When it comes to the question of the origin of religion I find Dr. Downey displaying the same controversial ingenuity and missing my plain intention in much the same way. He makes me out to be a follower of Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen, which is rather hard on me: Herbert Spencer is my philosophical bête noire; I have rarely mentioned him in my writings without some indication of my antipathy, and in The Outline of History I have never mentioned him at all. In a list of the opinions of various writers taken haphazard, to show what divergent views exist about the origin of religion, I mention Grant Allen’s Evolution of the Idea of God—Dr. Downey, I don’t know why, says “with evident respect.” Then he goes on for some pages confuting Grant Allen and pretending that he is confuting me. No doubt he thought he was confuting me, but if he had turned back to The Outline of History instead of going off at this tangent, he would have seen that I do not write of the fear and worship of the Old Man—which, as Dr. Downey will learn some day, is not quite the same thing as ancestor worship—as anything more than one factor in the complex synthesis of religion. And the case for considering obsession by the thought of the Old Man, an important factor in that synthesis, rests on very much stronger foundations than Grant Allen’s not very substantial book. I wish I could think of Dr. Downey reading any scientific book for instruction rather than to find little bits for controversial use. I would send him to Lang and Atkinson’s Social Origins and to the psycho-analytical work of Jung. He would learn then something of the real quality of the double stream of evidence, in human institutions and in childish psychology, for the importance of Old Man fear in the religious and social development of mankind.
Upon the third issue raised by Dr. Downey, the rôle of the Church towards knowledge, I am not very well equipped for discussion. Was Cardinal Newman right in saying that the case of Galileo is the exception that proves the rule, the rule that the Church has never put barriers in the way of scientific progress? I rub my eyes when I find Dr. Downey endorsing this—these habits are catching. Lord Bacon, says Dr. Downey, “violently opposed the Copernican system.” But did he make anyone kneel and recant? I must learn more about these questions. Certainly they were good Catholics who discovered America and first circumnavigated the globe—a point Dr. Downey misses. I shall find perhaps that there were Catholic schools of human anatomy in the Middle Ages and that the Inquisition was a debating society that took for its motto “Hear all sides,” and that it had a burning curiosity to learn some new thing.... I promise further inquiry here and such amendment of the text of the Outline in my next edition as these inquiries may justify. As I have said already, I look to the Catholic Church as an organisation logically obliged to teach the universal brotherhood of mankind, to apply the healing parable of the Good Samaritan to political and social life, and to discourage the vile nationalism that at present darkens and embitters so many human lives. It impresses me as being rather a weak and negligent teacher of these things nowadays, but I have no disposition to go into blank antagonism to the Church on that account. I offer Catholics The Outline of History for use in their schools in the most amiable spirit. If they will not have it, I will not grieve, if only they will produce a universal history of their own. I shall certainly read such a history with interest and delight. It will be different. Catholics, I gather, do not believe in “progress.” It will be, I presume, a History of the Creation (explaining logically why the ichthyosaurus was made), the Salvation and the subsequent Stagnation of mankind.
Before I leave these two critics I may perhaps say a word or two about their manner towards me. Mr. Belloc’s is rather amusing. I am a journalist and writer of books, some novels, some books on public questions. I am a university graduate of respectability rather than distinction in biological science. Mr. Belloc is a journalist and writer of books, some novels, some books on public questions, and a university graduate of respectability rather than distinction—I believe in modern history. He is a younger man than myself, and by that measure less experienced in life and affairs. But for some unfathomable reason he writes as if he were a monstrously wise old historian and I were a bright little boy who had gone to the wrong authorities instead of coming to him before I wrote my little essay. He is lucky not to have adopted this attitude towards me thirty years ago, because then I should have put him across my knees and established a truer relationship in the simple way boys have. Dr. Downey varies in his manner from the pitying and paternal to sprightly defiance. Sometimes he is almost flippant. He closes my last chapter “feeling that—
“His talk was like a spring which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses;
It slipped from politics to puns,
It passed from Mahomet to Moses.”
But how else could one write an Outline of History? A slight flavour of the encyclopædia is unavoidable, as Dr. Downey will find out for himself when his turn to write an Outline of History arrives; the rocks, and Moses and Mahomet will insist on coming in. If he leaves out the rocks as being irrelevant to a Catholic history, the critics will throw them at him.
But in one section Dr. Downey has a third manner with regard to me. When first I turned over Dr. Downey’s pamphlet I was much surprised to find a little group of pages studded with such delightful phrases as “we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Wells,” “graceful pen,” “sympathy and insight.” The reader will guess, of course, that I rubbed my eyes. He will guess wrong. I did nothing of the sort, I rub my eyes very rarely, but probably they dilated. On Loyola and the Protestant princes, it seems, I am perfectly sound—and then my style becomes admirable....
Yet only the other day I had a letter from an indignant Protestant in Australia explaining that in these very sections my style and my history reached its nadir of smattering ineptitude.