A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

by Hilaire Belloc

Let me give an example drawn from a sphere where there is less violent emotion aroused, and which therefore can be calmly examined by anyone of our opponents. Supposing a man to maintain that the shorter races in the history of mankind had always conquered the taller races. He is putting forward a universal statement. He is putting forward, because it is universal and because it has so few terms, a statement absurdly simple. Finally, he is putting forward this absurdly simple universal statement with some motive. If we find that the man is himself a member of a short race, we at once divine what the motive is. It is the motive of satisfying self-esteem.

Now a statement like that put to the member of a race as short as you like, put to an intelligent dwarf, ought to rouse him to immediate contradiction: however flattering he might find it. So it ought to rouse a man of average stature to even stronger contradiction, and still more, I suppose, a tall man. But it is contradicted, not because the contradictor favours tall men as against short men, but because the statement is in itself false and ridiculous. Sometimes short races have conquered tall ones, as the Romans the Germans, or the Normans the Saxons, or the Japanese the Koreans. Sometimes it has been notoriously the other way about.

The putting forward, then, of a statement (1) as universal (when as a fact it is just the opposite), (2) as absurdly simple so that it can be easily swallowed (when as a fact the situation being human is exceedingly complex), (3) with a motive which is not acknowledged, is a thoroughly unscientific way of going to work; yet that is what we Catholics are perpetually finding in the attacks made directly and indirectly against Catholic truths by popular writers on what these writers believe to be “Science” or “History.”

So it is with Priesthood. You can cite cases of Priesthood revered in a very simple state of society and cases of a Priesthood dispossessed of power by an advancing lay organization. But so also can you find ample examples of the opposite: Priesthood powerful in a very high civilization and Priesthood overcoming lay power.

How a Priesthood arose we do not know: presumably after the same fashion as all other functions of religion. These functions being awful and sacred, there would, in the nature of things, be a special class of men attached to them. But, anyhow, the relations between the idea of a Priest and the idea of Civil Government are most emphatically not the relations between earlier and baser social functions on the one hand, and more developed and higher social functions on the other. You can cite cases where the power of a Priesthood (or, rather, of religion, for it is never the Priest who imposes his religion, but always the religion that needs the Priest) was mastered by the civil power; but you can also cite cases where the exact opposite took place; and you can cite intermediary cases innumerable.

Now, what Mr. Wells does in this sixteenth chapter of his is to put forward one leading case—the Sumerian—in which (quite probably) an earlier Priestly power yielded to (though it was never downed by) what was in that one time and place a later kingly power. He first of all gives us (on p. 125) a purely imaginary account of Kings arising through the quarrels between Priests or during the inability of Priests to withstand foreign conquerors. He then proceeds, on the same page and the following, to present the Sumerian Kingship as becoming in time superior to the Sumerian Priesthood. The thing is, of course, neither recorded nor ascertained History, but it is a fair guess. It may very well be History; and if it is so, then it is one particular example of the process going one way. But that is no sort of argument for the process never going the other way. When Mr. Wells comes to talking of the Egyptian development, he admits that the King was divine, and in that quality superior to and including both Priest and King. He again admits it in the case of China in another form. The Chinese civil ruler was also High Priest.

How, then, without any evidence to go on save one particular (and purely hypothetical) case, is this ridiculously simple theory made justifiable to the reader as a universal process? How can Mr. Wells use it to prove that Priesthood goes with base undeveloped minds and yields to “Progress”?

By the usual practice of allusion. In the case of the Sumerian King, the plain statement that the gods entrusted him with power is called by Mr. Wells his “doing it with the utmost politeness to the gods”—the innuendo being, of course, that the King’s power arose in spite of the Priesthood, that the King being later in development, and therefore more “enlightened,” despised the gods, and that all he did was to compromise somewhat with old decaying superstitions in order to strengthen his hold on government. But we have no evidence of that; it may be the right interpretation, or the exact opposite may be the right interpretation. The Sumerian King may have been sincerely devoted to the gods—as he says he was—and have risen through that devotion.

We are told (on p. 121), with regard to the early Priesthoods that “it is clear” the Priesthood early developed political powers. But it is not clear at all. It is merely stated. True to the wearying puerility of his black and white “Progress” idea (Wednesday superior to Tuesday, Tuesday superior to Monday), Mr. Wells tells us that the temples began with an idol, “usually a somewhat monstrous half-animal form.” Why “usually”? We know nothing about it at all. We know the half-animal legend in Babylonia, or, rather, the purely animal legend that a fish started culture. We know the animal and half-animal deities of the Egyptians. But no one can say that the Greek or Italian shrine began with a half-animal figure, or that there was anything “monstrous” about it. No one can say that the primitive worship to which the Bible bears witness was that of a monstrous or half-animal figure. The thing is only set down thus in order to confirm the statements already gratuitously made that religion, like all other human affairs, begins in something offensive.

It is the characteristic of these thin and erroneous theories, first, that they quote only what is in their own favour; secondly, that they bring in every possible indication, no matter how remote, which may be twisted into a support; and, thirdly, that those who promote them either are (as is usually the case) ignorant of, or (as is less common) refuse to mention, still more to study, any opposing evidence. They refuse to weigh the full record of the past or (what is equally available) to make a full examination of the present.