Historically the whole talk of human sacrifice as original to religion is quite worthless. There is no general evidence of the thing in the remains of prehistoric civilization; no picture, no sculpture, no language test. We may safely prophesy that if this nameless perversion reappears among men—as it well may—it will reappear not in their simplest societies, but rather in their most refined.
The bulwark against all such things—and such murder is but one out of myriads of possible monstrosities—is that general tradition of our morals and culture which depends upon the Catholic Church. Men do not grow out of their evils: they return to them, lacking a Divine guide.
When, therefore, I lay down Mr. Wells’s book (not without relief) and find my eyes following the phrase upon page 72, “it must be clear from what has gone before that primitive man could have had no idea of God or of religion,” I leave that comic phrase “it must be clear” to the judgment of the reader.
There never was any writer less clear in his ideas than the author of this work when he deals with Early Man: and as to the few real facts and his conclusions from them, they dance such a saraband that you never know where you are, nor which is first or last, nor which is top and which is tail.
First religion arises in some beast living before man who gets a “complex” of terror from his horrible old father; then it is neolithic man who gets it—after an immense interval with no religion at all. On one page a thing is possible; two pages later probable; four pages on it is certain. A man having put forward a theory in 1893, it is still gospel in 1926, though exploded in 1895. A feathered chieftain waving bows and arrows at you is ignorant of the bow, and the poor devils of deer with arrows stuck into them everywhere are told that their hunters knew nothing of arrows.
It is on science of this kind, instruction of that calibre, and culture of such a tone, that we are asked to abandon the Faith, which made, and on whose retention depends, the civilization of our race.
CHAPTER VI
WE COME TO REAL HISTORY
I now leave Mr. Wells’s Outline of History in so far as it deals with guesses, unproved statements, and ascertained facts on Man as he existed before any known written record.
I have devoted so large a proportion of my space to this earlier and vaguer part of the book because it is by far the most important. In it Mr. Wells, repeating the various materialist and other anti-Christian theories of his youth, has put before his readers an ethnography and a philosophy confused, indeed, but consistently opposed to the Catholic Faith. And it has been my business to distinguish what was demonstrably wrong in his statements, what exploded by recent scholarship and what solid and demonstrated; blaming his obvious unacquaintance with recent European thought, and his lack of mental grip, but praising his vividly picturesque style and his undoubted sincerity.
The opportunity for speculating at large and affirming without proof in this prehistoric region is unlimited. Therefore it is here that Mr. Wells’s attack on the Catholic Faith is largely delivered; and since it is his antagonism to the Catholic Faith with which I am mainly concerned—for sympathy or antagonism with the Catholic Faith is the only thing of real importance in attempting to teach History—I have given to this section the considerable space my reader has traversed.