I will not disappoint the reader if I quote, as a savoury, the most extravagant example of “progress” in this division. It is on page 393, and runs thus: “Hitherto men of reason and knowledge have never had the assurance and courage of the religious fanatic. But there can be little doubt that they have accumulated settled convictions and gathered confidence during the last few centuries. They have slowly found a means to power through the development of popular education and popular literature, and to-day they are far more disposed to say things plainly and to claim a dominating voice in the organization of human affairs than they have ever been before in the world’s history.”
So now we know that the anti-Christian of the best-seller, of the sexual novel, of the star article, and the cheap textbook, is about to take over the governance of mankind. God help us if he does! But he won’t.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MIDDLE AGES
All the end of the Sixth Book of Mr. Wells’s History is taken up with his judgment on what must properly be called the Middle Ages in Europe—that is, the period which begins with the great awakening of the West in the eleventh century and ends with the strains and difficulties of the fifteenth, to conclude in the crash of the Reformation. It is the period midway between that great stage of Christendom called the Dark Ages which ends about the year 1000 and the split of Christendom which comes after 1500. It covers nearly twenty pages.
It would not be just to criticize the writer for this comparatively small allotment to what is, in the best judgment of cultivated European men, the greatest achievement of our race. Mr. Wells would answer that the Middle Ages were not the greatest period of our race, nor our race the chief portion of mankind. He has a right to his own theory of History: to treat the climax of united Christendom as but one episode (and not a superior episode) in the little we know of human effort and achievement. He is wrong, but he has a right to be wrong: unless, indeed, one affirms that no historian may adopt the anti-Catholic view. The scale, I say, is, in my judgment, warped. I think that an impartial observer (could such an one be conceived), looking at the world from far off, himself without religion, and judging things strictly by their temporal effect, would still say that it was in Europe men did the very most they ever could do, and that the time they did the most they ever could do was the 500 years between the year 1000 and the year 1500.
To ask Mr. Wells to see things in that completely detached fashion would be to ask too much; for he does not seriously pretend to look at the story of mankind thus detachedly, but rather to interpret it in terms of Evangelical English Protestantism, gutted of such supernatural doctrine as it once possessed. I will therefore deal with this chief section of the human story as briefly as Mr. Wells himself deals with it, although it certainly deserves a much larger place. For, after all, Mr. Wells’s whole quarrel is with the Catholic Church; and this was the moment when the Catholic Church was producing its chief fruits after the long and desperate siege of the Dark Ages. I think, in decency to such an opponent, Mr. Wells ought to have made the section more important. But, on the other hand, I remember that the opponent is an opponent; and if one regards the Catholic Church as the bane of mankind (which is Mr. Wells’s hereditary attitude), one would naturally hesitate to emphasize the centuries of its most united active effect upon our blood.
Three things have impressed Mr. Wells mainly in what he has been told by his Oxford coaches on this tremendous episode in the human story.
Firstly, the spontaneity, energy, and united purpose of the Crusades.
Secondly, the apparent futility of the medieval Papacy in handling its fine opportunity for creating an international (and a merely human) state.
Thirdly, the decline and breakdown of Christendom, inevitably ending in the shipwreck called the Reformation.