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.