with glaciation) is a definite error of over-emphasis upon my part.
The first, my ignorance of his remarkable proficiency in modern
language (including Portuguese), is more than natural, because he had
made no use of such knowledge: nevertheless, I shall correct it in my
book.
The second is wholly insignificant, and turns merely upon Mr. Wells’s
misunderstanding of my use of inverted commas in a particular case.
In the third, about Vialleton, he is simply wrong, and, what is worse,
pretends acquaintance with a book of which he clearly knows nothing.
So is he wrong about the fourth. Mr. Wells’s definite affirmation for
popular consumption of a theory exploded more than thirty years ago was
disgraceful.
On the sixth point, misreading due to Mr. Wells’s own confused order, I
have promised him the small necessary redress, which he will receive.
Now, let me ask my reader, in conclusion, is it not remarkable that a
man setting out to inform a large audience that God, and our Lord’s
Divinity, and our own immortal destiny are all nonsense, doing so by a
pretended “science” and favouring me as an insufficient critic of his
book, can only find in some scores of my exposures of him six points,
half of which tell heavily against himself, while two of the remainder
are due to his own confusion and only one--my over-emphasis on glacial
sea level--has any substance in it?
V
MR. WELLS SHIRKS
The most violent _positive_ part of Mr. Wells’s attack upon me is, as
I have said, his challenge upon the matter of Natural Selection, his
jeer that my arguments are wholly my own, ridiculous and unsupported;
and his amazing assertion, which he makes, quite naïvely and sincerely,
that there has been nobody in modern criticism opposing the Darwinian
theory. I think I have sufficiently exposed Mr. Wells in these
particulars.
But quite as important as this huge positive error on his part is the
_negative_ factor in his pamphlet which I here emphasise for the reader.
In my articles, which are about to appear in book form, I took his
_Outline of History_ section by section, examined, turned over,
analysed, and exposed failure after failure in historical judgment and
information.
One challenge after another--I know not how many in all, but certainly
dozens on dozens--was put down by me clearly and, I hope, methodically
throughout a series of articles originally twenty-eight in number, and
of such volume that they still will form when rearranged a book not
less than 70,000 or 80,000 words.
Of all this great mass of destructive criticism which leaves his
_Outline_ limp and deflated, Mr. Wells knows nothing. He leaves it
unanswered, and he leaves it unanswered because he cannot answer it.
All he can do is to fill a pamphlet with loud personal abuse.
I do not think it difficult to discover his motive or the calculation
upon which he worked. He said to himself: “I have a vast reading public
which will buy pretty well anything I write, and very few of whom have
seen or will see Belloc’s work. For to begin with he has no such huge
popular sales as mine; and on the top of that his work is only written
for his co-religionists, who are an insignificant body. Also it only
appeared in a few of _their_ Catholic papers, which nobody reads.
“Therefore, if I write a pamphlet against Belloc holding him up to
ridicule in every possible fashion, slanging him with the violence so
dear to the populace, making him out to be a grotesque fellow--and yet
shirking nine-tenths of his criticism--I am in no danger of exposure.
The pamphlet attacking Belloc will be very widely read, people will
believe anything I say in it about his articles, because they will not
have read these articles and because, in their simplicity, they think
me a great scientist.”
This calculation is partially justified.
I suppose that for ten men who may read Mr. Wells’s pamphlet against
me, there will not perhaps be more than one who will read this, my
reply.
But I would like to point out to Mr. Wells that success of this kind
is short-lived. No one can read what I have said in the second section
of this pamphlet, no one can read that list of authorities of whom Mr.
Wells has not even heard, and whom he loudly proclaimed not even to
exist, without discovering that the author of the _Outline of History_
was incompetent for his task. Very few people, I think, faced with
chapter and verse of that sort, can refrain from passing on the good
news.
If you take the history of opinion upon matters of positive fact, you
will generally discover that the discovery of the truth affects at
first but a small circle, and that a popular error may cover a whole
society. But it is the truth that wins in the long run, because the
truth is not soluble: it is hard and resistant. The number of people
who continue to believe that there has been no modern destructive
criticism of Darwinism by the greatest of modern biologists,
anthropologists, and scientific men, bearing the highest names in our
civilisation, will necessarily be progressively lessened as time goes
on. The half educated of any period are always cocksure of things which
the real science of that period has long ago abandoned; but their
situation is not a stable nor a permanent one. Sooner or later they
learn. So undoubtedly will it be with Darwinian Natural Selection.
Mr. Wells’s incompetence in that one department of his history has been
exposed. I have exposed it. But note that he was here on his own chosen
ground. He boasted special instruction in these affairs of physical
science, and particularly in biology; he contrasted his education with
my own, which had been so deplorably limited to the Humanities, and in
his attack upon me he was fighting wholly upon a position chosen by
himself.
What then would it have been had he attempted to meet the rest of my
criticism, filling up as it does much the greater part of my book?
How will he meet my objection that the man who tries to talk about
the Roman Empire, and our civilisation which is its product, without
any mention or conception of Latin literature and its effect, is
incompetent?
How would he deal with the simple and obvious but conclusive fact that
physical discovery was not the cause of religious disruption, as may
be proved by the simple fact that it came after and not before that
disruption?
How will he handle my pointing out that he knows nothing of the history
of the early Church and has no conception of what the Christian
traditions and sub-Apostolic writings were?
What will he make of my showing him to be ignorant of Catholic
philosophy and Catholic definition, and yet absurdly confident in his
attack on what he supposes them to be?
Anyone can see how he deals with my criticism of him in all these
things. He is silent. He does not rebut it, because he cannot rebut
it. If he could have done so even in the briefest and most elementary
fashion, there would have been at least a few sentences to that effect
in his pamphlet. There were none except one vague phrase on the
contemporary doctrine of the Incarnation.
In plain English Mr. Wells shirks. He shirks the great mass of my
attack. He submits in silence to the bombardment--because he has no
power to reply.
Yet surely these proved absurdities on recorded history, and not his
backwardness in biological science, are the main thing he has to meet.
It is principally through recorded human history and not through guess
work upon the unknown past, that he should rely, in order to upset the
Christian Faith of his readers.
The history of our race becomes a definable and concrete thing only
after the establishment of record, and if he fail there manifestly--as
he has failed--he fails altogether.
Mr. Wells must, I think, have heard the famous dictum of the late
Master of Balliol upon his _Outline_--a judgment which has already been
quoted by more than one critic, and which I am afraid he will hear
repeated pretty often before he has done with it. That very learned
historian remarked: “Wells’s _Outline_ was excellent until it came to
Man”; and upon the whole it is about the truest epigram that could have
been written. Save perhaps this. Mr. Wells’s _Outline_ is excellent
until he begins to deal with living things--somewhere about page ten.
VI
THE GREAT ROSY DAWN
The last factor in Mr. Wells’s pamphlet is one that we must always
expect from your Bible Christian who has lost his God. He becomes a
materialist troubled with Pantheism, and very eager to get away from
the Puritan disease of his youth--yet a vision remains. He comes
forward as the “Seventh Monarchy man,” which is, indeed, the natural
term of your Bible Christian--even after he has lost his God.
“I see knowledge,” says Mr. Wells at the end of his diatribe,
“increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing
possibilities before life, and I see no limit set to it at all.
Existence impresses me as perpetual dawn. Our lives as I apprehend
them, swim in expectation.”
We have had this before over and over again, not only from the
enthusiasts of the seventeenth century, but from the enthusiasts of the
early heresies. There was a glorious time coming. Reality--that is the
Faith--is a delusion. Now that you know it to be a delusion you are
naturally down in the mouth. But cheer up, I have a consolation for
you. All will yet be well; nay, much better. All is going forward. My
donkey will soon grow wings.
I need not waste my reader’s time on that sort of thing. It is sheer
stupid enthusiasm, indulged in to fill the void left by the loss of
reason: by a man losing himself in a fog of cheap print and becoming
fantastically unaware of things as they are.
When, in that connection Mr. Wells tells me that we of the Faith are
backward people, who “because it is necessary for their comfort believe
in Heaven and Hell” (a comfortable place Hell!) I answer that he
appreciates the Faith as a man born blind might appreciate colour. When
he tells me that this Catholic sort (to which I belong) are besotted to
stand by accepted morals, beget children honestly, love one wife and
live decently, I answer him that he is becoming disgusting. When he
says that we believe in immortality “because we should be sorry to grow
old and die,” I answer that he is talking nonsense on such a scale that
it is difficult to deal with it.
When he goes on to say that we think we live on a “flat World” it
becomes worse still, and one can’t deal with it; it is no longer
nonsense, it is raving.
When he tells us that the Catholic has about him “a curious defensive
note,” I am afraid he must be thinking of the Church Congress. There
was certainly no “curious defensive note” in my demolition of his own
ignorance, vanity and lack of balance.
When he tells us that I, as a Christian, “must be puzzled not a little
by that vast parade of evolution through the immeasurable ages,” he
clearly has not the least grasp of the very simple principle that
eternity is outside time, and that relative values are not to be
obtained by mere measurement in days or inches. When he says that “my”
phantasy of a Creator....
Really, my dear Mr. Wells, I must here interrupt. Why “_my_” phantasy?
Not that he uses the word “phantasy,” but he implies that I invented
God (another enormous compliment to me). Does he not know that the
human race as a whole, or at any rate the leading part of it, including
his own immediate honourable ancestry, pay some reverence to Almighty
God, and humbly admits His creative power and Sustained Omnipotence?
But I must resume.
... that my phantasy of a Creator has worked within disproportionate
margins both of space and time; when he tells me if I reach beatitude
I shall feel like a fish out of water; when he speaks like this, I
recognise the unmistakable touch of the Bible Christian who has lost
his God.
Mr. Wells has never met anybody, I suppose, of sufficient breadth of
culture to instruct him in these things. He does not know that the
truths of the Faith cannot be visualised; he does not know that the
Faith is a philosophy; he does not know that our limitations are no
disproof of an infinite Creator.
He boasts that his education was a modern one, and taught him things
that were unknown a hundred years ago. So was mine. I also was taught
that the Earth was a globe, that geological time was prolonged, and the
rest of it, but I was also taught how to think, and I was also taught a
little--not very much--history.
For instance, I was taught enough to know that the doctrine of
immortality did not arise in the Middle Ages, as Mr. Wells thinks it
did, nor even the doctrine of eternal beatitude. But I was taught
enough to regard these great mysteries with reverence and not to talk
about them as preposterous. In other words, I was taught not to measure
the infinite things of God, nor even the great things of Christendom,
by the standards of the Yellow Press.
When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying, “I strut to no such
personal beatitude,” and then goes on to say, “the life to which I
belong uses me and will pass on beyond me, and I am content,” he does
two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with
the imaginary (for whether he will attain beatitude or its opposite
has nothing whatever to do with his opinions upon the subject), and
next he falls into the very common error of confused intellects--the
personification of abstract ideas. “The life to which we belong uses
us” is a meaningless phrase. God may use us or we may use ourselves, or
some other third Will, not God’s or our own, may use us: but “the life
to which we belong” does not use us. Talking like that is harmless when
it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets up to be definition.
He accuses the Christian of being anthropomorphic: it is just the other
way. It is we who are perpetually compelled to drag back inferior
minds to a confession of their own apparently ineradicable tendency
to talk in terms of their own petty experience; to imagine that the
whole world has “progressed” because they have daily hot baths and
bad cooking, while in their childhood they had only occasional hot
baths, but better cooking; that more people voting is “progressive” as
compared with people not voting at all; that a lot of rich people going
from England to the Riviera every year is “progressive” compared with
staying at home in the hideous surroundings of poor old England.
This leads Mr. Wells, as it always does all his kind, to prophecy.
We are all of us approaching what I may call The Great Rosy Dawn: a
goldmine: a terrestrial Paradise.
This sort of exaltation is the inevitable first phase of Bible-mania in
decay. But it is a very short phase. It is the shoddy remnant of the
Christian hope, and when it is gone there will return on us, not the
simple paganism of a sad world, but sheer darkness: and strange things
in the dark.
A COMPANION
TO MR. WELLS’S
“OUTLINE OF HISTORY”
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION
II. MR. WELLS AND THE CREATION OF THE WORLD
III. MR. WELLS AND THE FALL OF MAN
IV. MR. WELLS AND GOD
V. WHENCE CAME RELIGION TO MAN?
VI. WE COME TO REAL HISTORY
VII. MR. WELLS ON PRIESTHOOD
VIII. BUDDHISM AS A STICK WITH WHICH TO BEAT THE CHRISTIANS
IX. MR. WELLS AND THE INCARNATION
X. THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH
XI. ISLAM
XII. THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES
XIII. THE MIDDLE AGES
XIV. THE REFORMATION
XV. THE FRUIT OF DISRUPTION
XVI. MR. WELLS’S STRANGE OBSESSION THAT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS
BEEN KILLED STONE DEAD BY MR. DARWIN
SUMMARY
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.