CHAPTER XI
ISLAM
The end of the Fifth Book and the beginning of the Sixth Book of Mr. Wells’s Outline of History deals with the early Persian religious movements after the Incarnation, with the History of China during the period corresponding to the early Dark Ages in Europe, and with the rise, first preaching and original conquests of Mohammedanism.
The whole of it is well done; best of all the Chinese part, but also very excellently the Mohammedan part. And here, as everywhere in the book, it is in the rapid presentation of a long period vividly to the reader’s mind that this writer shows peculiar talent.
The reason that Mr. Wells is always at his best when he is dealing with China is that there is here no complication. He and his readers are on the same level. We none of us know anything about Chinese history, except a few experts, and what there is to know is apparently less detailed, or, at any rate (to our completely foreign minds), less manifold than what there is to know about our own old world between the Asian and African deserts and the Atlantic.
Moreover, the temper of China, with its absence of religious enthusiasm, is sympathetic to a mind which does not understand the qualities of that emotion, save in the comparatively narrow field of what may be called “Hot Gospel.” Moreover, Mr. Wells’s way of dealing with the story of China is moderate and unexcited, because he is here completely removed from that goad to which he reacts with such violence, the Catholic Church. With no Catholic Church to send the blood to his head, he can deal with matters as calmly as the proverbial “Mongolian Dynasties: so restful; so impartial.”
In the whole of these pages on China I can find but one “jerk” provoked by a sudden reminiscence of Christian doctrine (though, it is true, exactly the same phrase is repeated ten pages later rather irrelevantly)—I allude to the term “Immaculate Conception.” He is talking of the experience of a Chinese traveller in India during the seventh century, and in giving a list of “the preposterous rubbish” attached to the Buddhist negations and despairs (which, by the way, Mr. Wells never remarks to be negations or despairs), he includes (likening it to a “Christmas pantomime”) the strange fairy-tales about what he calls “Immaculate Conceptions” by monstrous animals.
Now, since I understand Mr. Wells does me the honour to read these careful comments and corrections of mine upon his momentarily popular work, I will put this in italics, so that he can have it before him in sharp form.
The term “Immaculate Conception” does not mean Incarnation.
Mr. Wells thinks it does. He thinks it means a miraculous birth without a human father, and, in particular, the miraculous birth of a divine being without a human father, of which central doctrine the instinct of mankind is full—wherefore, indeed, it does but seem the more absurd in Mr. Wells’s eyes.
Mr. Wells may here plead that he sins in company; and he may also plead that, unlike the greater part of his errors, this error is not particularly old-fashioned. Ill-educated men of the English-speaking world constantly use the term “Immaculate Conception” under the impression that it means a miraculous incarnation. They do it almost as often as they talk of Socialism as meaning a wide distribution of property.