CHAPTER IX

MR. WELLS AND THE INCARNATION

As I approach what is much the most important section of Mr. Wells’s book (for it deals with much the most important subject in all History—I mean the Incarnation, which he so cheerfully denies), I must, not without regret, be too brief upon preliminaries, lest I should take up the space necessary for the larger controversy later on.

Therefore, it is only in a very summary manner that I can deal with the writer’s presentation of the rise of the Roman power and of the beginnings of the Empire; that is, with the unity of the European world as it was prepared by Divine Providence for the advent of the Catholic Church: the noble antique soil in which was planted, as alone worthy of it, that institution whereby alone Man can be put in tune, or, even in temporal matters, a right civilization preserved.

As may be imagined, Mr. Wells on approaching the critical point in the drama of Human History, allows his anti-Christian enthusiasm more rein than he has given it hitherto, and the Roman Empire—because it was the foundation upon which our civilization was built through the action of our religion—moves him to an excited wrath in which he loses all historical sense, and curses at random.

It would be wearisome to repeat again the excellences which this department of the book also presents: its accuracy in date, its lucidity in expression: but a third excellence, which Mr. Wells usually has, proportion in statement—the essence of good précis writing, and therefore of good summarization in History—here fails him. The reason of this is that he takes up, of the few pages allotted to him, far too much space in violent abuse. I think I had better give the reader a short list of these vituperations, in order to make him understand the state of mind in which our author approaches the majestic origins of Europe.

On page 259 he is reluctantly “forced” to repeat his grave criticism that the Græco-Roman civilization had no printing press. On page 260 he expresses his “astonishment” that they did not hand printed copies of the measures about to be discussed round their assemblies, especially the Roman Senate. In the same page he points out that the failure of popular government towards the end of the Republic was due to a lack of Board Schools. A wholly disproportionate amount of the next few pages is devoted to diatribes against Cato the Elder. He begins as “a small but probably very disagreeable child of two.” He is a hypocrite who “poses as a champion of religion and public morality”; he “carries on a lifelong war against everything that is young, gracious or pleasant”; and therefore he was, of course (after much more abuse of the same sort), “the type of man that rose to prominence in Rome” (p. 265).

Rome, successful in her gigantic battle for life against Carthage, was “a nation so cowardly that she had to destroy her enemy,” and she is again “a cowardly victor” on page 268. (Mr. Wells understands so little of Paganism that he seems to think Carthage would have spared Rome.) She proceeds to “an ungracious expansion of power abroad,” and the whole great age of our foundation is one (p. 269) of “general grim baseness.” The Senate, on page 270, is “a Senatorial gang,” in which Cato (who occupies an absurdly exaggerated place) especially shows “interest and natural malice.” On page 271 you get “pitiless greed,” and meanwhile, of course, “the military efficiency of the Romans had been steadily declining”—but, indeed, the singular incapacity, not only of the Roman people, but of all soldiers, for war is one of Mr. Wells’s standing grievances. The Senate, on the first failure against Carthage, passed “from a bullying mood to one of extreme panic.” On page 273 we have a pleasant contrast between the horrid ignorance of the Roman citizens and the enlightenment of the modern British Trade Union leaders, the latter of whom have done what no Roman ever thought of doing: to wit, started a Labour College. On page 273 Rome is “subcivilized.” It is compared to “Neanderthal man”; its religion “carries us far back beyond the days of decent gods to the age of Shamanism and magic”; and there is a moving contrast between the antique leader searching the entrails of animal victims after a sacrifice for augury, and the more dignified gestures of a British Lord Chancellor.

On page 274 Rome is again “Neanderthal”; and on page 275 there is yet another contrast between the gladiatorial shows and our own more humane sports—though there is no actual mention of either football or golf. It reminds one a little of the famous remark of the old lady who was seeing the death of Cleopatra on the stage, and said, “How different from the home life of our own good Queen Victoria”!

On page 277 the Roman senators and the great equestrians are “vulgar and greedy spirits.” But do not imagine that the poorer Romans were any better; they, in their turn, are “ignorant, unstable, and equally greedy”; and, once again, on this same page, all these Romans are “Neanderthals.” On page 278 he is able to answer the question which puzzled the Ancients in the later days of the Roman Republic. Those mighty men asked themselves, even while they were founding a world state, in what they were to blame, confessed their errors, and sought remedy perpetually. But in _this_ book “we” have the advantage over them. “We (that is, Mr. Wells) _who can look at the problem with a larger presentation_ can see what had happened to Rome.” On the same page there is a doubtful admission that Tiberius Gracchus may have been “more like an honest man” than the other cowards and mediocrities of the Roman State. But Gracchus, again, was defective compared with the modern authors of Outlines of History in that “he did not understand how much easier it is to shift population from the land into the towns than to return it.” However, he stands excused; for it seems that even to-day, in spite of progress, “few people” other than the Author “understand” this wearisome and age-long truism.

No wonder that, after all this, Mr. Wells is astonished at the voluntary association of external States with the Roman Empire which began before the end of the second century B.C.

Among their other defects, we are told, the Romans could not organize sea power. They foolishly marched their troops, not only because they were somehow unaccountably ignorant of railways (as was Alexandria, he bitterly complains, of typewriters) but because they had not the military sense to see how much easier it is to embark a large army in small sailing vessels at the mercy of the weather, and disembark them, than to march them round a not much greater distance by land.

On page 284 even the most superficial student of antiquity will be astonished to hear that it was the Roman unity which so weakened the Greek culture of the East as ultimately to subject it to barbarism under the Turks. He notes on the same page with horror that the Roman of the Republic had no maps of Germany, Russia, Africa, and Central Asia, and adds (of men like Cæsar) that “even if they had had maps they would not have had the intelligence to use them.” Talking of Julius Cæsar, one might have thought that _his_ really remarkable talents would emerge from Mr. Wells’s eagle view of the human plain below. But no! That great head is first presented to us as “bald and middle-aged”—two qualities which, it seems, destroy capacity. His affair with Cleopatra marks “the elderly sensualist or sentimentalist” (Mr. Wells remarks with an ascetic sternness, remarkable and novel in such a novelist, that he was fifty-four at the time). As for great-mindedness, the unfortunate man was suffering from “a common man’s megalomania” with “a record of scheming” which is “silly and shameful.”

It will be seen from these few epithets, chosen at random from a bare twenty pages, what the effect upon Mr. Wells has been of his first acquaintance, late in life, with the Eternal City.

There is only one reasonable adjective for such an attitude. It is ridiculous. Lack of proportion and lack of dignity in historical writing, when they are pushed to that extreme, are absurd.

There was about the Roman Empire all that we know most offends our author—majesty, greatness, a connection with our ancient tradition, and order. Roman letters suggest the education of the gentry, and anything connected with the gentry is, in itself, enough to rouse our author to boiling-point. The Roman story is the great story of soldiers—and with the Soldier goes the Priest, two characters abhorrent to him. But behind it all, without a doubt, the ultimate source of these ineptitudes is reaction against the Catholic Church, which not only the name, but the fact of Rome, suggests to the ill-guided and insufficient pen here at work.

The odd thing is that Mr. Wells does not hesitate to illustrate his account, and that his average reader (who, I fancy, looks more at illustrations than at the text) has, by even such a glimpse of nobility in architecture and statuary, the whole foolish railing discounted. Had Mr. Wells’s publishers been able to include and present in popular illustration to their readers, not only building and bust and statue, but also that great volume of verse and prose which is the soul of Rome—but of which Mr. Wells would understand nothing, even if he had been compelled to study it for years—the effect would be greater still.

But, of course, the reader gets no hint of high verse or monumental prose, for our author has no idea of them. The reader of Mr. Wells’s _Outline_ is lucky to get one tiny hint of faces at least, and of buildings—of the latter very little—taken hastily from the most hackneyed photographs, but even these will be sufficient to destroy the folly of the text.

It is a singular phenomenon this: the itch to kick against that which made one: the instinct to destroy the house in which one lives: the craving towards impiety and unfilial negation. But we Catholics who live in the anti-Catholic culture are woefully familiar with it.

Mr. Wells himself is entirely the product of Rome; not, perhaps, the ripest fruit on that great tree, but a fruit none the less. Out of the Roman Empire come all things that we are—the sour and withered units of our Commonwealth, as well as the living parts; the noblest and most traditional, as well as the basest, the most vulgar, and the most impatient of majesty. Yet a sort of necessity compels men of this sort to oppose that by which they had their being. You see it in their disgust with all that is oldest and best in their own narrow community, in their bewilderment at any European thing which happens to be outside their parochial experience, in their pitiful astonishment at learning that the material details of their own lives—tramways and “last editions” and electric light—were not to be found in the daily life of classical antiquity. They cannot understand that bad poetry set down on a typewriter may be of less value than good poetry written on papyrus: the distinction is incomprehensible to such minds. That the creation of a busy, contented, rich, united culture from the Grampians to the Euphrates was an achievement of lasting grandeur escapes them.

Well, we know that such minds exist and have always existed. We know that they are now being multiplied by the hundred thousand and the million under the conditions of our great towns and their press.

We also, we of the higher and older culture, we of the Faith, know that all of this can only end in ruin. But meanwhile let us vigorously stamp with our own mark the expressions of such vulgarity whenever they come before us, and label them for what they are; which is rubbish: and degraded rubbish at that.

But all this raving against the Empire from which we descend, is but a preface. Its cause is the fact that the high Græco-Roman Culture was the prelude to, and the setting of, the _Incarnation_.

With this word we come to the supreme interest of mankind: the one essential question in human History which must always be answered by a “Yes” or “No”; and according to that answer our whole view, not only of human society upon earth, but upon the very nature and destiny of Man, depends.

That question is, whether Jesus Christ, who was certainly Man, was not also God: two Natures in one Person? Those who answer “Yes, the Dual Nature was there present,” believe in the Incarnation. Those who answer “No, Jesus Christ was only a man (or a Myth)” do not believe in the Incarnation.

Now the reader need hardly be told that Mr. Wells belongs to the later division. For him as for the great mass of his readers, and, indeed, the majority of English-speaking people to-day outside the Catholic Church, Jesus Christ was only Man.

Indeed, if Mr. Wells belonged to the other division, that is, if he believed in the Incarnation, his book would have had no great popular sale, however ephemeral.

If that were the main point against Mr. Wells’s attitude towards the Incarnation, my article might stop here. Belief in the Incarnation is not a matter of historical proof, it is a matter of Faith. If a man doesn’t believe it History will not make him do so. Historical truth, like all other truth, supports Faith; but it does not cause Faith. When, therefore, we condemn a man’s _history_ in connection with a discussion upon the Faith, we must keep quite distinct our disagreement with his _doctrine_ from our exposure of his ignorance or misjudgment of mundane _fact_.

What we are concerned with in this commentary is Mr. Wells’s failure as an historian; the insufficiency of his knowledge; his weak judgment; the confusion in his processes of thought: Not his lack of the divine gift of Faith, which is not here germane to our subject.

If a man comes to you with the remark that your father, long dead, once forged a cheque, you say to yourself, “I feel that man is wrong.” But if he brings forward some testimony to that assertion, you listen to it. If you _then_ find that he does not know what he is talking about, you are the more relieved in the matter of your father’s memory. For instance: Suppose he said that your father forged the cheque in 1914 and that he remembers the date because it was in the same week as the battle of the Marne, while to your certain knowledge your father died in 1913, his history is at fault, and his contention worthless.

Now that is exactly the position in which the Catholic reader stands in regard to Mr. Wells’s quite insufficient way of dealing with the question of the original doctrine of the Incarnation.

That question must be put quite clearly at the outset. We are not discussing the truth or falsehood of the Incarnation, that is, of Christ’s Godhead. We are discussing the purely historical point, whether or no that doctrine is original to the Christian Church and its founder.

_Was the idea of the Incarnation, that is, of the Divinity of Our Lord, held by those who had seen and known Him; did they claim to have received it from Himself; did they record His own witness to it?_ Or is the whole thing a later imposition?

That is the point; and it is a point not of Faith but of History.

A writer is free to call the visions and voices of St. Joan illusions, and yet to remain a sound historian in the ordinary acceptation of that term; but if he denies that St. Joan herself and her contemporaries believed she had had such experiences, then he is an absurd historian.

It is clear, on reading Mr. Wells’s pages, that he has never come across the historical arguments for regarding belief in the Incarnation as contemporary with Our Lord and His companions. He does not know of their existence. He approaches the problem as though all the world would readily agree with his own cheerfully uninformed conclusions—because he has never heard of any other. He obviously thinks that those who accept as historical Christ’s own gradual revelation of the doctrine, and its acceptation by certain contemporaries, are merely doing so to order. He thinks they have not read even as much (or as little) as he, and have only to be enlightened. He has no idea that a convincing body of evidence exists and has been marshalled by powerful and numerous pens.

Let me begin with the common view which Mr. Wells here repeats.

It is essentially the view of _Modernists_ of a particular type, to wit, Modernists of the Protestant type, and of the Protestant type which flourishes chiefly in the world to which Mr. Wells himself belongs. It is not of the German sort, still less of the French sort; it is of the sort which you find in the more popular Sunday journals of the London Press. And here we must define what the Modernist is.

The Modernist is a man who, having lost his faith in whatever Catholic doctrine he or his may have held, is afraid of facing the consequences of that loss.

That is an exact definition. A man is not a Modernist who denies all Catholic doctrine _en bloc_, from the Omnipotence and Personality of God downwards, and accepts the consequences of such a denial.

A man is a Modernist when he no longer admits a Catholic doctrine with his intellect and will, but shirks the loss of its benefits.

The fear takes two forms. Sometimes (as with Loisy—a very great scholar—during his period of Modernism), it is the fear of corporate surroundings. A man has ceased to believe, but he is afraid of following out the full consequences of his new intellectual attitude because he fears what people may say. More often the fear is an inward fear, very largely unconscious in its working and certainly unintelligent. It is the fear of losing a certain habit of mind to which the man who has lost belief is accustomed, which is only intellectually tenable so long as he believes, but which he blindly clings to when it is no longer intellectually tenable to him because the loss of the moral habit would be so painful.

In the Modernist of this type, trying desperately to combine incompatible things, you will find two marks invariably present. First, he is muddle-headed; secondly, he does violence to sane judgment upon testimony.

That is exactly what you shall find in Mr. Wells’s attitude towards the belief of Our Lord Himself in His Own Divinity and His followers’ corresponding belief. Mr. Wells no longer believes in Our Lord’s Divinity, _but he wants to go on feeling that He made all the difference_. In the attempt to straddle between the two his judgment goes all to pieces, and even his grossly insufficient reading on the elementary evidence disturbs him. Thus Our Lord “is a great Teacher.” He comes to “liberate the intense realization of the righteousness and unchallenged oneness of God and of man’s obligation to God from its old Jewish narrowness” (pp. 321, 322). (The reader will remember, though Mr. Wells has forgotten it, that, a few pages back, God was appearing in the _Outline of History_ as a human phantasy, and a nasty one: proceeding from the “Old Man.” It is a fine example of inchoate thinking!) Our Lord is, in phrase after phrase, a subject for awestruck wonder and admiration. Yet He does not Himself quite know what He is about. Our Lord, according to Mr. Wells, does no more than talk very vaguely on general duties, and allude still more vaguely to some undefined, incomprehensible “kingdom.” Our Lord has no intention of definite organized action upon Mankind; indeed, He is clearly incapable of it. He never said anything about His divine commission, nor confirmed it with marvels, nor established rules of conduct, nor (of course) said a word about any Institution designed to perpetuate His memory, to enforce His teaching and continue His effect on earth. Those who heard Him and knew Him had no experience of His saying any such things; wherefore Mr. Wells adopts the old tag of Our Lord being “the seed rather than the founder.” And so on.

All that is essentially Modernist—and already belated. In a few years it will look grotesque.

The intelligent, straightforward and courageous thing to do if you are a clear-headed man and have ceased to believe, is to say that the whole Christian affair is an imposture and an irritating imposture at that. That is the German non-Christian attitude; the German non-Christian boldly talks of “The Jesus Fairy Tale” and asks us to be well rid of it.

That is the French and Italian non-Christian attitude: a determination to have done with the tradition of Christian morals, and to root them out of the State.

That is the attitude of the old and robust English Atheism which was far more respectable intellectually and morally than the Modernist sentimentality of our day.

Granted the premises of men like our author, the Christian spirit proceeds from a fraud or an illusion and should be abandoned. It interferes with many of the pleasures of human life. It prevents an easy natural way of going on. It introduces authority in moral affairs (and that is always irksome). Unless you believe that you hear the voice of the Creator imposing such things, there is no sort of reason why you should accept them.

Since Mr. Wells will not give up the emotional side of his ancestral religion, though abandoning the intellectual side, he necessarily falls into bad history: the bad history of that sort which we have heard repeated so often that we almost take it for granted as a necessary part of the world around us, but which is just as bad history to-day as when it first startled the audiences of a hundred years ago.

The fundamental _historical_ error in such contradictory talk is this: That the doctrine of the Incarnation was not held by those who heard Our Lord nor inculcated by Our Lord Himself. There is a mass of proof that it was.

There are the texts of the New Testament. There are the unbroken traditions. There is the fact that all the divisions, quarrels, and heresies of the very earliest years turned _not_ on the denial of Godhead, but on the attempt to rationalize its presence one way or the other, either by saying that the Godhead was separate from, though in some way accompanying, the Man Jesus: or by saying that the Godhead only was present and the Humanity an illusion. There is the Johannine and Ignatian documentary evidence. There is the Pauline. And there is nothing on the other side.

It is no answer to say (wrongly) that the Johannine evidence _may_ not be, or (rightly) that the Pauline _is_ not that of an apostle who heard Our Lord. It is no answer to say that the first Christians were following a misguided enthusiast who suffered from illusions. (Mr. Wells is afraid to say that.) The point is that these first writers wrote for people who had met and known scores of witnesses, and that these evidently took the doctrine of Our Lord’s Divine Origin for granted.

Before critical examination grew detailed men could say vaguely that the Gospels were of very late fabrication, and that there had been plenty of time between the Crucifixion and the first documents for legends to grow up and for living memory to die out. They cannot say that to-day.

They could, till recently, pretend that the Ebionites were not the heresy of one Ebion, but the original Christian Church. They cannot say that now. Historical Science is against them. They are free to say that the doctrine of Divine Origin was a folly and an illusion in its Propounder and His apostles. They cannot say it was not held by them. To say _that_ is simply bad History. It is bad History also to admit the contemporary character of a document, such as a gospel, and then to discard at will and call an “interpolation” or “corruption” any part of such document as does not fit your theory.

In that connection (the arbitrary and contradictory rejection of all inconvenient evidence in documents the general authenticity of which is admitted) let me turn to another of Mr. Wells’s unhistorical lapses: the strange idea that the assertion of Our Lord’s Divinity did not much matter, anyhow, and that the violent opposition aroused from the very origin by Our Lord Himself and by the Catholic Church which He founded, was due to His bidding men to love one another and recognize the Fatherhood of God: to the very vaguest and most general precepts out of all that vast and consistent body of morals and doctrine, most of it highly particular, for which the Faith stands.

Historically that assertion is ignorant, and, indeed, any man with a reasonable sense of values might see that it could not but be nonsense.

Why should anyone get very angry with a man for saying that people ought to love one another? Or for telling them to lead kindly lives? Or for telling them to acknowledge a righteous Creator? In point of fact, if we are to reject tradition and only trust the fragmentary records of the four Canonical Gospels (as Mr. Wells does in everything which is not (a) supernatural, or (b) favourable to Our Lady), we know that Jesus Christ was put to death for _Blasphemy_. He was declared guilty of a specific crime meriting death, and that crime was refusing to deny that He was the Son of God: “We have a law,” said the Jewish authorities who demanded His execution, “and by that law He must die.”

We also know, according to the same record, that the Roman authorities were reluctant to allow Him to be put to death. They yielded to the intense demand of the Jewish authorities, which demand turned wholly upon what they regarded as His blasphemy in calling Himself Divine. But so strong is the power of imagination in your Modernist that he can get himself to prefer some visionary thing of which he has no record at all against the plain statement of a text, even when he himself accepts that text.

Again, the persecution to which the Catholic Church has been subject from its origins, has _not_ been a persecution directed against such general doctrines as those of a beneficent Creator, of charity, etc. How could it be? It has been a persecution directed against a definite, organized Religion, packed with mystery and affirmation, which Religion clashed and clashes with non-Catholic Religion and social ideas outside of itself.

No one persecuted the Jews for believing in one God and refusing to accept Pagan gods. But then, they did not say that their religion had universal authority: the Catholic Church and its Founder did say that of theirs—and do so still. It is simply silly to think that anyone would have persecuted anyone else for telling people to be gracious and to look to happiness from a good life: yet in order to fit facts in with his theory, the Modernist has to descend to that silliness.

The Catholic Church was persecuted because it proposed and practised a ritual, doctrinal, particular, mystery religion claiming universal and Divine authority, and therefore antagonistic to the official religion of the Empire; and the heart of that mystery religion, the pivot on which it all turned, was, from the very beginning, a belief, right or wrong, in the Incarnation: that Christ was God. Ignorance of that historical fact is, I say, a piece of first-class historical ignorance on Mr. Wells’s part.

Next in importance, though still very important, is what I have already alluded to, his quite unhistorical way of looking at the Gospels. Here I must warn the reader that I take up an attitude which would have been that of but a small minority fifty years ago (when the ideas Mr. Wells still retails were in their hey-day), and which is still that of a minority, but a rapidly growing minority to-day. I think the old-fashioned criticism of the Gospel text has failed. Anyhow, Mr. Wells takes the Gospels—or what Modernists chose to retain of them—as contemporary records. In that he is right. He says that they have miraculous and incredible “additions,” and he only accepts the documents subject to his right to reject anything in them to which he is unaccustomed. I know that in this attitude he is only copying what he finds in a hundred textbooks of our time. But unhistorical such a method is and unhistorical it remains no matter how widely it is used.

Mr. Wells is careful to say, as all the swarm of his sort continually repeat, that he is treating the Gospels only as he would treat any other book. But the historian, when he comes across a book crammed with statements which he is certain are false, ceases to depend upon that book. You may indeed say that the man who wrote such and such a document credulously accepted a lot of nonsense, or got himself to believe what he was saying or was simply telling lies; but then, by every standard of historical criticism, documents packed full of falsehood are worthless.

You may say that the Gospels _may_ have behind them some tiny, ultimate nucleus of fact, but that is all you can say: And you have no right whatever to single out what you choose to regard as true from what you choose to regard as false, simply upon the plea of probability. You can say, “In these stories there does appear a certain human figure: he may have existed: he probably did. But as he perpetually claims and exercises miraculous powers, and, as these are incredible, there is no certitude to be based on such documents.” But you have no sort of right to say, “He certainly said this. He certainly did not say that,” on the strength of such documents. Least of all can you exclude matter which is in no way marvellous or unusual but simply out of gear with some imagined theory, e.g. the Petrine texts, the intensely vivid touches concerning Our Lady, Her rhapsody, Her Visitation, Her warning of tragedy (such things are said to mothers every day), Our Lord’s recommendation of her to St. John from the Cross, etc. None of these things are miraculous: they are called “unauthentic” simply because they support Our Lady and St. Peter—whom the critics don’t like. If the Gospels had not about them the traditional appeal to the heart and to the ancestral memories which the Modernist is too weak to strip off, our author would throw over the _whole_ of them. If they came to him as documents from another tradition he would certainly do so. Belonging as they do to his past, he cannot bear to part with them altogether, and so picks out a few words to retain for his consolation.

Similarly, it is grossly unhistorical to imagine impossible motives at work in the composition of the Gospels. Suppose the Gospels to be contemporary, but the work either of people too daft to judge reality or of people who were telling lies. Then the historical way of attacking them is to say: “They are contemporary; but they, being written under such and such a motive consonant to the time, tell such and such falsehoods, or are subject to such and such illusions for which the character of the time will account.”

That is how critics with good historical knowledge, but of sceptical temper, deal with, say, the marvels in The Venerable Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_, or in _The Life of St. Martin_. But if you do not know the motives consonant to the time, you will make a muddle of it—and Mr. Wells, not knowing the time, has made a muddle of it.

A very good example of his attempt at understanding something which he has insufficiently studied is his comment on the double lineage given for Our Lord through His Foster-Father, St. Joseph, and through His Blessed Mother, “both leading to David.” Mr. Wells remarks: “As if it were any honour to descend from such a man.”

It is a remark which presupposes that a first-century Jew would present Our Lord’s descent from David merely as a social distinction. What an extraordinarily ignorant idea! Yet even Mr. Wells must have heard that the Jews expected their Messiah to be descended from David, and further, that lineage was counted among the Jews, not only through a natural father, but also through an adopted or legal father.

As another example (out of dozens) of the unhistorical character of the whole thing, you have those descriptions made up entirely out of his head, in which Mr. Wells excels as a writer of fiction, but which are hopeless in History. It is admirable to attach imagination to History for the purpose of giving life to known facts, but it is ridiculous to try to make History live by inventing facts. How, for instance, does Mr. Wells know that Our Lord was “lean,” was “strenuous,” or that He was unkempt? Or that He was “very human”—I mean, with the modern connotation of weakness in those unfortunate words?

I have said that the consequences between this attempt to “straddle” between belief and unbelief leads one into muddle-headedness, and we get muddle-headedness in these pages to the _n_th. Thus our author tells us that his concern is not with the “spiritual or theological significance of Jesus Christ”—whereupon he proceeds to spout theology page after page. He makes certain that the texts in which Our Lord admits Godhead are spurious; that the cry on the Cross is proof of an only human nature in Christ; that the supernatural is “incredible”; that the Resurrection was a false story, which began to be whispered and then talked, and at last apparently foisted upon people. The whole thing is a theological tract from beginning to end.

It is the theology of the evangelistic Protestant turned Modernist. The old evangelical, Bible Christian theology is as deeply impressed upon Mr. Wells’s work as Catholic theology is impressed upon, say, the poetry of Claudel. It has all the consequences of that theology, especially in the very unmistakable rhetoric. We have “The White Blaze of this Kingdom of His” and the inevitable Oleograph of “Three Crosses on the Red Evening Twilight.” It is as though all of this had been written as part of a revivalist address; but revivalist language in the mouth of a man who has ceased to believe is muddle-headedness gone mad.