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.