I have said that the consequences between this attempt to “straddle” between belief and unbelief leads one into muddle-headedness, and we get muddle-headedness in these pages to the nth. Thus our author tells us that his concern is not with the “spiritual or theological significance of Jesus Christ”—whereupon he proceeds to spout theology page after page. He makes certain that the texts in which Our Lord admits Godhead are spurious; that the cry on the Cross is proof of an only human nature in Christ; that the supernatural is “incredible”; that the Resurrection was a false story, which began to be whispered and then talked, and at last apparently foisted upon people. The whole thing is a theological tract from beginning to end.
It is the theology of the evangelistic Protestant turned Modernist. The old evangelical, Bible Christian theology is as deeply impressed upon Mr. Wells’s work as Catholic theology is impressed upon, say, the poetry of Claudel. It has all the consequences of that theology, especially in the very unmistakable rhetoric. We have “The White Blaze of this Kingdom of His” and the inevitable Oleograph of “Three Crosses on the Red Evening Twilight.” It is as though all of this had been written as part of a revivalist address; but revivalist language in the mouth of a man who has ceased to believe is muddle-headedness gone mad.
CHAPTER X
THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH
When we pass from the Life of Our Lord itself to the formation of the Church as He founded it and as it was and taught immediately after His Ascension, we find Mr. Wells (as we might expect) pursuing this same highly emotional, unintelligent, Modernist method, but with this difference: that he is now free to attack everything at random. So long as Our Lord is still present in his pages, the confused but powerful emotions he inherits from the older and more intelligent doctrinal Protestant world of his forbears would not give him a free hand. He had to talk of Our Lord’s “inimitable greatness,” of the “giant measure of the Kingdom of God,” and so on; but when he has only to deal with the Apostles and their successors, he is under no such emotional obligation.
We may discover in his way of treating the early Church, its doctrines, and its organized form, two clear marks, both exactly consonant with that insufficiently cultured Modernist type of which he is the exponent.
Firstly, he is devoted to the old principle: “The Bible only.” He does not understand the factor of tradition in History, and, as for documents, he writes as though the sub-apostolic writings did not exist, which, for him, they probably do not.
Secondly, he follows the fashion which became prominent in the Protestant world over fifty or sixty years ago, and is still powerful, of ascribing pretty well everything in Catholic doctrine to the unscrupulous invention of St. Paul. He repeats the German phrase that “Paul” found the Christian community possessed only of a “way of living,” and left it with “a belief”: the doctrine of the Atonement, the Mass, the whole affair, must spring from the unbridled (and strangely unchallenged!) imagination of a man who never came across Our Lord during His ministry on earth, who knew intimately those who had been constantly with Our Lord during that ministry, who (according to this impossible theory) contradicted all their experience, and yet who appealed to that experience as the authority for everything he said.
Posterity will smile at this way of getting out of an historical problem. But it is still so largely followed that Mr. Wells is in no way inferior to those whom he merely copies, so far as the general thesis is concerned. He is in very good company. Where he is inferior is in not appreciating, as the great scholars who are our opponents do, two points: Firstly, that one must never in History state as definite fact, or present as a picture, something which one has made up out of one’s head: Secondly, that the Catholic side has a body of historical evidence to present. He makes up pictures in support of his thesis as though he were writing fiction instead of History, and he leaves out, presumably because he has not heard of it, the counter evidence with which he ought to deal.
For instance, he gives us this sentence: “We know very little of the ideas, or ceremonies or methods of the Christian communities in the first two centuries.”
If he had said no more, that sentence could have stood; for “very little” is a vague phrase, and it is true that we have for the second century few documents compared, say, with the documents of the third century. We have far more documents than we have for the two centuries of English history between 400 and 600, but we have less-connected ones than we have for the two centuries of English history between, say, 700 and 900.