Mr. Belloc still objects to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

by Hilaire Belloc

I can understand many a blunder about the Catholic position on the part of people living in a world where they do not meet Catholics and who know next to nothing of the past of Europe or of the way in which our civilisation is a product of the Catholic Faith. I often come across even well-educated men who have surprisingly little knowledge of the Church; but what I cannot understand is that a man thus ignorant should also be ignorant of the ordinary rules of thought.

A man’s Faith may possibly be shaken by some philosophical argument—though my own experience is that when it is shaken, still more when it is lost, the cause at work is not intellectual but always moral—the Faith is lost through wrong doing. But that the Faith could conceivably be lost through not being able to define at what exact moment true man appeared, is to me quite inconceivable. I confess I cannot understand the mental processes of a writer who puts a test of that kind.

We are arguing as to whether Wordsworth is a good poet or no. One man says he is, quoting from his best; another man says he isn’t, quoting from his worst. There barges in a third party who says cheerfully, “The whole discussion is futile. There was no such person as Wordsworth as a writer at all. And to prove that, here is a record of what he was like and what he did at the age of six, and another when he was inarticulate upon his death-bed. Where do you draw the line?”

We are discussing whether an individual is responsible for a particular action; for instance, writing a confused book. One man says, “It was not his fault; it was due to bad training.” The other says, “It was his fault, for any rational being ought to write more clearly than that.” A third party barges in, and says, “The whole discussion is futile, for there was no such writer. I can prove it by a photograph of him as a baby, in which it is quite clear that he couldn’t write books at all.”

But Mr. Wells’s manifold lack of acquaintance with his most serious opponent is seen in plenty of other lights.

For instance, there is his idea that scale destroys the Faith. “Only let me convince you,” he pathetically urges, “that the material universe existed long before man, and that the scheme of redemption only applies to the comparatively brief human period in geology. Only let me convince you, and you will see how foolish all this Christian talk is.” But we have all of us known all about that, not only since first the Church began, but since first man began to trouble himself about divine things at all. Is not the sky at night sufficient evidence of scale? Is not the brevity of human life? Is not the magnitude of the world upon which we live—of even a part of which no man could have comprehensive knowledge in a thousand years?

There is I think in all of this an honest desire upon Mr. Wells’s part—I may say a burning missionary zeal—to convert us to Atheism, something on the same level as that of those from whom he derives. They were convinced, you will remember, not so long ago, that to turn the inhabitants of Wugga-Mugga into honest folk like themselves attending chapel, meeting at tea-fights, and even keeping one or two servants, all that was wanted was a translation of the Old Testament in Wugga-Mugganese—which translation they then did order in prodigious quantities and export to Wugga-Mugga by the ton, to the huge profit of a great number of salaried officials in the W.M. Bible Society, and to honest rum-drinking sea captains as well; but to no appreciable effect upon Wugga-Muggaland, its monarch, aristocracy and common folk.

So I fear it will be with this effort at conversion of the Catholic to Atheism by an exceedingly insufficient rehash of text-books thirty years old. Mr. Wells sometimes pleads that all this doesn’t matter, because the Catholic Church no longer counts. Well, that plea itself is a very good example of ignorance. If he had a general acquaintance with Europe he would know, not only that the Catholic Church counts, but that it is beginning to count more and more. That is no proof of its right to the claim it advances of a divine authority; but it is proof that there is a great social phenomenon present to the eye of every educated and travelled man to-day—the resurrection of the Catholic Nations, the new attitude of the academic youth on the Continent, and particularly in Paris; the new wave in literature; the breakdown of the nineteenth-century materialism in philosophy—which is not present in the experience of Mr. Wells.

He tells us rather pathetically that he must know all about the Catholic Church, because he now winters on the Riviera. I answer that the experience is insufficient. If every rich Englishman who wintered on the Riviera acquired thereby a general grasp on the modern spirit of Europe, we should have among them a public to be envied; but from what I have seen of those who thus escape the English winter, the Monte Carlo Express and the Cosmopolitan hotels do not make for common culture, let alone for an understanding of divine things.

I have no space to enlarge on the point. Mr. Wells knows as much about the Catholic Church as he does of the classical spirit, of great verse, of the architecture inherited from the ancients, or indeed of any other noble tradition. Yet it should be a commonplace with anyone who attempts to write upon European history that some general knowledge of what the Faith may be is a first essential in his affair.