The contradiction is resolved, of course, by the very simple dodge of saying that the good Buddhism which is so superior to the Faith of civilized men, the maker of Europe, is “the simple, pure, original Buddhism”—in plain English, the Protestant Buddhism—while the developed Buddhism is the naughty, “ritualist,” Buddhism. And as the original Buddhism seems to have differed in doctrine and idea from the later Buddhism, the opportunity of saying “Modern Buddhism is a corruption of a simple original: therefore Catholicism is a similar corruption,” seems too good to be missed.
Mr. Wells (as we shall see in a later article) shirks the essential point, whether the Catholic Church is as a fact of different substance to-day from what it was at its origins. He prefers to put forward the false Buddhist parallel, and let it work in minds as ill-instructed as his own.
Thus we poor Christian remnants catch it both ways. “Buddhism is a degraded man-made thing, full of ceremonies and perverse human imaginings—look how like it is to the Catholic Church, and judge from that what a perverse, man-made thing is the Catholic Church also! At the same time, Buddhism is a supremely noble doctrine, especially in its denial of a personal God and of the immortality of the human soul. Judge from that how degraded you Catholics are with your absurd ideas of a personal God and of the immortality of the human soul”! The reader who turns to Mr. Wells’s chapter, “The Rise and Spread of Buddhism,” in Book IV (beginning with page 237), will appreciate what I mean.
Within a brief twenty-three pages, more than half of which, I think, are illustrations, he manages to put the whole anti-Catholic emotion (by innuendo) in the fullest fashion, and not only to do that, but to sacrifice common sense (as fanaticism must always sacrifice common sense) in the process.
On page 241 you get the note of the whole thing, “the teaching of History, as we are unfolding it in this book,” says Mr. Wells, “is strictly in accordance with this teaching of Buddha”: that is an example of what I mean. It is childish, not only as vanity in the Author, but as praise of a great, though perverted, philosophy.
Mr. Wells’s Outline of History is not a Buddhist magnum opus; it is an ephemeral popular book written by a simple Protestant Englishman who has lost what relics of doctrine he once possessed but still preserves a fine dislike of the Papacy. His attraction to Gautama Buddha as much resembles that of an Indian mystic as his style resembles the prose of Voltaire. When he tells us with approval that Buddhism regards the desire for Immortality as an evil and the loss of being (for impersonal being is not being at all) as a good, he tells us what is undoubtedly true: though in the strong light of Western thought, obviously a muddlement—for there must be being, and conscious being, and discrete being, if there is to be the sense of joy or of good. But however much Mr. Wells pats Buddha on the back he will persuade no one that he is a Buddhist with a yearning desire to have done with notoriety and the flesh.
What of Mr. Wells’s desire (which he earnestly presents to his readers) to be rid of Mr. Wells’s own immortal soul?
It is pretty clear on page 242 what he feels in the matter of Immortality. He praises the Buddhist Atheism in this particular, because he dislikes “an endless continuation” of his “mean little individual life,” which in his judgment is man’s conception of Immortality, whether in the Egyptian whom he mentions by name, or in the Christian whom he really has in mind.
Now there is in this profession of dislike for the doctrine of Immortality, and ridicule of it, a positive element beyond the negative element of mere opposition to Catholicism and to the high tradition of Europe. The positive element is the very natural distaste for following on the dreary round of suburban life in London or New York; and in this our Author is to be applauded. But it is characteristic of him and of the time and audience in which and for which he writes, that he should have had any such appalling conception of the profound and majestic dogma of Immortality.
It exactly corresponds to what the same type of thought produces when it demands Immortality instead of denying it. The present-day English Modernist, who writes a book saying that he has had communication with his son killed during the War, and that the son is drinking whiskies and sodas and smoking cigars in Purgatory or Paradise (whichever you like to call the fashionable idea of the next world), is in exactly the same mental state as Mr. Wells. Certainly, if the dogma of Immortality (that very summit of the dignity of man and characteristic of all our race and its achievements) meant an endless succession of going up by train to the office and reading the Daily Howl on the way, we should be better without it. But it does not mean that, Mr. Wells; I assure you it does not. There is far more glory about Immortality and far more elbow-room—and far more peril.