I have not the space to quote at length sentence after sentence in which the inability of the writer to deal with this prime matter appears. But take such a sentence as “Cease to be ruled by Dogmas and Authorities!” Mark the underlying conception that Authority merely means force and that Dogma is necessarily a falsehood; mark the characteristic inability to grasp what should be, to the thinking mind, an obvious truth: that all teaching is dogmatic, all acceptation of all truth necessarily under some authority, of reason, of judgment, of sense, or of accepted experience in others.
Perhaps Mr. Wells’s most characteristic error on the Reformation (for it is a common one) is the conception that there was in the early sixteenth century (and earlier) a great popular movement—a sort of tide—against Catholic doctrine. There was nothing of the sort. I know this statement sounds too strong and exaggerated in the ears of many of my readers, because the myth of such a popular tide of protest against the Faith is taught on all sides.
But my statement is true. There was no popular uprising against the Faith. There was popular indignation against indifference and corruption in the administration of the Faith.
There was a small enthusiastic and sincere minority arising in the late Middle Ages against abuses. There was no general movement against doctrine. There was nothing remotely resembling a great popular feeling such as the great popular feeling against capitalism to-day. It is a myth. Here and there a few fanatics, here and there a few extravagances (all of them due to reaction against abuses in the use of Sacerdotal power) were apparent. Of widespread popular feeling against doctrine there was none. On the contrary, where doctrine was attacked at last by a few highbrows, the populace was its defender.
To men of Mr. Wells’s intellectual furnishing it seems mere common sense that sooner or later people should wake up and say, “After all, can this doctrine of the Real Presence be true?” or, “After all, can this mystery of the Incarnation (or of the Trinity or what not) be anything but a fairy tale made up by men”? This was not the attitude of the mass of our fathers.
Scepticism upon the supernatural was current in the Catholic Culture from the beginning, and is current to-day. It was not peculiar to the sixteenth century—the Middle Ages were full of it. What was special to the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century was what may properly be called a political reaction against the sterilization, the fossilization through the process of time, not only of the Ecclesiastical, but of the lay social machine.
Mr. Wells is perfectly right when he repeats the commonplace that the annoyance of the people with the Papacy was not that it governed religion, but that it did not govern religion enough: that it was not religious enough. But he is perfectly wrong—I mean historically wrong, writing bad history—when he prints (upon p. 497—writing of the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth century) that “only the Spaniards, fresh from a long and finally successful religious war against Islam, had any great enthusiasm left for the Church.” He does not know the time.
The bulk of men all over Europe had any amount of enthusiasm for the Church, and any amount of vigour to react against those new pedantic subtleties which powerful men caught at as an excuse for plunder, but which the instinct of the masses taught them to be poisons, destroying the freedom and happiness of the common man.
Has Mr. Wells never heard of all the great, though unsuccessful, popular rebellions in England under the late Tudors, or of the much more violent and successful rebellions of the populace against the threat of Huguenot domination in France? He must know them, because they are in every cinema show. But he certainly has no idea of what they were. These popular rebellions were furious protests under arms against the murder of that Catholic culture which was not only necessary to the scant happiness of the poor on this sad earth, but felt also by them to be Divine.
I find another piece of ignorance on page 502: “Luther had taken,” says Mr. Wells, “to reading the Bible.”