Or again, take what he says about Wycliffe and about Huss. These two worthies fill the greater part of a whole page (466), and they might be taken straight out of a Kensitite tract. He repeats the ineptitude that Wycliffe “translated the Bible into English in order to set up a counter authority to that of the Pope.” He appealed to the Bible, of course, and he and his followers certainly translated the Bible (though their work has probably disappeared), but can he be so ignorant as to think that Vernacular Scriptures were unknown to the fourteenth century? I suppose he is thus ignorant. If that is so he ought not to attempt history at all.
Wycliffe wanted a Bible as a textbook out of which to cite particular quotations against developments later than the Canon. But he was not speaking to a society ignorant of the Canon. He wanted to make an idol of the existing Bible—but he did not fashion that idol. Probably he put in particular phrases and interpretations of his own, as all heresiarchs have; but what they were we shall never know, for they have disappeared.
And there is more. Mr. Wells imagines that Wycliffe started the heretical doubts on the Blessed Sacrament, making them the principal part of his teaching. What lamentable history! It is as though I were to say that Mr. Snowden started Socialism in Europe and made it the great message of his glorious career.
Wycliffe’s main doctrine—the only thing that really counted in the mass of contradictory things which he put together—was a doctrine which he got from people of a century before, the doctrine that the right to holding property depends on our being in a State of Grace. What he thought about the Blessed Sacrament I defy Mr. Wells or anybody else to elucidate. He never touched upon the matter until quite late in his career, and it was more as a piece of intellectual gymnastic than as anything else. But because, generations later, the main attack was upon the Blessed Sacrament, Mr. Wells imagines that Wycliffe was in the same case.
He shows the same fundamental ignorance about the Hussite movement. He thinks of it lovingly as Kensitite. The Hussite movement was a Slav anti-German movement, for which heresy was but the pretext. It was not a heresy which happened by some strange accident to be coincident with the Czech dislike of Germans. I even find here the hoary howler about the “safe conduct” of Huss. Huss never had a safe conduct guaranteeing him against trial and condemnation. I should have thought that by this time everyone knew that. Huss had a safe conduct to attend the Council, i.e. to pass through the territories leading to Constance; as a rebel he would naturally have been arrested or killed save for such safe conduct, but he was never given a guarantee against trial. He arrived for the purpose of trial.
But though I quote these startling examples of ignorance in detail, I think they are quite unimportant, compared with the inability of the writer, whether from lack of opportunity, or from anti-Catholic enthusiasm, to understand what he is dealing with.
The distinction between the good and the bad historian is the power—or lack of power—to survey things detachedly from above. A bad historian can only write in terms of his present experience; the good historian, or even the tolerable historian, writes from his fullness in the past.
Mr. Wells intended, quite honestly, to write history. He has failed, because, naturally opposed to the Catholic Church by training and social circumstances, he did not know the nature of what he was opposing.
So much for the Preliminaries: now for the Reformation itself. The Reformation is the most important incident in the history of our race since the Incarnation; and that for this reason: That Christendom disunited is wounded; that the unity of Christendom was broken by the Reformation after a different and more lasting fashion than in all the breaches which had hitherto occurred.
The separation of the East from the West was mainly a political separation and is mainly a political separation to-day. Such doctrinal differences as were pleaded, are an excuse, not a cause. The great heresies one after the other (of which the Arian was much the most important) did the harm they did and rocked the ship of Peter, but they never created what may be called a “separate realm” in Christendom; a whole with its own heretical traditions, its own roots in its own soil, and producing evil fruit.