He is always putting it (as do the most of our textbooks) into sham categories confused in a sham similarity. The Catholic Church is to Mr. Wells (as to all his kind) one religion out of many religions. It talks (he thinks) of but one Incarnation out of many incarnations; it has (he thinks) but one sacrificial system out of many sacrificial systems—and so on.
But the whole point of the Catholic Church is that, true or false, it stands quite apart from anything else in the history of our Race. It assumes as no other system ever did a universal Divine and absolute authority: and that authority not vague but detailed, specialized, insistent, manifold, covering all human life.
The Catholic Church says “I am of God, none else is of God. God (made man for our sake) intended and created me. By His voice in me are you at unison with all God’s works, and so with your own end and nature. I am; and I bear witness for ever.”
The claim may be true or fantastic: but not to know what it is nor what a hold it had (and has) on men, nor how it made Europe, is the prime cause of Mr. Wells’s inability to grasp the history of his own race.
The history of other races he can deal with better. All that he has to say on the Mogul Empire of India, for instance, is admirable, save, of course, when he tries to think; as, for instance, when he pronounces that education is information upon “realities”—without having, apparently, heard that, upon what philosophy you hold, depends what you call reality—and upon your scheme of values what is worth teaching.
He is excellent in his little sketch of the gypsies on page 457. He is picturesque on Tamerlane. But when he comes to the contact between Asia and Europe Giant Pope appears again. He thinks the conversion of Asia to have been a very simple matter, merely missed because Giant Pope was trying to save that imperilled Europe of his instead of talking at large on “Jesus of Nazareth.”
The second point in which Mr. Wells fails to understand his task is in his idea that the Reformation was an inevitable event. It is the curse of nearly all our modern popular writers (who are most of them inferior to, and outside the Catholic culture) that they read history in terms of that physical science which is the model for all their thought. They cannot understand the effect of Free Will: they cannot understand that spiritual good and evil come to men, not of fate, but from their own choice.
Europe was not shaking and breaking up before the Reformation. Europe was imperilled before the Reformation, as it had often been imperilled before, but it might easily have been saved. Only a very few political incidents turned the scale against the recovering of unity, and produced the trouble from which we are increasingly suffering to-day. Each of these events depended upon certain perverted human wills. The folly of looting the Church lands in England came from the immediate impulse of greed in a few, and that was what, sorely against their bewildered hearts, stole the Faith from the English. The principal incident in the tragedy, without a doubt, was (let me repeat) the policy of Richelieu, of which, so far as I can make out, Mr. Wells has not heard. Had Richelieu backed up the Empire, the whole of Europe would be Catholic to-day.
It is worth remarking that Mr. Wells on account of this defect in his historical vision (which is a defect of Provincialism) does not appreciate the fact that the Catholic Church still carries on.
I have already pointed that out to him. You can say that the unity of Christendom was wrecked, but you cannot say that Christendom was wrecked. The Divine Authority is not now universal over Europe, but it is universal over its own very wide, exalted, and increasingly active department of the European mind. We are still numerically the majority of Western Europe and, in intellectual weight, the centre of gravity lies within our sphere. The intellectual centre of gravity of Europe to-day does not lie within the culture of Britain and North Germany aided by the moribund French anti-clericals and Scandinavia. It lies most certainly in those who have always accepted, or are now again beginning to reaccept the full doctrine which made the culture by which we live.