Those born into Her society inherit that knowledge of truth and have it taught them in childhood, as other truths are taught; but it remains knowledge of truth none the less; not meaningless suggestion. The Faith is not imbecile acceptation of something heard before the age of reason; on the contrary, it is the highest act of the intelligent will. Mr. Wells seems to be sincerely of the opinion that Lacordaire and Newman accepting the mystery of predestination and free will, did so through some base itch for obeying blindly. It is as though one in admiration of the Heavens and Earth were told he was but repeating an art critic’s essay.
Here is Mr. Wells telling us with wearisome reiteration that at the end of the Middle Ages the common man began to “think for himself.” The Church, he tells us (p. 464), had for its object the “subjugation of minds.” Again, in the thirteenth century, “a new arbitrator, greater than Pope or monarchy, had come into the world.” “Public opinion.” (P. 465.) John Huss is a martyr “not for any specific doctrine, but for the free intelligence and free conscience of mankind.”
And so on: all the tags of a long lifetime ago, as they ran current once in Exeter Hall.
It is a hopeless thing to argue with those who do not know the nature of their material. Perhaps I can best put it thus: Does Mr. Wells himself (as does certainly his great uneducated public) believe that the Catholic has not examined his own first principles? Is not interested in intellectual discussion? Does not perpetually criticize, weigh, and judge? Does he think that there are two kinds of men: (1) the Catholic—say Pascal—who is forbidden to think and can produce nothing intellectual; (2) those who, like Mr. Wells himself, have reached the summit of intellectual achievement through an exceptional intellectual freedom and power? I suppose he does. But the sight of such a man so complacent is a dreadful eye-opener on universal free laical compulsory education in elementary schools.
Does he think that St. Thomas Aquinas shirked the use of the brain?
Does he think Suarez merely repetitive? Lanfranc a parrot? Augustine a repeater of set phrases? Does he think that they are still shirking intellectual problems at Louvain, in Paris, in Lyons, in Angers, in Maynooth to-day? Apparently he does.
I have done Mr. Wells the justice of saying here and elsewhere, that in the matter of detail, date and incidental points he is remarkably accurate. But here, in the matter of the period before the Reformation, even his literal accuracy, his chief merit, breaks down. The reason is that here his passion runs away with him, and he will not be patient to discover even from common books of reference, what might clash with Protestant legend. For instance, having got into his head that chastity was in some way horrible to an imaginary thing called the Nordic race, he tells us of “the peculiar bias of the early Anglo-Saxons and Northmen against the monks and nuns.”
This is wild. Of what the pirates in the fifth century did against monasteries we know nothing, absolutely, and for this good reason: that monasteries had not yet been founded in Eastern Britain. We do know that the specially Teutonic belt—the North-Eastern coast—was devotedly and splendidly monastic beyond any other part of Anglo-Saxon England.
What the Scandinavian pirates did, we know too well. They attacked the monasteries because they were full of wealth, because they were comparatively defenceless, and because they were centres of civilization. But immediately after conversion they revere and endow the monastic institution even more than does the South. And if there is one thing more clear in history than another it is that the moment men accept our civilization they show a respect for its signal monastic institution.
It is incredible to me that a man professing to write even a cursory popular history such as this should not know that the monastic institutions especially flourished in the ancestry of those to whom Mr. Wells applies the term Nordic (which simply means modern Protestant). It does not flourish among them now; but to imagine that the past was like the present is the very test of historical incompetence.