Well, we know that such minds exist and have always existed. We know that they are now being multiplied by the hundred thousand and the million under the conditions of our great towns and their press.
We also, we of the higher and older culture, we of the Faith, know that all of this can only end in ruin. But meanwhile let us vigorously stamp with our own mark the expressions of such vulgarity whenever they come before us, and label them for what they are; which is rubbish: and degraded rubbish at that.
But all this raving against the Empire from which we descend, is but a preface. Its cause is the fact that the high Græco-Roman Culture was the prelude to, and the setting of, the Incarnation.
With this word we come to the supreme interest of mankind: the one essential question in human History which must always be answered by a “Yes” or “No”; and according to that answer our whole view, not only of human society upon earth, but upon the very nature and destiny of Man, depends.
That question is, whether Jesus Christ, who was certainly Man, was not also God: two Natures in one Person? Those who answer “Yes, the Dual Nature was there present,” believe in the Incarnation. Those who answer “No, Jesus Christ was only a man (or a Myth)” do not believe in the Incarnation.
Now the reader need hardly be told that Mr. Wells belongs to the later division. For him as for the great mass of his readers, and, indeed, the majority of English-speaking people to-day outside the Catholic Church, Jesus Christ was only Man.
Indeed, if Mr. Wells belonged to the other division, that is, if he believed in the Incarnation, his book would have had no great popular sale, however ephemeral.
If that were the main point against Mr. Wells’s attitude towards the Incarnation, my article might stop here. Belief in the Incarnation is not a matter of historical proof, it is a matter of Faith. If a man doesn’t believe it History will not make him do so. Historical truth, like all other truth, supports Faith; but it does not cause Faith. When, therefore, we condemn a man’s history in connection with a discussion upon the Faith, we must keep quite distinct our disagreement with his doctrine from our exposure of his ignorance or misjudgment of mundane fact.
What we are concerned with in this commentary is Mr. Wells’s failure as an historian; the insufficiency of his knowledge; his weak judgment; the confusion in his processes of thought: Not his lack of the divine gift of Faith, which is not here germane to our subject.
If a man comes to you with the remark that your father, long dead, once forged a cheque, you say to yourself, “I feel that man is wrong.” But if he brings forward some testimony to that assertion, you listen to it. If you then find that he does not know what he is talking about, you are the more relieved in the matter of your father’s memory. For instance: Suppose he said that your father forged the cheque in 1914 and that he remembers the date because it was in the same week as the battle of the Marne, while to your certain knowledge your father died in 1913, his history is at fault, and his contention worthless.