CHAPTER X

THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH

When we pass from the Life of Our Lord itself to the formation of the Church as He founded it and as it was and taught immediately after His Ascension, we find Mr. Wells (as we might expect) pursuing this same highly emotional, unintelligent, Modernist method, but with this difference: that he is now free to attack everything at random. So long as Our Lord is still present in his pages, the confused but powerful emotions he inherits from the older and more intelligent doctrinal Protestant world of his forbears would not give him a free hand. He had to talk of Our Lord’s “inimitable greatness,” of the “giant measure of the Kingdom of God,” and so on; but when he has only to deal with the Apostles and their successors, he is under no such emotional obligation.

We may discover in his way of treating the early Church, its doctrines, and its organized form, two clear marks, both exactly consonant with that insufficiently cultured Modernist type of which he is the exponent.

_Firstly_, he is devoted to the old principle: “The Bible only.” He does not understand the factor of tradition in History, and, as for documents, he writes as though the sub-apostolic writings did not exist, which, for him, they probably do not.

_Secondly_, he follows the fashion which became prominent in the Protestant world over fifty or sixty years ago, and is still powerful, of ascribing pretty well everything in Catholic doctrine to the unscrupulous invention of St. Paul. He repeats the German phrase that “Paul” found the Christian community possessed only of a “way of living,” and left it with “a belief”: the doctrine of the Atonement, the Mass, the whole affair, must spring from the unbridled (and strangely unchallenged!) imagination of a man who never came across Our Lord during His ministry on earth, who knew intimately those who _had_ been constantly with Our Lord during that ministry, who (according to this impossible theory) contradicted all _their_ experience, and yet who appealed to that experience as the authority for everything he said.

Posterity will smile at this way of getting out of an historical problem. But it is still so largely followed that Mr. Wells is in no way inferior to those whom he merely copies, so far as the general thesis is concerned. He is in very good company. Where he is inferior is in not appreciating, as the great scholars who are our opponents do, two points: _Firstly_, that one must never in History state as definite fact, or present as a picture, something which one has made up out of one’s head: _Secondly_, that the Catholic side has a body of historical evidence to present. He makes up pictures in support of his thesis as though he were writing fiction instead of History, and he leaves out, presumably because he has not heard of it, the counter evidence with which he ought to deal.

For instance, he gives us this sentence: “We know very little of the ideas, or ceremonies or methods of the Christian communities in the first two centuries.”

If he had said no more, that sentence could have stood; for “very little” is a vague phrase, and it is true that we have for the second century few documents compared, say, with the documents of the third century. We have far more documents than we have for the two centuries of English history between 400 and 600, but we have less-connected ones than we have for the two centuries of English history between, say, 700 and 900.

On the other hand, “it is clear” (to use one of Mr. Wells’s own favourite expressions) that he does not know what the “very little” is. He does not know the testimony of St. Ignatius, of Justin Martyr, of Papias, of Irenæus, of the Earlier Apochryphal Gospels (especially the Proto-Evangelion), of the authentic Clementine, of the inscriptions, of the Didache, of the Hermas, and so on. If he did, he would know that the “very little” (and it is very little) is quite conclusive on such essentials as affirmation by the Church, in that very early time, of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Veneration of Our Lady, and of the Saints who have passed; of Episcopacy, of a sacramental Priesthood, of the Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, of firm insistence upon orthodox unity and the excretion of heresy—and so forth.

It is “very little,” but it witnesses to all the essentials. The evidence is not conclusive of the spiritual value, or the truth, of any of these things; but it is conclusive upon the fact that they were believed from the beginning.

St. Ignatius stood to the Apostles and to all those scores and hundreds of people who had seen Our Lord—and many of whom had talked with Him, in a highly civilized time, full of continual travel and criticism and sceptical enquiry—he stands, I say, to that generation _contemporary_ with Jesus Christ as Mr. Wells himself stands to men like Huxley or Matthew Arnold. St. Ignatius was a lad in his teens when the younger witnesses, such as St. John, were not more than fifty or so. What he heard about Our Lord’s teaching and foundation and commands, what he heard about those miracles which are so incredible to people fed upon the Daily Press, what he heard of the Resurrection, of the affirmation of the Incarnation, and the rest, is on a par with what Mr. Wells and I have heard of Darwin’s publication of the _Origin of Species_, and of the effect it created.

Justin Martyr, our next chief witness (giving the earliest surviving account of the Mass), stood to those contemporaries as a man just old enough to have fought in the Great War stands to those who had fought as subalterns in the Crimea or as a young American of to-day stands to Lincoln. St. Irenæus, with his explicit witness to St. John and to orthodoxy, stood to that generation of eye-witnesses much as a child born in the last year or two will stand to the mid Victorians.

That is the kind of thing which the school Mr. Wells follows has got to get over. Such proximity may not be evidence as to the _truth_ of what the contemporaries of Our Lord said they had heard from His Own lips, but it is excellent evidence that they _heard_ it. You may ridicule the story that Peary reached the North Pole, but if you deny that he said he did and that companions of his believed him it is yourself you are making ridiculous.

The great anti-Christian scholars of a past generation knew all that. Mr. Wells doesn’t. He follows them simply, in the innocence of his heart, because he thinks it is all plain sailing with no snags. He knows no better. But the more a serious student appreciates the character of the Roman Empire in the first century, and the actual limits of time involved, the more certain he becomes that the main Christian dogmas, true or false, belong to the very origins. The idea of a complete change in doctrine and method and tone within the known dates of the process becomes impossible to him in proportion to his historical knowledge.

This argument applies, of course, with special strength to the tottering tale that St. Paul invented the Church.

If you accept even some main part of what are traditionally St. Paul’s writings as authentic, you can discover him insisting to distant converts that he is adding nothing, that he has imagined nothing, that he is but conveying and spreading a doctrine which he had received.

Again—to develop a point I have but mentioned—if St. Paul was making up a fantastic new scheme of his own, why was there no resistance? Why is there no hint or tradition or echo of universal indignation against such monstrous innovations?

It is no good saying that the evidence for any such resistance has been destroyed. In the first place, it could not in the nature of things have wholly disappeared. There would have been a violent quarrel affecting the whole story of the early Church. And in the next place the most emphatic testimony is allowed to survive of a very grave difference of opinion—to wit, whether the Church should include Gentiles or not, whether the converts should conform to Judaic ceremonial laws.

Mr. Wells suggests that the doctrine of the Atonement, of a Victim offered to God, was due to St. Paul’s previous attachment to the mysteries of Mithras. He does not here actually descend to mere fiction, as he is too fond of doing (for instance, when he follows the high authority of Miss Marie Corelli upon the motives of Judas), but he does in that sentence on Mithras show that he is away back in the dear old Renan Period of his youth, and that he prefers an utterly unsupported guess to known fact.

The mysteries of Mithras do not turn on a human victim: contrariwise, the victim is a bull. The man gets much the best of it—with a knife.

The idea that Mithraism was ever a serious rival to the Catholic Church is an old-fashioned piece of guesswork, which every succeeding year of research has done more and more to discredit.

Mithraism was in no way universal. It was mainly a soldiers’ superstition, its relics are not numerous as are those of the main popular deities.

There is not a shred of evidence, nor of anything that can be twisted into an implication of evidence, that St. Paul had ever heard of Mithras. To suggest that St. Paul got the dogma of the Atonement from the mysteries of Mithras is as though I were to suggest that Mr. Wells got his doctrine of Natural Selection from the Contrat Social; for (1) I have no proof that he has ever heard of the Contrat Social; he probably never has. And (2) the Contrat Social has nothing to do with Natural Selection.

As for the added remark that the idea of a human victim offered for the whole human race to God as a complete propitiation “haunted the black-white races” (which is Wellsian for the Italians and Greeks), that again is historically nonsense. We have individual sacrifice, of course, but no universal one. The Mediterranean peoples other than the Semites were singularly free from such ideas. We seem to have some hint of them in the barbaric North, but very vague.

As to the pivot point of the Resurrection, Mr. Wells cannot, of course, lay the burden of that corruption upon the shoulders of St. Paul; and for this we should be grateful. But his handling of the subject is very poor. Here it is: “Then presently came a whisper among them and stories, rather discrepant stories, that the Body of Jesus was not in the tomb in which it had been placed, and that one, then another, had seen Him alive. Soon they were consoling themselves with the conviction that He had risen from the dead and shown Himself to many.”

There is a very good example of the woolly way of writing which carries conviction to the man who is already convinced. Legends and falsehoods arise continually in History, but they do not arise like that. You may say of such a story that you disbelieve it: then it will have arisen by any one of the four known ways in which _false_ stories of the marvellous do proceed. (1) Hearsay, with no witnesses available. (2) Conspiracy and falsehood. (3) The substitution (in a considerable lapse of time) of affirmation for what was originally metaphor, and definite statement for what was originally poetic expression. (4) Hallucination, individual or collective. But the idea that “stories getting about” transform themselves into a group of living and contemporary _sincere_ witnesses is psychologically impossible.

And who were these witnesses?—according to the only accounts we have, they were Peter, the authority for Mark; John; later all the Apostles. One can say the story is late, or madness, or a lie, and each hypothesis is arguable. But Mr. Wells’s hypothesis that the witnesses did _not_ witness a highly definite, most extraordinary event repeated over many days, and then were persuaded they _did_ witness it, is not worth arguing; he only puts it in from a Modernist fear of shocking himself or his readers by ridiculing venerated names.

The best example we have of a false legend in our time is that of the Russians in England during the early part of the War. You can get myriads to say that they were heard of, but I (who received sheaves of letters written to me at the time by people who believed in the story) have never met a single individual who said he had _himself_ seen them. Indeed, I have only heard of one such, and he turned out to be a practical joker.

Had Mr. Wells not been fettered by his Modernist necessity of treating the story of Our Lord with a veneration due only to His Divinity, he would boldly have said what the stronger and more intellectual sceptics have always said: that the story of the Resurrection is either contemporary falsehood or a piece of hallucination or a later legend; he would not have tried to rationalize it in this ludicrously insufficient fashion.

I have no space to make a full catalogue of Mr. Wells’s lack of sufficient reading for his purpose. It needed no great amount. Even a few days among those Encyclopædias with which he is acquainted (and the articles in which are as anti-Catholic as he could wish) would have enlightened him. But he never spent those few days. He has copied the conclusions of the more commonly known anti-Christian writers of his youth as those conclusions have been presented in popular rationalist tracts, but he does not know how those scholars worked nor what has been said since their time.

He brings in the old tag from Gibbon of the contrast between Mass at St. Peter’s and the state of mind of St. Peter himself. He brings in the fifth-century sneer against Our Lady, identifying her with Isis (and here there is clearly no knowledge of documents illustrating the veneration of our Lady as Mother of God and going back to at least the second century). He has the old error which, I suppose, one may still find surviving in certain remote conventicles—that sundry minor Catholic practices, such as the offering of candles, take the place with us of spiritual action. He even seems in one place to be under the extraordinary delusion—it may be no more than confused writing—that we sprinkle ourselves not with holy water but with blood! (Where on earth did he get that?) He knows nothing of the way in which the early morning Sunday Mass at dawn followed naturally on the Jewish Sabbath, and of which there is evidence as late as St. Ambrose; instead of appreciating that concrete piece of historical evidence, he makes a vague guess at the “Sunday” of Mithras: for Mithras is his King Charles’s head.

He ends up by the wildly unhistorical statement that the idea of orthodox unity was imposed by Constantine in A.D. 325, imagining it to be unknown to the whole body of the first three centuries!

I marvel that those to whom he went for information did not warn him. There is—to quote from memory, at random, only the instances known to all men of average culture—St. John’s attitude towards Cerinthus (_c._ 70–90). The Clementine Epistle to the Corinthians (_c._ 90). The whole story of Marcion (_c._ 150–160). The Montanists a lifetime later. The tremendous _De Unitate_ of St. Cyprian (A.D. 251).

The whole note of those three centuries _before_ Constantine is a story of the expelling of heresy and the maintaining of unity. Yet Mr. Wells thinks Constantine invented such things! Moreover, he calls such unity “the stamping out of all _thought_” (my italics).

But I think the most revealing piece of ignorance is what he says about the Arian creed of the late federate troops of barbarian extraction.

He thinks they were Arian “because their simple minds found the Trinitarian position incomprehensible.” He thinks Arianism to have been a mere affirmation that Our Lord was only a man; and he has no knowledge of the plain, historical fact that most of the federate Roman troops, other than the Franks, got their complicated and highly metaphysical heresy from heretical missionaries at a moment when the official powers at Constantinople favoured heresy. He has no grasp of the peculiarly subtle—indeed, over-subtle—Arian position.

How surprised Mr. Wells would be if someone were to take him through the outline of that affair: “The Conditioned Procession of the Logos,” “The All-creative no part of the Ingenerate,” etc. Talk of simplicity! You might as well say that the London Sunday newspapers boomed the Einstein theory in its day because it was “so simple.”

But what a revelation of this writer’s ideas on the Faith in antiquity—and how typical of the second-hand, the popular, the half-educated attitude towards the ancient and enduring religion of Europe.