At the end of this section comes in again (with Chapter XVI) that note which is the principal motive for these comments. For it is with this Chapter XVI of his third book that we come again upon the Author’s reaction against religion and particularly against the essential idea of a Priesthood. Mr. Wells’s sixteenth chapter is entitled, “Gods and Stars, Priests and Kings.”
He introduces it at the beginning of his account of recorded History, and it is the first example in this account of that personal and violent reaction of his against true religion which I am following throughout these articles.
His reaction is, of course, only part of the general spirit of our time outside the Catholic Church, and in his attitude towards all religion properly so-called—especially in his contempt and dislike of the high religious functions of ritual, hierarchy, sacrifice and the rest—Mr. Wells is but one individual in the millioned English-speaking Protestant public for whom he writes, and whose ideas he repeats to their satisfaction. But he feels this hatred with a particular animosity where other people nowadays feel it but vaguely: he is stirred by an antipathy to the Catholic Church which they also feel, but do not feel so pointedly or so continually. And he can express it in a very readable, popular fashion, which enables the average reader of his own sort to say “This is what I have always thought, more or less, but more forcibly and better put than I could have put it.”
He here declares himself fully for the first time on the special point of Priesthood. What he thinks about it in general his readers had already heard on an earlier page, where he made an imaginary picture of its origin (p. 72 of the Outline of History). He there tells them that “bold men, wise men, shrewd and cunning men, were arising” (in neolithic times) “to become magicians, priests and kings.”
There is, of course, no evidence at all as to how mankind first connected a Priesthood with the general idea of religion; and this specific attachment of it to the neolithic period (itself a very vague term, for who can tell that men using polished stones were everywhere earlier than men using metals?) is not History, but arbitrary assertion. However, it is a guide to what Mr. Wells, and the myriads who have had the same education as he, in England and America, feel with regard to the institution of Priesthood. It was wholly man-made, seeing that religion itself is man-made; and it proceeded from the same sort of very unpleasant origins as religion itself. Mr. Wells, on the same page, is careful to say that the Priests were not to be thought of as cheats; he wisely admits that they “usually believed in their own ceremonies,” but the innuendo is that any “ceremony” performed by any Priest in any religion is bunkum.
Now that, of course, is a mere assumption the opposite to which may equally well be true: that all ceremonies of all Priests had something in them, and that, in a true religion, the ceremony would be efficacious and the Priestly office justified.
So much for his first attack on page 72 of his Outline.
On page 120, he goes in some detail into the matter; and with a better basis for discussion, because he is talking of things historically certain, and not copying the story from nineteenth-century writers who made it up out of their own heads. There were full Priests in the old Pagan religions, or at any rate in the finest and most civilized of them; and for that matter in nearly all of them there were Priests in some form or another. The theory Mr. Wells repeats with regard to the early recorded Priesthoods may, like so many of his repetitions, be called “The theory of the eighteen-eighties”: the theory current about a generation ago. It is the contention that the Priest came first when man was inferior and was at last ousted, as man advanced, by the King—the innuendo being that the power of the Priest essentially belongs to an earlier time, and therefore to a more degraded period in human History; for to the man who believes in a childishly simple theory of “Progress” (as Mr. Wells believes in it, and as do the great majority of his readers), whatever is earlier must be worse than what comes later.
At this point I repeat what I have had to say so often in the course of these comments. It cannot be said too often in the ears of our opponents, because we know by experience that the modern half-educated mind, nourished on masses of print and without that capacity of clear thinking which our fathers had, feels a difficulty in grasping the distinction between two connected ideas. Once it hears the same word used in connection with two separate ideas it tends to confuse the two ideas together. So we Catholics who have the privilege of inheriting the higher culture must always patiently explain our position to our opponents, lest we should merely antagonize them instead of teaching them. The following, then, is the point I wish to emphasize:
When we are presented with any universal statement which is (1) hypothetical (i.e. not a matter of ascertained fact); (2) of an exaggerated simplicity and therefore very easily swallowed; (3) motived consciously by a contempt for true religion, that is for the Catholic Faith, we Catholics do not deny the portion of ascertained fact contained in the universal statement. What we deny is the universality of the statement. When we, who can reason, are told that London and Carthage were great seaports, and that therefore all the capitals of high civilizations are great seaports, we do not deny the character of London and Carthage; what we deny is that they are the models of all other capitals. What the trained and clear Catholic intelligence finds intellectually repugnant is a false simplicity imposed on highly complex organic phenomena, especially social phenomena. What we particularly complain of is the apparent inability of our opponents to recognize their own motives, and to see that they are putting things in a particular and artificial fashion in order to fit in with their theories instead of honestly inducing theory from fact.