His other blunders are, as a rule, no more than his repetition of old errors which he did not happen to know had been exposed by modern scholarship, coupled with his sporadic outbreaks against the Church. But when he comes to approach the Reformation, we have something very different. We have an ignorance of (or aversion from) the fundamentals of the position, which ignorance (or aversion) is fatal to his History.
For to understand modern times (which have drawn all their trouble from the break-up of Christendom that followed, and all their energy from the renewal of discovery that preceded the Reformation), one must understand what the whole thing was about. A man who merely repeats the old Protestant formulæ is useless; and that, unfortunately, is exactly what Mr. Wells does. He misappreciates the quality of the problem. He goes wrong here on the main outline more than he does in any other department of his work, and he goes wrong because he is in the “No Popery” tradition. To exemplify this I will quote.
In the first place he always speaks of the Catholic Church as something separate from Europe, something, as it were, imposed upon Europe like an alien conqueror; a man who thinks in those terms of Europe before the Reformation manifestly ignores the nature of all our History. A man who thinks in those terms is like a foreigner talking of England as an aristocratic tyranny grinding down a mass of rebellious people. Many Frenchmen have talked of England in those terms, and have made themselves laughing-stocks by doing so. They have not understood the aristocratic state. So does a man who speaks of united Christendom as a thing to which the Catholic Church was an external, alien thing make a laughing-stock of himself. The Catholic Church was Europe and Europe was the Catholic Church. In so far as the break-up of Christendom succeeded, in that degree has Europe lost its unity and therefore its being. Nor shall we recover our being save by a reunion in religion.
Let us look at the phrases which betray this ignorance of the European past.
“Though it is certain that the Catholic Church opened up the modern educational state in Europe, it is equally certain that the Catholic Church never intended to do anything of the sort. It did not send us knowledge with its blessing; it let it loose inadvertently.” “Us”! “It”!—but “we” were “it.”
Again:
“At first the current criticism upon the Church concerned only moral and material things.” Criticism whence? From those who were themselves of the Church!
Again:
“The Church was losing its hold upon the consciences of Princes and rich and able people. It was also losing the faith and confidence of common people.” But Princes and common people were the Church!
Again: