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

by Hilaire Belloc

“The revolt of the Princes was essentially an irreligious revolt against the world rule of the Church.” It was a scramble for loot of Church Goods undertaken by avaricious men within the Society of Catholic Europe—not by men from something outside.

I might quote many such sentences which we come across by the hundred in the sort of textbooks upon which Mr. Wells and the vast bulk of his readers have been brought up; they are all (to the historian) lamentable.

The Catholic civilization of Europe broke up from within, because the evil will of men was, at one moment, too strong for their conscience of good, and the opportunity for loot too strong for man’s underlying knowledge that the Church was the salvation of mankind. To talk of criticism of the clerical organization and its abuses as an attack on “the Church” is unhistorical. It is thinking of the past in modern terms. To contrast Catholic Christendom with some ideal, impossible (and unpleasant) system, of vague, enthusiast religion, and to imagine the latter suppressed by the former is, historically, unreal. One might as well imagine English cricket rules persecuting an imaginary ideal cricket in which there were no rules. The Catholic Church, in any society which is Catholic, no more stands outside the community as an odd tyrant than the social habit of the Londoner stands outside the Londoner as a tyrant, or than the public school system stands as a tyrant outside the man trained under it. The whole thing is one.

That unity may suffer attack. It may break down. It may suffer the loss of certain portions while maintaining the rest intact. But to regard any vital principle (such as the Church) as something outside the body which it vivifies, is bad history. It is exactly the sort of bad history written by anyone who doesn’t understand the personality, the identity, the spirit of his subject. Mr. Wells and his readers (and those who wrote the textbooks on which he has been trained) are not themselves Catholics; but cannot they exercise enough imagination to call up a world in which their ancestry and their blood were Catholic? Apparently they cannot; and in so far as they cannot, their history is worthless; for they miss the main fact that Catholic Europe was still Catholic while the disruption was proceeding, and that the idea of the Church as an alien thing was only possible after the full effect of the break-up.

So much for the first piece of bad history. This obsession of the Catholic Church as an alien tyrant of Catholic men.

Now for a second more detailed point. Mr. Wells is obsessed, as the less intelligent part of Protestant society was obsessed a lifetime or more ago, with the extraordinary conception that the Catholic Church restricts the powers of reason and the action of the human mind.

A man who writes that of the Catholic Church is like a man who should say (and indeed there are nowadays some men who do say it) that a formula in mathematics restricts the freedom of the human mind.

Here you have a popular novelist dealing with what he himself has vaguely heard to be one of the great phenomena of History, and what every educated man knows to be the greatest phenomenon of all History, the Catholic Church; and yet, in attacking it, he does not know what it was. A little while ago the greatest purely political phenomenon in the world—it is still, perhaps, the greatest—was the sudden expansion of the British Empire; with its unique bond of a nominal crown, its vast territorial extent, its exceedingly rapid growth. What should we say of a foreigner who, writing of this phenomenon, should judge (because he hated it) that it was all due to tyranny?

We should say of him exactly what I say of Mr. Wells. He does not know what he is talking about.

The Catholic Church propounds certain truths, and those who accept her authority accept those truths. They do not accept Her authority by discovering the truths and piecing them together. They do not accept Her authority like your modern reader who accepts whatever he reads. They discover Her authority by Her character. Then, and only then, and as a consequence, not a cause, of such recognition, they accept Her teaching.