Mr. Wells must, I think, have heard the famous dictum of the late Master of Balliol upon his Outline—a judgment which has already been quoted by more than one critic, and which I am afraid he will hear repeated pretty often before he has done with it. That very learned historian remarked: “Wells’s Outline was excellent until it came to Man”; and upon the whole it is about the truest epigram that could have been written. Save perhaps this. Mr. Wells’s Outline is excellent until he begins to deal with living things—somewhere about page ten.
VI
THE GREAT ROSY DAWN
The last factor in Mr. Wells’s pamphlet is one that we must always expect from your Bible Christian who has lost his God. He becomes a materialist troubled with Pantheism, and very eager to get away from the Puritan disease of his youth—yet a vision remains. He comes forward as the “Seventh Monarchy man,” which is, indeed, the natural term of your Bible Christian—even after he has lost his God.
“I see knowledge,” says Mr. Wells at the end of his diatribe, “increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limit set to it at all. Existence impresses me as perpetual dawn. Our lives as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.”
We have had this before over and over again, not only from the enthusiasts of the seventeenth century, but from the enthusiasts of the early heresies. There was a glorious time coming. Reality—that is the Faith—is a delusion. Now that you know it to be a delusion you are naturally down in the mouth. But cheer up, I have a consolation for you. All will yet be well; nay, much better. All is going forward. My donkey will soon grow wings.
I need not waste my reader’s time on that sort of thing. It is sheer stupid enthusiasm, indulged in to fill the void left by the loss of reason: by a man losing himself in a fog of cheap print and becoming fantastically unaware of things as they are.
When, in that connection Mr. Wells tells me that we of the Faith are backward people, who “because it is necessary for their comfort believe in Heaven and Hell” (a comfortable place Hell!) I answer that he appreciates the Faith as a man born blind might appreciate colour. When he tells me that this Catholic sort (to which I belong) are besotted to stand by accepted morals, beget children honestly, love one wife and live decently, I answer him that he is becoming disgusting. When he says that we believe in immortality “because we should be sorry to grow old and die,” I answer that he is talking nonsense on such a scale that it is difficult to deal with it.
When he goes on to say that we think we live on a “flat World” it becomes worse still, and one can’t deal with it; it is no longer nonsense, it is raving.
When he tells us that the Catholic has about him “a curious defensive note,” I am afraid he must be thinking of the Church Congress. There was certainly no “curious defensive note” in my demolition of his own ignorance, vanity and lack of balance.
When he tells us that I, as a Christian, “must be puzzled not a little by that vast parade of evolution through the immeasurable ages,” he clearly has not the least grasp of the very simple principle that eternity is outside time, and that relative values are not to be obtained by mere measurement in days or inches. When he says that “my” phantasy of a Creator....