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.