A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

by Hilaire Belloc

But it will be to Mr. Wells’s advantage if, in future, he does not go wrong on this point. Insignificant as it may seem to him, it is a very characteristic test of general culture, and outside the world to which he belongs everybody laughs at this common blunder. Mr. Wells would be the first to ridicule a Continental journalist who should talk of “Sir Gladstone.” But this blunder about the Immaculate Conception—a doctrine affecting the whole of Christian theology, and a commonplace in the mouths of all instructed Europeans—is far less excusable. The term “Immaculate Conception” is a specific theological term, signifying the absence in a human soul from its first moment of original sin. It has nothing whatever to do with the idea that the origin of that human soul is supernatural, save in the sense in which the origin of all our souls is the effect of a supernatural creative act. Mr. Wells himself, for instance, believes (as do, I am sure, much the greater part of his readers) that he was immaculately conceived, and that the whole of the human race is so.

We Catholics, on the contrary, believe this to be a peculiar state, attaching to the Mother of Jesus Christ and to no other human being.

Is that quite clear? I hope so; and I hope we shall not see this howler falling again from a pen so distinguished.

Mr. Wells is also unable, in this very clear, readable, and interesting summary of the early Chinese story, to avoid two passing references to his own exceedingly simple theology of “progress.” One is that in which he makes certain that images of animals and men put into graves are but substitution for earlier living sacrifices; the other is that in which he refers to mankind as (in the matter of its conservatism) “still an animal.” But, on the other hand, he modifies the general commonplace, mechanical, explanation that the lack of change in Chinese culture is due to the nature of its script. He modifies such a conclusion (which he repeats from an earlier page) by the word “plausible.” He says, “There is much that is plausible in this explanation,” and that is a perfectly reasonable way of putting it. So also, he keeps his nationalism within reasonable bounds when he calls the London Royal Society “the Mother Society of Modern Science.” Many foreigners would be angry at reading that phrase, and nearly all foreigners would smile at it; but there is something to be said for it, all the same.

Just before his account of the early Chinese, he has a fairly clear, though very brief, account of the origin of Manichæism, and clearly states the very great effect it had upon producing Christian heresy: but he is, I think, a little out of it in confining that effect to a thousand years. It is most powerful to-day. The whole of what is called Puritanism is based upon it. It is probably inseparable from true religion, of which it seems to be a necessary parasite or poisonous by-product. He also here brings in his King Charles’s head of Mithras, and makes the error of saying that the cult was “enormously popular” among the “common people.” We have no proof of that at all. What we do find (as Mr. Wells also quite rightly notes) is what I have already pointed out, its presence in the Roman army; but, as I have said in a previous chapter, the idea of Mithraism was never really widespread in the sense of affecting millions, let alone was it ever a serious rival to the Catholic Church. That was one of those exploded guesses of the nineteenth century, which still do duty in popular textbooks, but have lost all serious historical value.

We have in the next sentence, by the way, another of those little half-informed sneers at the Catholic Church which Mr. Wells seems to be quite unable to avoid, when he talks of Mithras “proceeding from the Deity” and gratuitously adds, to relieve his feelings, “in much the same way that the Third Person in the Christian Trinity proceeds from the First.” (He prints God the Father, by the way, without capitals—to put Him in His place.)

Here, again, I can do Mr. Wells a good service, by giving him a little elementary instruction in the outworn creed of Augustine, Anselm and Mercier.

The dogma is not what Mr. Wells fancies it to be. He has read of the “Filioque” discussion, though perhaps he does not know that it was a pretext and not a cause; he is acquainted with this word “Proceed” in connection with the Blessed Trinity, and therefore connects it with the Holy Ghost in procession from the Father alone, thinking this to be the original doctrine. As an historical fact the doctrine stood thus: that the Son is born of the Father, and the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. Also it is a doctrine implied at the origin of our religion, and one which is found in high antiquity long before the Greeks broke away from Unity. And though there was late argument against the double Procession, the complaint against the “Filioque” was not only, nor perhaps chiefly, that it was innovation in doctrine as that it was an unwarranted Western addition to the Creed.

I know that all these names and terms sound very ridiculous to Mr. Wells, just as the etiquette of the gentry seemed ridiculous to Sancho Panza; but, at any rate, an elementary historian ought to know the historical facts about a doctrine which fills all History, even if he thinks it absurd. A man may have no great respect for the Mormons; but if he is writing a popular history of Utah he must not mix up Brigham Young with Smith, or think that the Book of Mormon is only another name for the Bible.

If Mr. Wells deserves praise—and he certainly does—for his treatment of the Chinese passage, he also deserves it in a high degree for his treatment of the rise and effect of Mohammed.