The two subjects are closely connected, for it is clear that a man could not be a popular writer on these things unless he agreed more or less with his audience. Yet they are distinct; because the Follower of the Herd, the popular expositor of which Mr. Wells is an example, is not quite the same thing as the average of the Herd. It is in tune with the average of the Herd; but it presents a separate object of study from the Herd. You find in the Author the way in which reading and evidence react upon a certain kind of mind: you find in his innumerable readers what kind of faith or philosophy must be inhabiting them that they should devour wholesale the stuff thus delivered to them as food.
First, then, as to the Author. The most prominent point I discover in Mr. Wells as an historian is the acceptation of authority. It is a false authority, and it is an acceptation bearing everywhere that mark which is to the Catholic mind almost incomprehensible: blind acceptation of textbooks. He does not reason with himself, and say: "What are my first principles? Why and how have I come to believe in them?" On the contrary, he takes them for granted, as though they were something so native to the human race that no class of reader could question them.
For instance, all through his work he takes it for granted that the supernatural does not exist; that the conception of it as real is an illusion — particularly in the case of miracles.
He holds then, unconsciously, a certain philosophy and certain first principles: to wit, what is called materialist Monism: that effect follows fatally from material cause. That, therefore, we are in the hands of fate and have no free will. That the words "right" and "wrong" in human decisions are meaningless.
Yet he has no idea of what his own first principles are; for he contradicts them at every turn. He is full of indignation — against the Catholic Church, for instance — and indignation involves an idea of right and wrong. He has a strong moral sense — as, for instance, of man’s duty to his fellow-men. Again, his attitude towards the miraculous in the story of Our Lord, and particularly towards the Resurrection, is not only that of a man who disbelieves — which is natural enough — but that of a man who thinks that everybody else will disbelieve the moment the unusual character of such events is pointed out to him. Mr. Wells thinks that people who believe are simply people who have not yet had the advantage of being told that the things in which they believe are not obvious nor of daily occurrence. He starts from a first principle that only the obvious or the common can be true. Yet if he set down that first principle in black and white its absurdity would appear, even to him.
This inability to tell you what his first principles were or why he held them, this taking for granted as admitted what all the best minds of humanity have discovered to be worthy of profound questioning and anxious debate, I call blind faith — faith which accepts without question and without even the knowledge that question is possible. I have heard it discussed whether such faith even in trueauthority is an advantage or a disadvantage. You get it in little children, and in some morally admirable but intellectually over-simple minds. But to have that faith in various false (and conflicting) authorities which have no common basis of intelligible theory is a very bad mark indeed against a man’s intelligence.
The next major quality I discover in Mr. Wells’s historical writing is one closely allied to the first. It is ignorance of the other side: not knowing what is to be said for the case which the author not so much rejects as remains unaware of.
For instance, Man imagines Gods; therefore, it would seem, the Gods he worships are illusions: therefore any God he worships, including the supreme God of Catholic theology, is a man-made illusion.
Well and good. That has been the attitude of a great many people, from the remotest antiquity. But people worth arguing with know that there is another, exactly contrary, attitude which may be stated thus: Men make up Gods precisely because they have an instinctive recognition of the existence of a God and of subordinate spirits: the process is one corresponding to reality, though led into errors of appreciation. Both positions may be argued, and have been argued, by the strongest of human intelligences. One man will say, like Diderot, that the whole affair is a mere projection of Man himself by his own imagination upon the void, and be confirmed in this view by every new discovery of men’s gods in various eras and places. While another will say, like Newman, "On the contrary, if I find in all false religion something in common with true religion, it does not weaken my hold on true religion; it confirms it."
Now we find Mr. Wells in strange ignorance of the fact that this opposite point of view exists.
Nor is this all. Over and over again he shows ignorance of general European movements, of the results of modern scholarship, of definite discoveries which have changed all our thought since he was young. Not only does he not know his Europe: he does not know his books.
A very striking example of this I have noted in the early part of this book. Mr. Wells thought, when I spoke of a widespread European (and American) criticism of Natural Selection which is making that theory untenable, that I had imagined the whole thing! He denied the existence of such authorities and challenged me, in a violent pamphlet, to quote names. He (and the reader) will find a few of the most prominent in an appendix to this book. (See Debunking Darwin)
Next I notice a violent necessity in him for simplification. The general lines of History must indeed be simple; an outline must never allow confusion through too much detail. But I do not mean that our author has a powerful grasp of general ideas; I mean that he suffers from a weak simplification due to an inability to grasp the multitudinous complexity and the inhabiting mystery of things.
One example of this extreme simplification through weakness is the facile reference of everything social to race. Thus the "black-white" races of the Mediterranean have certain devotions, as, for instance, to Our Lady; the superior "Nordic" stock has not. Then, what will you do with the fact that the one province in Europe where there was the most passionate devotion to Our Lady for century after century was Britain? The desperate need for simplicity leads Mr. Wells to leave it out altogether.
I might multiply instances. They abound throughout the work.
Now, all these characters are allied to, or rather spring from, that quality which I noted in my author at the beginning of this long examination, and which I have called Provincialism." It is an essential insufficiency for his task. He does not know his Europe; he does not know the world. He writes in the few terms and with the few conceptions of a man going by the labels he finds in the newspapers and textbooks of his native place: certain printed generalizations which he read in his youth and never questioned. He is, therefore, when he talks of the great world of Man, out of touch with the stuff of his subject. It is this, no doubt, coupled with an excellent economy of words and lucidity of style, which has given him his wide public for this book; it is also this which makes the book read second-rate to minds of a higher culture, or of a deeper and more varied experience; and it is this which confines its existence as a book to a very brief period of time.
We are reading in this Outline of History the work of a mind closely confined to a particular place and moment — the late Victorian London suburbs. Such a mind has an apparatus quite inferior to the task of historical writing.
And that is why I said in my first review of this book, what I here repeat : "It will have a vast circulation, especially in the New World — and an early grave."
I must end upon a much graver note. What are we to say of that world in which a book like this has a sale which, however ephemeral, is at any rate enormous?
The question is one that my contemporaries do not seem to have put to themselves sufficiently. I mean, my Catholic contemporaries (for outside the Catholic Church very few people nowadays put any questions to themselves ultimately: they are content to drift and feel).
There has not, in my judgement, been nearly enough astonishment, alarm, or even aroused and curious interest in the vast social transformation of which we are the spectators.
Some of my contemporaries have criticized me with indignation when I have said that, outside the Catholic body, the last fragments of Catholic doctrine were rapidly dissolving before our eyes: yet surely the huge sales of such a book as this are proof enough that what I have said in this matter was true.
Within my own memory there remained of the Catholic scheme a most insufficient, but still solid, skeleton structure maintaining society in the English-speaking non-Catholic world. Within my own memory the Incarnation was commonly held by rich and poor in England and America, and very much of what the Incarnation implies was taken for granted in the structure of society. An attack upon that doctrine, stated in so many words, would have been violently offensive not forty years ago. As for a mere taking for granted that it was false, the books doing this were then thought eccentric. By a curious irony, the non-Catholic English-speaking world connected such blasphemy with the specifically Catholic cultures which were (in those days) alluded to as "Continental."
Side by side with this fundamental doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity, which certainly such a brief time ago was the commonplace of all our society, it possessed sundry other essential dogmas of Catholic truth — the Personality of God, His omnipotence, His creation of all things, the Immortality of the Human Soul, andthe dual destiny of mankind: the conviction that man by his own free will might lose the grace of God, and that if he lost it his eternal existence would be marred and deprived of the end for which it was created. In plain English, men believed in Heaven and Hell: particularly wicked men — upon whom such ideas have the most salutary effect. The whole range of emotions which arise from such doctrines as surely, and are as inseparable from them, as a scent from a flower or the emotions of landscape from the living eye, permeated society.
Not only were these doctrines retained with all their effect, but the chief Catholic social disciplines still had value. Property was still held to be a right, not a mere arrangement or a system. Its proper distribution was thought a good: its capture by a few, an evil: the Socialist attack on it as a principle, inhuman. The family was still the unit of the State. The control of the parent over the child was taken for granted and the action of the State, or of any other authority, was regarded as a delegation, and a perilous delegation at that.
Marriage was normally regarded as indissoluble.
Behind all this remaining grasp of the last but most essential factors in the general scheme of Catholic society — all that by which men could still vaguely be called "Christians"— went the common-sense appreciation of the truth that Man was Man: that we could not deal with Man by experiment as a changeable being, that he was not a mere phase in process of passing, but a fixed type with a known nature.
Man was — within my own memory — even to the highbrow non-Catholic world, what he still is (I am glad to say) to the populace — the most certain, the most fixed, known thing in the world; for Man knows himself as he knows no other thing. Hence was there a security in the sense and application of justice; hence was there a powerful comprehension of the past. For it was rightly taken for granted that men had always acted upon much the same motives. Hence was there a hearty recognition of the human conscience (which every man discovers in himself), and a corresponding contempt for sentimental excuses of misconduct.
Not only was this true of the dogmas, the disciplines, and the social effect of such remains of the Catholic Church as survived in the non-Catholic English-speaking world about us; but it was true of the intellectual heritage. Plain logic was accepted. The reason was given its due place. Men did not move by suggestion or by repetition; they still examined; and the presentation to that older generation (which I and all my contemporaries can remember) of statements unproved, the confusion of scientific hypothesis with scientific fact, were ridiculed. They were less and less ridiculed, it is true, as the nineteenth century drew to its close. Confusion of thought became more prevalent, and the swallowing whole of the last unproved and improbable affirmation in Biology, Pre-history, or Textual Criticism was already growing to be a habit. But the habit was not yet universal.
Now the lesson to be learnt from the immense sale of such a second-rate popular book as Mr. Wells’s Outline of History is that the old doctrines, for the great mass of our modern English-speaking non-Catholic population have gone. Mr. Wells ridicules the Resurrection; the Incarnation he could, of course, not grasp, but also— andhere is the significant point — he does not think that others really entertain it. He does not admit any part of the Christian scheme. On the intellectual side he proposes as true things of which we know nothing; and as obviously untrue things on which the best minds of Europe have long been assured.
Note you, in all this he is not an innovator. He challenges no one. He risks nothing. He follows the sheep. Mr. Wells makes no attempt to be a leader. He merely puts, in a nice, clear, simple fashion, that which the myriads to whom he addresses himself already believe — that there is no Creator, no Saviour, no Resurrection, no Immortality, no Communion of Saints.
Is not this a portent? In my judgement it is. It is not true that the modern world as a whole has suffered such a revolution. The Catholic culture in the continent of Europe not only stands strong, but is rapidly increasing in strength. The two branches of reaction against it (the German Protestant reaction of which Prussian atheism was the climax, and the more respectable anti-clericalism of French and Italian tradition) are both manifestly weakening. The doctrines that would dissolve society have been exposed and are now counter-attacked with an increasing vigour. Europe — the Soul of the world — is hesitating whether it will not return to the Faith: without which it cannot live.
But is that so in the world to which we belong, or at least of which we Catholics are exceptional inhabitants ? Is it true of that English-speaking culture which was founded upon the Bible and whose peculiar virtues and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages (many of them alien to us Catholics, but all well comprehended by us), were the texture of life in England and Scotland, in the English Dominions, and in the United States?
I think not. Men hesitate to say it; they are afraid of facing the truth in the matter, but truth it is: the foundations have gone.
I do not mean that in their place other foundations may not be discovered. I do not predict chaos, though chaos is a very possible result of it all. What I do say is, that Christian morals and doctrine, and all that they meant, are, in our English-speaking world much more than in any other part of contemporary white civilization, in dissolution.
This is no place in which to discuss the remedies (if any practical remedies be available) or even the probable results of so vast a revolution; but it is the place in which to emphasize the truth that the revolution has taken place.
It is a revolution in doctrine, discipline, morals, and intellectual action, as complete as any that we can find recorded in History since the conversion of the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church. It applies only to a section of the modem world, the section which I have mentioned: Britain, America and the Dominions; but that is a very important section of the modern world, and (what is of chief interest to us) it is the section wherein we live, of which we are citizens, to which we owe allegiance, and with whose fate our own and that of our children is bound up.