But is it not manifest that a man making such an enormous error upon the modern world must be incapable of giving an outline of the past?
That is what makes him misunderstand, for instance, the struggle in the Netherlands. He talks of the populace as bitterly Protestant and the nobles as only reluctantly following them. The truth is exactly the opposite. The majority, the large majority of the Low Country populace was strongly attached to the Faith and still is. It was the nobles here, as everywhere, and the great merchants of the towns who broke away—for loot.
That is what makes him wholly misunderstand the action of Alva. He has read nothing but the old diatribes of Motley. The marvel was not that Alva failed. The marvel was that he was able to keep his end up at all with such small forces, with all the wealthy against him, and with his supplies seized at the critical moment by Cecil.
That is what makes him misunderstand (to give a very small example) the nature of Charles V’s great renunciation. Because that great Christian remained in his retirement attached to his old habits of food and drink, therefore he must be ridiculed.—Why? Because Mr. Wells has read nothing but Prescott, if that, and Prescott ridicules Charles.
After doing one of the finest and most significant things that ever a man did when he handed over power and betook himself to contemplation, the great Charles must be sneered at because he preserved his common (and excellent) habits of life instead of turning full monk.
But it is always so. The same men who ridicule the ascetic ideal demand it of those whom they confusedly imagine—because they are Catholic—to have devoted themselves to it. Charles V was no monk. He had not vowed himself to the renunciation of common life.
What he did do was to leave a fine example for ever to men, as did the Pagan Diocletian, of how little the value of power is in the general sight of Heaven. Power—too long held—is evil or worthless at best to the soul. At the worst it is damnation. Charles V knew that. Mr. Wells does not.
It is so throughout all the description of the Reformation by Mr. Wells. The vast continuing quarrel of modern history is put forward as having ended all over the world, when it seemed to have ended in England. Mr. Wells is so ignorant of the modern world—outside his narrow reach—that he has no notion of these two powerful opponents, Faith and Anti-Faith, facing one another as they do to-day throughout Europe. He thinks and writes of the Reformation as a mere breakdown in a thing once called the Catholic Church, a thing of the Middle Ages, now disappeared.
All attempt at outline disappears in his No popery. The whole story falls into a mush, with long quotations on quite unimportant points, taken out of Protestant authorities, who wrote with a special propagandist motive in quite narrow fields such as the abuse of Spain or mere cracking up of the Dutch Commercial Oligarchy. There is not a word upon the tremendous business of the central arena upon which the whole undecided issue was fought: I mean the French field in which the Huguenots nearly changed all our civilization, then in turn were nearly destroyed by popular anger, but in which, at the end, the two parties were left undefeated, and facing each other as they still face each other to-day.
There is not a single quotation in Mr. Wells from any one of the Authorities writing under the Catholic Culture, not even from any one of the anti-Clericals among them. It is all Giant Pope.