When a man is talking of a social class whereof he knows nothing, you will notice that he does two things. First of all, he goes very much by the current statements about it which he has seen in print or on the stage: what he has met in the books and plays he happens to come across. Baronets are wicked, Dukes haughty, great Ladies disdainful and dazzlingly fair. Next, his imagination plays on that unknown world, creates out of the void, and then takes for granted a number of habits in it which are, as a fact, nonexistent and wholly of his own imagining: as, for instance, Cabinet Ministers wielding awful power in whispered conclaves.

But when he comes to talking of his own world, of his own class, of the things he really knows, his manner changes altogether. He becomes, for one thing, much more interesting, and, for another, much more definite. In that region, one can judge his style and credentials by real standards.

Something like this change from romance and misjudgment to appreciation and reason takes place in Mr. Wells’s book when he turns from what is called to-day “Pre-history” (of which we know hardly anything) to recorded History (of which we know a great deal, and which is in a totally different category).

This change takes place in Mr. Wells’s Outline of History with the opening of Book III.

In the first two books, where he was dealing with the world before Man, and Man before History, he went by such textbooks as he had come across (all of them anti-Catholic, few or none of them continental, and most of them old-fashioned stuff thirty or forty years old, the theories of which are to-day, for the most part, exploded). He filled up the gaps with guesswork, rather confused, even contradictory, and often in direct conflict with the evidence—had he known or noticed what the evidence was. He romanced, and he romanced out of the map. The world he saw in his vivid imagination was an unreal world, much as the English aristocratic world of a popular novel is an unreal world comically unlike the thing itself.

But when it comes to real and tangible stuff, record and monument, and still better, record in writing—in other words, when it comes to real History—Mr. Wells’s excellent qualities as a writer appear in a much better light and are put to a much better purpose. His narrative, which even in its misshapen prehistoric part was lucid, vivid and well put, capable of holding the reader’s attention, retains all these characters, and now becomes in great sections really informing without distortion. There is also a very successful packing of a great deal of information into a short space without redundancy of detail and without too much repetition. The order is well observed, and the survey is as wide as the Author intended it to be—that is, world-wide.

Unfortunately, in this second part of Mr. Wells’s account, he cannot help suffering from the disabilities of the modern industrial town world, under which he naturally labours. He has never experienced the great part played by popular memory and impressions handed down from one generation to another, as the counterpart and corrector of documentary Record. He is, therefore, too prone to treat what is handed down by masses of men living familiarly in neighbourhood (they still do so in our villages) as being, on its large lines and in its general sense, misleading; whereas it is, on its large lines and in its general sense, true. He has no appreciable knowledge of the Catholic Church, and, therefore, does not know how History falls into line under that philosophy which alone properly explains it. He also suffers, as we shall see, from that unfortunate tendency to violent personal hatred for the nobler things, especially for the great and united succession of civilization in Europe: Tradition.

But the merits, at first, outweigh the faults. Until he runs up against the beginnings of Rome—with all the irritation which the mere name of Rome provokes in him—he keeps his head and writes excellently. The thing is well balanced and of real value. The exceptions which must be made, even to the part before Greece and Rome, to this praise do not colour his story of early record as a whole. He gives a rather imaginary account of the beginnings of agriculture, but much of it is more probable than improbable; and he modifies it well enough by conditional adverbs proper to our necessarily speculative attitude towards these early and uncertain things.

Now and then, in a sentence or two, he is unwise enough to abandon this conditional attitude and bolts away again into fiction: for instance, he tells us that when man settled down to agriculture, the Red Sea was still connected with the Mediterranean (p. 91). We do not know that; it is mere guesswork, and ought not to be put up as historical fact. On the other hand, an immediately following remark, that “the Persian Gulf then extended much further northwards than it does now,” is real history; for there is sufficient proof of that.

Again (on p. 92), he puts down as historical fact the invariable conquest of settled populations by barbaric and nomadic populations outside. He treats it as a necessarily recurrent phenomenon and as the only process. Of course, we all know from History that in plain recorded fact the converse is just as common, and far more lasting in its effects. Subjugation of the barbarian by the civilized man is very much more the rule of recorded History than its opposite. And as for agricultural work being regarded as the lot of an inferior, that is a false generalization from our own suburban conditions. On the contrary, the tradition of the Mediterranean peoples, as of the Chinese, is just the other way. Agricultural work was the basis of their society and was clothed with moral dignity.

The account of early Mesopotamian civilization (including in that term the earliest culture before the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris systems) is excellent, and the subsequent short section on the beginnings of Egypt is equally good—with a paragraph on the causes of the difference of record (on p. 98) between the Nile and the Euphrates Valleys particularly well put.

In order to keep the survey parallel and marching on one front, there follow a few lines on the early civilization of India and on the early history of China; in which, by the way, Mr. Wells rightly rejects the somewhat shadowy hypothesis put forward of late years, which gives a Mesopotamian origin to the Chinese culture.

If only Mr. Wells had also rejected from these first stones of his building in real History such pure guesswork as the supposed “heliolithic” culture—an imaginary matrix for all future civilization—this early part might be called completely well done. It is a pity he yielded to that temptation, for it is one of the things that will “date” the book most seriously in a few years. Theories of this kind come and go, like the weather. The passage (pp. 107, 108) in which he quotes from another authority upon the development of the rowing ship in the Mediterranean, is a good example of sane reasoning and informing conjecture. While the conclusion—a rapid review of the Cretan discoveries and of the Phœnician civilization—is on the same high level.

Unfortunately, the reader is, of course, left under the impression that civilization of any complexity came very late, a judgment which the author has to make in order to fit it in with his Messianic ideas—his ardent inherited faith in a Millennium for which we are only beginning to prepare.

In point of fact, we do not know how far back the origins of our complex civilization may stretch, and these very Cretan discoveries should give us pause before we make any confident statement upon the point.

It is not forty years ago that all popular history was roundly affirming the original semi-barbarism of the Greek world at a time long after the culture of the Labyrinthine Palace fell—if fall it did—or decayed. The really interesting thing about the whole affair is that we cannot find a transition from barbaric to civilized conditions. We find civilization in all essentials fully present at the very origin of research. We have not yet, and probably we never shall, have final information upon the phase by which it passed from embryonic to mature. On the analogy of nearly all other development we may believe that change to have been a rapid leap. But where it took place or when, whether Egypt or Western Asia arose of themselves or whether there lay behind them some tradition of culture, far older, which they inherited, or which one of them inherited, and which later either by submergence or in any other way disappeared, we simply do not know.

The next section, Chapter XV, is, so far, the best of all. It deals with the development of the various forms of writing, and will be read with the greatest profit. It has all the qualities of Mr. Wells’s close précis writing at its best. Nor should the Author be blamed for having left out the theory (Sergi’s, if I remember right) that the alphabetic system had an origin of its own, connected neither with the Egyptian script nor with the Phœnician, but rather one from which the Phœnician itself derived. He has put the necessary facts simply and clearly and in the right order. He notes the reaction of writing on thought, and even (as in the case of China) upon social systems and method of government. And he has done well not to confuse so short a catalogue with too much consideration of learned theories.

But even this first-rate chapter is somewhat marred by a conclusion based upon the false hypothesis of a perpetual change in human nature. Writing is made to play a part far too great in the creation of something like a new man. That is not, historically, what happens to Man through any of his own inventions. Man’s inventions do not change Man in essentials. Man remains Man throughout. And when Mr. Wells goes on to say that the very widespread use (and abuse) of printing to-day will create a further apocalyptic transformation of our poor minds, he is going right against the common experience of all cultivated men, and living in an unreal newspaper world of his own. The modern mind, in countries where this quite recent habit of promiscuous and universal reading has arisen, has not improved; it has visibly degenerated; it thinks less clearly, it has a less intelligent grip than had the more sparing readers of the past.

You have only to contrast the peasant or fisherman to-day against the average newspaper-skimming townsman artisan, with an equal or higher material revenue, to appreciate this truth. In the popular appreciation of life and philosophy it is self-evident. The peasant is immeasurably superior. When, therefore, Mr. Wells concludes this admirable little section with the confident remark that “our world to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge,” he must be told that all that is mere Messianic stuff, part of a false religion, and worthless. It is the mood in which the same false Puritan religion from which he comes produced the Seventh Monarchy men, Second Adventists, Jump to Glory Jane, and the rest of them: the facile and contemptible mood of “The Good Time Coming” as an imaginary escape from this Lachrymarum Vallis: the “Great Rosy Dawn.”

The detail of what will happen to Man in the future we do not know. One thing we do know quite certainly: he will be Man in the future just as he has been Man in the past. The type will not change. He will yield to the same temptations, be strengthened by discipline and renunciation, weakened by indulgence and excessive opportunity—especially weakened by his own material creations when they are abused. And we further know, from all the records of our race, that a contempt for the past and a planting of standards in an imaginary future is the destruction of culture. Of all popular moods which a failing civilization can catch, it is the most fatal.

At the end of this section comes in again (with Chapter XVI) that note which is the principal motive for these comments. For it is with this Chapter XVI of his third book that we come again upon the Author’s reaction against religion and particularly against the essential idea of a Priesthood. Mr. Wells’s sixteenth chapter is entitled, “Gods and Stars, Priests and Kings.”

He introduces it at the beginning of his account of recorded History, and it is the first example in this account of that personal and violent reaction of his against true religion which I am following throughout these articles.

His reaction is, of course, only part of the general spirit of our time outside the Catholic Church, and in his attitude towards all religion properly so-called—especially in his contempt and dislike of the high religious functions of ritual, hierarchy, sacrifice and the rest—Mr. Wells is but one individual in the millioned English-speaking Protestant public for whom he writes, and whose ideas he repeats to their satisfaction. But he feels this hatred with a particular animosity where other people nowadays feel it but vaguely: he is stirred by an antipathy to the Catholic Church which they also feel, but do not feel so pointedly or so continually. And he can express it in a very readable, popular fashion, which enables the average reader of his own sort to say “This is what I have always thought, more or less, but more forcibly and better put than I could have put it.”

He here declares himself fully for the first time on the special point of Priesthood. What he thinks about it in general his readers had already heard on an earlier page, where he made an imaginary picture of its origin (p. 72 of the Outline of History). He there tells them that “bold men, wise men, shrewd and cunning men, were arising” (in neolithic times) “to become magicians, priests and kings.”

There is, of course, no evidence at all as to how mankind first connected a Priesthood with the general idea of religion; and this specific attachment of it to the neolithic period (itself a very vague term, for who can tell that men using polished stones were everywhere earlier than men using metals?) is not History, but arbitrary assertion. However, it is a guide to what Mr. Wells, and the myriads who have had the same education as he, in England and America, feel with regard to the institution of Priesthood. It was wholly man-made, seeing that religion itself is man-made; and it proceeded from the same sort of very unpleasant origins as religion itself. Mr. Wells, on the same page, is careful to say that the Priests were not to be thought of as cheats; he wisely admits that they “usually believed in their own ceremonies,” but the innuendo is that any “ceremony” performed by any Priest in any religion is bunkum.

Now that, of course, is a mere assumption the opposite to which may equally well be true: that all ceremonies of all Priests had something in them, and that, in a true religion, the ceremony would be efficacious and the Priestly office justified.

So much for his first attack on page 72 of his Outline.

On page 120, he goes in some detail into the matter; and with a better basis for discussion, because he is talking of things historically certain, and not copying the story from nineteenth-century writers who made it up out of their own heads. There were full Priests in the old Pagan religions, or at any rate in the finest and most civilized of them; and for that matter in nearly all of them there were Priests in some form or another. The theory Mr. Wells repeats with regard to the early recorded Priesthoods may, like so many of his repetitions, be called “The theory of the eighteen-eighties”: the theory current about a generation ago. It is the contention that the Priest came first when man was inferior and was at last ousted, as man advanced, by the King—the innuendo being that the power of the Priest essentially belongs to an earlier time, and therefore to a more degraded period in human History; for to the man who believes in a childishly simple theory of “Progress” (as Mr. Wells believes in it, and as do the great majority of his readers), whatever is earlier must be worse than what comes later.

At this point I repeat what I have had to say so often in the course of these comments. It cannot be said too often in the ears of our opponents, because we know by experience that the modern half-educated mind, nourished on masses of print and without that capacity of clear thinking which our fathers had, feels a difficulty in grasping the distinction between two connected ideas. Once it hears the same word used in connection with two separate ideas it tends to confuse the two ideas together. So we Catholics who have the privilege of inheriting the higher culture must always patiently explain our position to our opponents, lest we should merely antagonize them instead of teaching them. The following, then, is the point I wish to emphasize:

When we are presented with any universal statement which is (1) hypothetical (i.e. not a matter of ascertained fact); (2) of an exaggerated simplicity and therefore very easily swallowed; (3) motived consciously by a contempt for true religion, that is for the Catholic Faith, we Catholics do not deny the portion of ascertained fact contained in the universal statement. What we deny is the universality of the statement. When we, who can reason, are told that London and Carthage were great seaports, and that therefore all the capitals of high civilizations are great seaports, we do not deny the character of London and Carthage; what we deny is that they are the models of all other capitals. What the trained and clear Catholic intelligence finds intellectually repugnant is a false simplicity imposed on highly complex organic phenomena, especially social phenomena. What we particularly complain of is the apparent inability of our opponents to recognize their own motives, and to see that they are putting things in a particular and artificial fashion in order to fit in with their theories instead of honestly inducing theory from fact.

Let me give an example drawn from a sphere where there is less violent emotion aroused, and which therefore can be calmly examined by anyone of our opponents. Supposing a man to maintain that the shorter races in the history of mankind had always conquered the taller races. He is putting forward a universal statement. He is putting forward, because it is universal and because it has so few terms, a statement absurdly simple. Finally, he is putting forward this absurdly simple universal statement with some motive. If we find that the man is himself a member of a short race, we at once divine what the motive is. It is the motive of satisfying self-esteem.

Now a statement like that put to the member of a race as short as you like, put to an intelligent dwarf, ought to rouse him to immediate contradiction: however flattering he might find it. So it ought to rouse a man of average stature to even stronger contradiction, and still more, I suppose, a tall man. But it is contradicted, not because the contradictor favours tall men as against short men, but because the statement is in itself false and ridiculous. Sometimes short races have conquered tall ones, as the Romans the Germans, or the Normans the Saxons, or the Japanese the Koreans. Sometimes it has been notoriously the other way about.

The putting forward, then, of a statement (1) as universal (when as a fact it is just the opposite), (2) as absurdly simple so that it can be easily swallowed (when as a fact the situation being human is exceedingly complex), (3) with a motive which is not acknowledged, is a thoroughly unscientific way of going to work; yet that is what we Catholics are perpetually finding in the attacks made directly and indirectly against Catholic truths by popular writers on what these writers believe to be “Science” or “History.”

So it is with Priesthood. You can cite cases of Priesthood revered in a very simple state of society and cases of a Priesthood dispossessed of power by an advancing lay organization. But so also can you find ample examples of the opposite: Priesthood powerful in a very high civilization and Priesthood overcoming lay power.

How a Priesthood arose we do not know: presumably after the same fashion as all other functions of religion. These functions being awful and sacred, there would, in the nature of things, be a special class of men attached to them. But, anyhow, the relations between the idea of a Priest and the idea of Civil Government are most emphatically not the relations between earlier and baser social functions on the one hand, and more developed and higher social functions on the other. You can cite cases where the power of a Priesthood (or, rather, of religion, for it is never the Priest who imposes his religion, but always the religion that needs the Priest) was mastered by the civil power; but you can also cite cases where the exact opposite took place; and you can cite intermediary cases innumerable.

Now, what Mr. Wells does in this sixteenth chapter of his is to put forward one leading case—the Sumerian—in which (quite probably) an earlier Priestly power yielded to (though it was never downed by) what was in that one time and place a later kingly power. He first of all gives us (on p. 125) a purely imaginary account of Kings arising through the quarrels between Priests or during the inability of Priests to withstand foreign conquerors. He then proceeds, on the same page and the following, to present the Sumerian Kingship as becoming in time superior to the Sumerian Priesthood. The thing is, of course, neither recorded nor ascertained History, but it is a fair guess. It may very well be History; and if it is so, then it is one particular example of the process going one way. But that is no sort of argument for the process never going the other way. When Mr. Wells comes to talking of the Egyptian development, he admits that the King was divine, and in that quality superior to and including both Priest and King. He again admits it in the case of China in another form. The Chinese civil ruler was also High Priest.

How, then, without any evidence to go on save one particular (and purely hypothetical) case, is this ridiculously simple theory made justifiable to the reader as a universal process? How can Mr. Wells use it to prove that Priesthood goes with base undeveloped minds and yields to “Progress”?

By the usual practice of allusion. In the case of the Sumerian King, the plain statement that the gods entrusted him with power is called by Mr. Wells his “doing it with the utmost politeness to the gods”—the innuendo being, of course, that the King’s power arose in spite of the Priesthood, that the King being later in development, and therefore more “enlightened,” despised the gods, and that all he did was to compromise somewhat with old decaying superstitions in order to strengthen his hold on government. But we have no evidence of that; it may be the right interpretation, or the exact opposite may be the right interpretation. The Sumerian King may have been sincerely devoted to the gods—as he says he was—and have risen through that devotion.

We are told (on p. 121), with regard to the early Priesthoods that “it is clear” the Priesthood early developed political powers. But it is not clear at all. It is merely stated. True to the wearying puerility of his black and white “Progress” idea (Wednesday superior to Tuesday, Tuesday superior to Monday), Mr. Wells tells us that the temples began with an idol, “usually a somewhat monstrous half-animal form.” Why “usually”? We know nothing about it at all. We know the half-animal legend in Babylonia, or, rather, the purely animal legend that a fish started culture. We know the animal and half-animal deities of the Egyptians. But no one can say that the Greek or Italian shrine began with a half-animal figure, or that there was anything “monstrous” about it. No one can say that the primitive worship to which the Bible bears witness was that of a monstrous or half-animal figure. The thing is only set down thus in order to confirm the statements already gratuitously made that religion, like all other human affairs, begins in something offensive.

It is the characteristic of these thin and erroneous theories, first, that they quote only what is in their own favour; secondly, that they bring in every possible indication, no matter how remote, which may be twisted into a support; and, thirdly, that those who promote them either are (as is usually the case) ignorant of, or (as is less common) refuse to mention, still more to study, any opposing evidence. They refuse to weigh the full record of the past or (what is equally available) to make a full examination of the present.

Take this case of the fading away of Priesthood and the mastering of it by a civil power as a necessary part of human “Progress.” It is not what happened in our European community. It is not what happened in the history of our own race during the last twenty-five centuries, of which we know infinitely more than we do of the Euphrates or the Nile Valleys thousands of years ago.

What happened in the history of our own race is very well known: the religions of Pagan European antiquity had Priesthoods—all of them. Those Priesthoods were of very varying political power, and the variation in their political power had nothing to do with the stage of culture. You do not find Priests more powerful in the lower stages of culture, less powerful in the higher stages of culture; you certainly find them more powerful in Gaul, for instance, than you do in the more barbaric world beyond the Rhine. There is hardly a trace of any Priesthood among the lowest of all, the Scythians.

What Priesthood was in Etruria we do not know, but we do know that in the Roman religious origins which were probably Etruscan there is a curious rigidity and strength attaching to the hierarchic function, a union (again) between civil rule and Priestly action, and yet certainly not a government of Priests. We know how powerful was the horrible Priesthood of Carthage, but we know that government was civilian. There is every sort of type and degree in the power, the character, the rise and fall of Priesthood, and no indication whatsoever of a monotonous, regular elimination of the Priest by “Progress” such as Mr. Wells was taught in his youth.

When the great change comes over the recorded history of our race—the conversion of the Roman Empire to Catholicism—it is not the power of any Priesthood that weakens; it is the hold of the local Pagan religion that weakens. The Pagan Priest is in no way conquered by the civil power. There is no trace of such a thing. On the contrary, it is the civil power which, as Paganism dies, works hard to keep the Pagan Priest going. Next arises the Catholic Church. It has a Priesthood, and a very strong organized Priesthood, from the earliest records of it that we possess.

In the later centuries you find, in the West, that Priesthood acting together under a personal Chief and at last dominating society in the main struggle between this head of the hierarchy and the nominal head of civil society. It is the head of the hierarchy (the Pope) who wins, and the head of the civil society (the Emperor) who loses—not the other way about.

With the destruction of religious unity and the introduction of widespread differences of belief into Western Europe the civil power naturally preponderates. There came a maximum when the civil power might almost be said to have obliterated its rival during the nineteenth century. But it is pretty clear to people who know their Europe that something of a turn of the tide is already apparent.

What the future holds in the matter we cannot see; but it is plain detailed History of the most glaring and obvious sort that during these known two thousand five hundred years, there has been no regular process one way or the other. There has been no gradual fading away of Priesthood in the growing light and its replacement by an anti-Priestly, “progressive” civil power. What has actually happened is what a sound intelligence, shy of too easy theories, would expect—a complicated, eddying, series of changes, swelling gradually up towards maxima of strength on the one side, and then to maxima of strength on the other.

It is here as everywhere. When Mr. Wells touches on the point of religion, even when he has recorded History to go upon, he at once begins to repeat the popular theories of the anti-Catholic world and to repeat them crudely and in a fashion convincing only to those who had already been told what he tells them. What is more interesting for the Catholic reader in this kind of thing is to remember out of what an atmosphere it arose. Put in a different dress, it is really nothing more than the old cry of “Priestcraft,” which the more provincial sort of anti-Catholicism perpetually repeated though with failing accents during the middle third of the nineteenth century.

It is no safeguard against this for Mr. Wells to say—and he says it quite sincerely—that the Priests in some measure, some of them, believed what they taught. That is only part of the urbane tolerance which is used as a sort of oil to smooth the downward passage to destruction of such outworn things as the Faith. When they know our strength we shall have less of such courtesy.

Of two things, one: either Priesthood being a normal function of religion, like Veneration, Sacrifice, Sacrament, Shrines, Ritual, and the rest, will be found present in a true religion and is no argument against the truth of that religion; or, there being no true religion, Priesthood began as a man-made cheat, like all the other functions of religion—since (by this theory)—all religion and all its attendant functions are wholly illusion.

There cannot be in the nature of things any recorded evidence to decide between the two positions. Faith asserts that one religion is true, is of Divine origin, has authority to affirm the only things really worth man’s knowing. From that position it is rational to expect as a rule in all religions, vague or precise, amiable or detestable, the concomitants of what will also be found in the one true religion. The Catholic is not disturbed, but confirmed by the discovery of parallels to his own practice in contemporary or past Paganism. On the other hand, Un-faith affirms that all these things are shams; that Priesthood, along with the rest, is part of the sham and must be rejected.

But there is this great difference between the two positions, and it is one to be particularly noted in the great quarrel of the modern world.

The Catholic argues out his position, knows what his own first principles are, distinguishes between Faith and Science, does not pretend to prove that for which proof is not available, does not confound the possible with the probable, or the probable with the ascertained. Above all, he does not confound first principles which are beyond proof with things known by deduction or by observation.

There was a time, not so long ago, when general intelligence was on a higher level; it was a time in which our opponents met us as equals.

Nowadays they do not. We are compelled to meet them as inferiors. They put forward arguments in a circle; they assume their own conclusions. They are not aware of their own first principles. They take it for granted that their own first principles are accepted by their opponents. They generalize from instances not only few, but often actually abnormal. They compel fact to meet theory instead of basing theory upon fact. Above all, have they that especial mark of unintelligence, the hunger for over-simplicity, the determination to be quite sure of everything and to make everything fit in with a mechanical formula.

It has been well said by the greatest of modern Spanish artists that the chief need of the Catholic Church to-day is an opponent worthy of her stature. She has hardly found one in Mr. Wells.