Invective such as Mr. Wells substitutes for argument is wholly irrelevant. When you are discussing the competence of a man to write history, it is utterly meaningless to throw about the jeers of the gutter on his dress, accent or any other private detail concerning him. If you discover a man pretending to write about Roman antiquity and yet wholly blind to the effect of Latin literature, you rightly point out his ignorance. But it is not to the purpose to accuse him of having a round face or a thin voice. Indeed, were invective my object (which it most certainly is not), I should rather have answered in verse as being the more incisive and enduring form.
If it be a test of literary victory over an opponent to make him foam at the mouth, then I have won hands down; but I do not regard Mr. Wells as my opponent, nor am I seeking any victory. I am simply taking a book which proposes to destroy the Faith of Christian men by the recital of pretended history, and showing that the history is bad. While praising many qualities in the book, I point out with chapter and verse that the history is uninformed. That is my point and my only point.
Now that I have made it, I hope, quite clear that I am neither interested in Mr. Wells’s personalities nor intend to go one better upon them, but to deal strictly with things capable of argument and intelligent examination, let us cut the cackle and come to the horses.
* * * * *
Mr. Wells’s pamphlet against me, to which I am here replying, is a web of six elements. These are not put in any regular order, and the author himself would probably not be capable of analysing them; but a competent critic has no difficulty in separating them one from the other.
They are:—
First: A number of shrill grievances on general grounds. For instance, that though I have praised him highly I have not praised him highly enough; that where I had to blame him I have used adjectives upon his work such as “confused,” “ignorant,” which were not warranted; that in general he is an ill-used fellow, and is moved to complain most bitterly.
Secondly: He violently (and this is the main gist of all his pamphlet) assaults me for pointing out that his statement of Darwinian Natural Selection as the chief agent of evolution is antiquated stuff, exploded, and proves him quite unacquainted with modern work. Here he jeers at me as putting on a pose of special learning, and challenges me to quote any modern authorities substantiating my criticism. He calls my argument fantastic, a thing made up out of my own head, without any authority from competent biologists. He denies the existence of any such group of modern men of science opposed to Darwinian Natural Selection. It is an amazing thing that his ignorance should reach such a level as that, but it does. And it is there I am going to hammer him.
Thirdly: There runs all through the little pamphlet, and still more through the book itself, a startling ignorance upon the Catholic Church, and in particular the idea that the Church is opposed to scientific work, even such elementary science as Mr. Wells attempts to expound.
Fourthly: He complains that I have in certain specific points misread his meaning, misstated his conclusions or affirmations, and made errors myself in attempting to correct his. He brings, it is true, no more than three specific allegations; three out of a total of I know not how many score, in a body of work which catches him up and exposes him over and over again. Nevertheless, such as they are, being specific allegations, however few, they must in justice be met; and I will here meet them.