It is a remark which presupposes that a first-century Jew would present Our Lord’s descent from David merely as a social distinction. What an extraordinarily ignorant idea! Yet even Mr. Wells must have heard that the Jews expected their Messiah to be descended from David, and further, that lineage was counted among the Jews, not only through a natural father, but also through an adopted or legal father. As another example (out of dozens) of the unhistorical character of the whole thing, you have those descriptions made up entirely out of his head, in which Mr. Wells excels as a writer of fiction, but which are hopeless in History. It is admirable to attach imagination to History for the purpose of giving life to known facts, but it is ridiculous to try to make History live by inventing facts. How, for instance, does Mr. Wells know that Our Lord was “lean,” was “strenuous,” or that He was unkempt? Or that He was “very human”—I mean, with the modern connotation of weakness in those unfortunate words? I have said that the consequences between this attempt to “straddle” between belief and unbelief leads one into muddle-headedness, and we get muddle-headedness in these pages to the _n_th. Thus our author tells us that his concern is not with the “spiritual or theological significance of Jesus Christ”—whereupon he proceeds to spout theology page after page. He makes certain that the texts in which Our Lord admits Godhead are spurious; that the cry on the Cross is proof of an only human nature in Christ; that the supernatural is “incredible”; that the Resurrection was a false story, which began to be whispered and then talked, and at last apparently foisted upon people. The whole thing is a theological tract from beginning to end. It is the theology of the evangelistic Protestant turned Modernist. The old evangelical, Bible Christian theology is as deeply impressed upon Mr. Wells’s work as Catholic theology is impressed upon, say, the poetry of Claudel. It has all the consequences of that theology, especially in the very unmistakable rhetoric. We have “The White Blaze of this Kingdom of His” and the inevitable Oleograph of “Three Crosses on the Red Evening Twilight.” It is as though all of this had been written as part of a revivalist address; but revivalist language in the mouth of a man who has ceased to believe is muddle-headedness gone mad. CHAPTER X THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH