CHAPTER XVI
SUMMARY
I propose at this conclusion of a long examination upon Mr. Wells’s Outline of History, first, to present a summary of the author’s work as a typical popular teacher of our time in the English-speaking countries, and then to end on a much more important note; the attitude of the popular mind in that same world with regard to the only questions which are of ultimate moment in human life: the decay of Christian religion in that world, and the pace at which Christian truth is being lost in it; the religious revolution through which the English-speaking Protestant culture is passing, and the pace of that revolution.
The two subjects are closely connected, for it is clear that a man could not be a popular writer on these things unless he agreed more or less with his audience. Yet they are distinct; because the Follower of the Herd, the popular expositor of which Mr. Wells is an example, is not quite the same thing as the average of the Herd. It is in tune with the average of the Herd; but it presents a separate object of study from the Herd. You find in the Author the way in which reading and evidence react upon a certain kind of mind: you find in his innumerable readers what kind of faith or philosophy must be inhabiting them that they should devour wholesale the stuff thus delivered to them as food.
First, then, as to the Author. The most prominent point I discover in Mr. Wells as an historian is the acceptation of authority. It is a false authority, and it is an acceptation bearing everywhere that mark which is to the Catholic mind almost incomprehensible: blind acceptation of textbooks. He does not reason with himself, and say: “What are my first principles? Why and how have I come to believe in them”? On the contrary, he takes them for granted, as though they were something so native to the human race that no class of reader could question them.
For instance, all through his work he takes it for granted that the supernatural does not exist; that the conception of it as real is an illusion—particularly in the case of miracles.
He holds then, unconsciously, a certain philosophy and certain first principles: to wit, what is called materialist Monism; that effect follows fatally from material cause. That, therefore, we are in the hands of fate and have no free will. That the words “right” and “wrong” in human decisions are meaningless.
Yet he has no idea of what his own first principles are; for he contradicts them at every turn. He is full of indignation—against the Catholic Church, for instance—and indignation involves an idea of right and wrong. He has a strong moral sense—as, for instance, of man’s duty to his fellow-men. Again, his attitude towards the miraculous in the story of Our Lord, and particularly towards the Resurrection, is not only that of a man who disbelieves—which is natural enough—but that of a man who thinks that everybody else will disbelieve the moment the unusual character of such events is pointed out to them. Mr. Wells thinks that people who believe are simply people who have not yet had the advantage of being told that the things in which they believe are not obvious nor of daily occurrence. He starts from a first principle that only the obvious or the common can be true. Yet if he set down that first principle in black and white its absurdity would appear, even to him.
This inability to tell you what his first principles were or why he held them, this taking for granted as admitted what all the best minds of humanity have discovered to be worthy of profound questioning and anxious debate, I call blind faith—faith which accepts without question and without even the knowledge that question is possible. I have heard it discussed whether such faith even in true authority is an advantage or a disadvantage. You get it in little children, and in some morally admirable but intellectually over-simple minds. But to have that faith in various false (and conflicting) authorities which have no common basis of intelligible theory is a very bad mark indeed against a man’s intelligence.
The next major quality I discover in Mr. Wells’s historical writing is one closely allied to the first. It is ignorance of the other side: not knowing what is to be said for the case which the author not so much rejects as remains unaware of.
For instance, Man imagines Gods; therefore, it would seem, the Gods he worships are illusions: therefore any God he worships, including the supreme God of Catholic theology, is a man-made illusion.