Of course, the setting of the Bible up as an authority against tradition was a necessary part of the sectarian movement. Stated thus, you have an historical truth. But the idea that a cultivated man of the early sixteenth century did not know the Bible, or (for that matter) the idea that the rudest peasant of the sixteenth century did not know what was in his Bible, is as unhistorical as would be a Russian’s idea that knowledge of racing in England to-day was confined to rich owners of horses.
Mr. Wells is perfectly right when he says that the Princes made a political reformation; but he is perfectly wrong when he imagines a great popular repudiation of religion to have been going on at the same time.
There were mobs, as there always are in times of disturbance. But they came after political rebellion against the Church: not before it. They followed the rich. They did not urge the rich. There was popular rising against the pressure of the wealthy and the inequalities of life—as there always is when the organization of society is shaken. But there was no popular rising against doctrine; only a few “intellectual” cliques. There was no protest of the “common man” of Europe against the only food whereby his soul may live. On the contrary, it was the Common Man who saved the Catholic Church in spite of the nobles and the princes and their dependent apostate priests, the Luthers and the Knoxes, and the rest—who would never have gone down to fame but for the use their atheist and glutton masters made of them.
I may put the whole attitude of our Author towards the Reformation in the simple but true phrase that he does not describe what took place; he does no more than repeat the stories of his childhood.
To read him one would imagine that the Catholic Church broke up and disappeared, that it broke up and disappeared under a popular uprising, and that the popular uprising was due to the quarrel of plain sturdy fellows, like himself, with theological dogma. Indeed, he uses the word “theological” and the word “dogma” as though they connoted something irrational. What would Mr. Wells write down if you asked for a strict definition of the word “theological” and of the word “dogma” He uses them as mere terms of abuse: yet they have a meaning for educated men.
What is at the back of his mind when he says that the Emperor, during the Reformation, “seems to have taken the religious theories as genuine theological differences”? What can he mean if he has any conception, however vague, of the meaning of the word “theological”?
If one set of leaders take up arms under the principle that individuals, and not a corporate authority, are the recipients of revelation, that is what educated men call a theological position. When the streets of Paris were placarded with posters saying, “Your Sacrament is but bread, and we will throw it to the dogs,” that insult to devotion for the Real Presence (it was one of the many things which exasperated Paris into the St. Bartholomew) is said in educated language to have a theological connotation.
Throughout all the rest of this Book VII and on into Book VIII the same false historical ideas run, and particularly the idea that the Catholic Church was, in the sixteenth century, destroyed.
It is not easy to state in clear terms what is going on in an unclear mind, though it is a most useful thing to attempt the criticism of such a mind; but I fancy if one could unravel the underlying idea of Mr. Wells’s confused thought in this matter one would find something like this:
“The Catholic Church is dead. No one who counts nowadays accepts its authority. Those who pretend to do so are only playing a game. The old sincere attachment to it was based upon ignorance and the lack of newspapers, Board Schools, Typewriters, Railways, Broadcasting, and Best-sellers. To-day you only have the old sincere Faith in a few very backward, uneducated peasant districts.”