Again, in dealing with the Galileo case, he will have it that the advance of physical science broke down the Catholic scheme. The motive of such a statement is clearly to suggest that the Faith is incompatible with real knowledge and that all extension of ascertained truth tends to destroy the Christian Religion.
But that is not rational history; it lacks even elementary instruction; a schoolboy ought to know better than to write thus. The historical process whereby so much of Europe was lost to European religion was not first an advance of physical science, then a loosening of the Catholic authority, and, lastly, a wide denial of that authority and the establishment of various heresies. The historical process was just the other way—first came the violent explosion of spiritual revolt and anarchy which nearly wrecked our civilization altogether; then, later, a large but not complete recovery; then, last, and principally in societies which had retained or recovered the Catholic culture, a new and remarkable advance in physical science.
It is not historically possible that astronomical discovery in the seventeenth century, the telescope, and the great new development of mathematics, could lead to the denial of Catholic doctrine in the sixteenth. Not only is it impossible in History; it could not possibly be true in psychology. No one with an elementary knowledge of Catholic spirit and doctrine could conceive that doctrine and spirit to be affected by any discovery in the plane of physical science. You might as well say that a man’s judgment on his duties to his country would be affected by a new ordnance survey, or his admiration of Bach by the discovery of zinc photography for printing music.
With all this I will deal later in more detail when I come to those parts of Mr. Wells’s work which specially show his general animus against the Faith. Meanwhile, let me conclude with another disadvantage which I find in him for the task he has undertaken. It is the inability he has shown for consulting the right people.
It is a laudable thing in any popular novelist who has acquired a large public and can attract its attention to set out with the sincere intention of instructing his fellow-beings, even in a department wherein he has had hitherto no practice.
Thus some such popular novelist might say to himself: “I think people ought to know more about the laws of health. I will therefore use my wide circulation and my large audience for the purpose of spreading knowledge upon hygiene.” There is nothing blameworthy in this, nor need the effort be insufficient. The popular novelist, being hitherto ignorant of modern medicine, would have to go for instruction to men who were already experienced in the matter: he would have to read certain textbooks; he would have to “get up the subject,” and might, if he selected his tutors and guides with a good flair for the right sources, produce a really useful elementary treatise upon a matter of which he had, till lately, known nothing. His name being well known to the multitude, his little effort would probably have a wide sale, and that wide sale would do nothing but good. But it is essential that he should make himself acquainted with the difference between what was certain and what was hypothetical; with the most recent debates upon disputed points; with at least the main arguments on either side, etc., and it would further be essential that he should hear the latest results of research. For though a theory is not better than another merely for being later than that other, yet as there is new fact continually being discovered, and new arguments concluded, their bearing upon theory must be appreciated.
Now, Mr. Wells has been very remiss indeed in this duty of consulting the right authorities, before sitting down to write even so elementary a history as this “Outline” of his. He had, at the outset, not more faculty for writing an elementary history than any other best-seller might have for writing a book on elementary mathematics; indeed, a good deal less, for our schools give a certain amount of elementary training in mathematics, but as yet no training to speak of in history. But it was manifestly apparent from the first issue of his book that Mr. Wells was rarely given the latest historical theories, let alone the latest historical discoveries.
What is more extraordinary in a man so interested in such things, he does not know the modern trend of controversy in Pre-history and Anthropology. He remains away back in what I may call “the early Golden-Bough-Period”—that of Grant Allen’s Evolution of the Idea of God in Pre-history. From internal evidence it would seem, as I shall point out in the text, that his studies in these matters stopped short—or at any rate crystallized—in 1893, the date of Ball’s book on Croll’s Theory of Glaciation and of the Weissmann articles in the Contemporary Review.
And I am appalled to discover that he knows nothing of all the modern work against Darwinism, in which system—that is, in Darwinian Natural Selection—he retains the simple faith of the day—over thirty years ago—when he was “doing” elementary science in a class.
It is the same with the recorded history of Europe. His informers referred him to no books wherein he might learn what force that Catholic Church was which made Europe. He did not compare—perhaps he never heard of—the various sources ascribed to our main political institutions, and the increasing evidence for their Latin origin.