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.