For instance, he gives us this sentence: “We know very little of the ideas, or ceremonies or methods of the Christian communities in the first two centuries.” If he had said no more, that sentence could have stood; for “very little” is a vague phrase, and it is true that we have for the second century few documents compared, say, with the documents of the third century. We have far more documents than we have for the two centuries of English history between 400 and 600, but we have less-connected ones than we have for the two centuries of English history between, say, 700 and 900. On the other hand, “it is clear” (to use one of Mr. Wells’s own favourite expressions) that he does not know what the “very little” is. He does not know the testimony of St. Ignatius, of Justin Martyr, of Papias, of Irenæus, of the Earlier Apochryphal Gospels (especially the Proto-Evangelion), of the authentic Clementine, of the inscriptions, of the Didache, of the Hermas, and so on. If he did, he would know that the “very little” (and it is very little) is quite conclusive on such essentials as affirmation by the Church, in that very early time, of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Veneration of Our Lady, and of the Saints who have passed; of Episcopacy, of a sacramental Priesthood, of the Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, of firm insistence upon orthodox unity and the excretion of heresy—and so forth. It is “very little,” but it witnesses to all the essentials. The evidence is not conclusive of the spiritual value, or the truth, of any of these things; but it is conclusive upon the fact that they were believed from the beginning. St. Ignatius stood to the Apostles and to all those scores and hundreds of people who had seen Our Lord—and many of whom had talked with Him, in a highly civilized time, full of continual travel and criticism and sceptical enquiry—he stands, I say, to that generation _contemporary_ with Jesus Christ as Mr. Wells himself stands to men like Huxley or Matthew Arnold. St. Ignatius was a lad in his teens when the younger witnesses, such as St. John, were not more than fifty or so. What he heard about Our Lord’s teaching and foundation and commands, what he heard about those miracles which are so incredible to people fed upon the Daily Press, what he heard of the Resurrection, of the affirmation of the Incarnation, and the rest, is on a par with what Mr. Wells and I have heard of Darwin’s publication of the _Origin of Species_, and of the effect it created.