantic
subtleties which powerful men caught at as an excuse for plunder, but
which the instinct of the masses taught them to be poisons, destroying
the freedom and happiness of the common man.
Has Mr. Wells never heard of all the great, though unsuccessful, popular
rebellions in England under the late Tudors, or of the much more violent
and successful rebellions of the populace against the threat of Huguenot
domination in France? He must know them, because they are in every
cinema show. But he certainly has no idea of what they were. These
popular rebellions were furious protests under arms against the murder
of that Catholic culture which was not only necessary to the scant
happiness of the poor on this sad earth, but felt also by them to be
Divine.
I find another piece of ignorance on page 502: “Luther had taken,” says
Mr. Wells, “to reading the Bible.”
Of course, the setting of the Bible up as an authority against tradition
was a necessary part of the sectarian movement. Stated thus, you have an
historical truth. But the idea that a cultivated man of the early
sixteenth century did not know the Bible, or (for that matter) the idea
that the rudest peasant of the sixteenth century did not know _what was
in_ his Bible, is as unhistorical as would be a Russian’s idea that
knowledge of racing in England to-day was confined to rich owners of
horses.
Mr. Wells is perfectly right when he says that the Princes made a
political reformation; but he is perfectly wrong when he imagines a
great popular repudiation of religion to have been going on at the same
time.
There were mobs, as there always are in times of disturbance. But they
came _after_ political rebellion against the Church: not before it. They
followed the rich. They did not urge the rich. There was popular rising
against the pressure of the wealthy and the inequalities of life—as
there always is when the organization of society is shaken. But there
was no _popular_ rising against _doctrine_; only a few “intellectual”
cliques. There was no protest of the “common man” of Europe against the
only food whereby his soul may live. On the contrary, it was the Common
Man who saved the Catholic Church in spite of the nobles and the princes
and their dependent apostate priests, the Luthers and the Knoxes, and
the rest—who would never have gone down to fame but for the use their
atheist and glutton masters made of them.
I may put the whole attitude of our Author towards the Reformation in
the simple but true phrase that he does not describe what took place; he
does no more than repeat the stories of his childhood.
To read him one would imagine that the Catholic Church broke up and
disappeared, that it broke up and disappeared under a popular uprising,
and that the popular uprising was due to the quarrel of plain sturdy
fellows, like himself, with theological dogma. Indeed, he uses the word
“theological” and the word “dogma” as though they connoted something
irrational. What would Mr. Wells write down if you asked for a strict
definition of the word “theological” and of the word “dogma” He uses
them as mere terms of abuse: yet they have a meaning for educated men.
What is at the back of his mind when he says that the Emperor, during
the Reformation, “seems to have taken the religious theories as genuine
theological differences”? What can he mean if he has any conception,
however vague, of the meaning of the word “theological”?
If one set of leaders take up arms under the principle that individuals,
and not a corporate authority, are the recipients of revelation, that is
what educated men call a theological position. When the streets of Paris
were placarded with posters saying, “Your Sacrament is but bread, and we
will throw it to the dogs,” that insult to devotion for the Real
Presence (it was one of the many things which exasperated Paris into the
St. Bartholomew) is said in educated language to have a theological
connotation.
Throughout all the rest of this Book VII and on into Book VIII the same
false historical ideas run, and particularly the idea that the Catholic
Church was, in the sixteenth century, destroyed.
It is not easy to state in clear terms what is going on in an unclear
mind, though it is a most useful thing to attempt the criticism of such
a mind; but I fancy if one could unravel the underlying idea of Mr.
Wells’s confused thought in this matter one would find something like
this:
“The Catholic Church is dead. No one who counts nowadays accepts its
authority. Those who pretend to do so are only playing a game. The old
sincere attachment to it was based upon ignorance and the lack of
newspapers, Board Schools, Typewriters, Railways, Broadcasting, and
Best-sellers. To-day you only have the old sincere Faith in a few very
backward, uneducated peasant districts.”
But is it not manifest that a man making such an enormous error upon the
modern world must be incapable of giving an outline of the past?
That is what makes him misunderstand, for instance, the struggle in the
Netherlands. He talks of the populace as bitterly Protestant and the
nobles as only reluctantly following them. The truth is exactly the
opposite. The majority, the large majority of the Low Country _populace_
was strongly attached to the Faith and still is. It was the nobles here,
as everywhere, and the great merchants of the towns who broke away—for
loot.
That is what makes him wholly misunderstand the action of Alva. He has
read nothing but the old diatribes of Motley. The marvel was not that
Alva failed. The marvel was that he was able to keep his end up at all
with such small forces, with all the wealthy against him, and with his
supplies seized at the critical moment by Cecil.
That is what makes him misunderstand (to give a very small example) the
nature of Charles V’s great renunciation. Because that great Christian
remained in his retirement attached to his old habits of food and drink,
therefore he must be ridiculed.—Why? Because Mr. Wells has read nothing
but Prescott, if that, and Prescott ridicules Charles.
After doing one of the finest and most significant things that ever a
man did when he handed over power and betook himself to contemplation,
the great Charles must be sneered at because he preserved his common
(and excellent) habits of life instead of turning full monk.
But it is always so. The same men who ridicule the ascetic ideal demand
it of those whom they confusedly imagine—because they are Catholic—to
have devoted themselves to it. Charles V was no monk. He had not vowed
himself to the renunciation of common life.
What he did do was to leave a fine example for ever to men, as did the
Pagan Diocletian, of how little the value of power is in the general
sight of Heaven. Power—too long held—is evil or worthless at best to the
soul. At the worst it is damnation. Charles V knew that. Mr. Wells does
not.
It is so throughout all the description of the Reformation by Mr. Wells.
The vast continuing quarrel of modern history is put forward as having
ended all over the world, when it _seemed_ to have ended in England. Mr.
Wells is so ignorant of the modern world—outside his narrow reach—that
he has no notion of these two powerful opponents, Faith and Anti-Faith,
facing one another as they do to-day throughout Europe. He thinks and
writes of the Reformation as a mere breakdown in a thing once called the
Catholic Church, a thing of the Middle Ages, now disappeared.
All attempt at outline disappears in his No popery. The whole story
falls into a mush, with long quotations on quite unimportant points,
taken out of Protestant authorities, who wrote with a special
propagandist motive in quite narrow fields such as the abuse of Spain or
mere cracking up of the Dutch Commercial Oligarchy. There is not a word
upon the tremendous business of the central arena upon which the whole
undecided issue was fought: I mean the French field in which the
Huguenots nearly changed all our civilization, then in turn were nearly
destroyed by popular anger, but in which, at the end, the two parties
were left undefeated, and facing each other as they still face each
other to-day.
There is not a single quotation in Mr. Wells from any one of the
Authorities writing under the Catholic Culture, not even from any one of
the anti-Clericals among them. It is all Giant Pope.
To put it very plainly, Mr. Wells does not know what happened. He writes
as one of his own type in a foreign country might write about the
English industrial revolution, proclaiming that it destroyed English
national feeling and tradition, and substituted democracy for
aristocracy. He cannot see the gigantic religious cataclysm of Europe in
its main lines: the first sweeping tide, then the ebb, then the
crystallization of the offensive and defensive positions after one
hundred years of armed struggle throughout the Continent.
I do not think the subject is too big for him. I think that he has not
taken upon it even enough trouble to grasp the main structure.
If he had written with great contempt, or, better still, with great
anger, of the saving of the Catholic Church in spite of the storm, he
would have been historical, though an opponent. Not understanding that
it was saved, and that, having been saved, its fortunes of success or
failure will make up the future story of our race, he must, in what is
left of his history, blunder still worse than he has blundered before;
for he will have to account for modern Europe as though the Church were
not there, and to do that is a little like trying to account for modern
England as though the English climate were not there.
In this exposure of such nullity in the chief event in modern history I
have had little time for the praise which is Mr. Wells’s due in lesser
matters touched upon during the period of the great change. I owe it by
way of postscript.
Thus the summary of the literary and artistic Renaissance, though a
little dull from cramming in much detail (a fault, as a rule,
conspicuously absent from Mr. Wells’s, who excels in economy of words)
is accurate and sufficient. He appreciates thoroughly the greatness of
Magellan’s heroic adventure. The pages upon Columbus (492 and 493) are
good and sufficient.
There is only one foolish note in all this rapid sketch of _Springtime
of the Arts_, and that is where Mr. Wells has the folly to say of
Shakespeare that he was “happily” without the Classics. It is an idea
which obsesses our author. Because gentlemen are trained in the
Classics, therefore, he cannot believe that the Classics have any value.
But Mr. Wells, in spite of his violent antipathy to culture, is right by
power of vivid imagination and original use of brain in many points
where his fellow popular writers are wrong. For instance, he does not
make out Francis Bacon to have invented a new philosophical method. He
knows that printing was of gradual development (though he hardly
understands what ill effect it had upon the mind as well as what good),
he is original and interesting on the effect of the coming of paper into
general use—though naturally materialist in his exaggerated judgment of
its effect.
I could quote a dozen little touches of the sort, in all of which he is
to be congratulated. They do not make up for the lack of acquaintance
with the main matter of his discourse, and that lack of acquaintance is
not to be remedied by any amount of reading. It is not lack of
scholarship; it is lack of appreciation and judgment. He knows no more
of the Catholic Church, which made Europe and still sustains Europe in
its peril, than he does of the other things which infuriate him, such as
the Gentleman.
I may sum up by saying that the whole of this attitude towards the
Catholic Church, and even towards the religious sense as a whole,
reminds me of an incident in my own life. A certain commercial traveller
in the town of Lichfield confided to me his conviction that “_all this
talk about wine is great rot. One wine is much the same as another; and,
anyhow, it’s all sour, nasty stuff, as everybody would admit if people
weren’t afraid of their neighbours._”