The fundamental historical error in such contradictory talk is this: That the doctrine of the Incarnation was not held by those who heard Our Lord nor inculcated by Our Lord Himself. There is a mass of proof that it was.
There are the texts of the New Testament. There are the unbroken traditions. There is the fact that all the divisions, quarrels, and heresies of the very earliest years turned not on the denial of Godhead, but on the attempt to rationalize its presence one way or the other, either by saying that the Godhead was separate from, though in some way accompanying, the Man Jesus: or by saying that the Godhead only was present and the Humanity an illusion. There is the Johannine and Ignatian documentary evidence. There is the Pauline. And there is nothing on the other side.
It is no answer to say (wrongly) that the Johannine evidence may not be, or (rightly) that the Pauline is not that of an apostle who heard Our Lord. It is no answer to say that the first Christians were following a misguided enthusiast who suffered from illusions. (Mr. Wells is afraid to say that.) The point is that these first writers wrote for people who had met and known scores of witnesses, and that these evidently took the doctrine of Our Lord’s Divine Origin for granted.
Before critical examination grew detailed men could say vaguely that the Gospels were of very late fabrication, and that there had been plenty of time between the Crucifixion and the first documents for legends to grow up and for living memory to die out. They cannot say that to-day.
They could, till recently, pretend that the Ebionites were not the heresy of one Ebion, but the original Christian Church. They cannot say that now. Historical Science is against them. They are free to say that the doctrine of Divine Origin was a folly and an illusion in its Propounder and His apostles. They cannot say it was not held by them. To say that is simply bad History. It is bad History also to admit the contemporary character of a document, such as a gospel, and then to discard at will and call an “interpolation” or “corruption” any part of such document as does not fit your theory.
In that connection (the arbitrary and contradictory rejection of all inconvenient evidence in documents the general authenticity of which is admitted) let me turn to another of Mr. Wells’s unhistorical lapses: the strange idea that the assertion of Our Lord’s Divinity did not much matter, anyhow, and that the violent opposition aroused from the very origin by Our Lord Himself and by the Catholic Church which He founded, was due to His bidding men to love one another and recognize the Fatherhood of God: to the very vaguest and most general precepts out of all that vast and consistent body of morals and doctrine, most of it highly particular, for which the Faith stands.
Historically that assertion is ignorant, and, indeed, any man with a reasonable sense of values might see that it could not but be nonsense.
Why should anyone get very angry with a man for saying that people ought to love one another? Or for telling them to lead kindly lives? Or for telling them to acknowledge a righteous Creator? In point of fact, if we are to reject tradition and only trust the fragmentary records of the four Canonical Gospels (as Mr. Wells does in everything which is not (a) supernatural, or (b) favourable to Our Lady), we know that Jesus Christ was put to death for Blasphemy. He was declared guilty of a specific crime meriting death, and that crime was refusing to deny that He was the Son of God: “We have a law,” said the Jewish authorities who demanded His execution, “and by that law He must die.”
We also know, according to the same record, that the Roman authorities were reluctant to allow Him to be put to death. They yielded to the intense demand of the Jewish authorities, which demand turned wholly upon what they regarded as His blasphemy in calling Himself Divine. But so strong is the power of imagination in your Modernist that he can get himself to prefer some visionary thing of which he has no record at all against the plain statement of a text, even when he himself accepts that text.
Again, the persecution to which the Catholic Church has been subject from its origins, has not been a persecution directed against such general doctrines as those of a beneficent Creator, of charity, etc. How could it be? It has been a persecution directed against a definite, organized Religion, packed with mystery and affirmation, which Religion clashed and clashes with non-Catholic Religion and social ideas outside of itself.