Mr. Wells suggests that the doctrine of the Atonement, of a Victim offered to God, was due to St. Paul’s previous attachment to the mysteries of Mithras. He does not here actually descend to mere fiction, as he is too fond of doing (for instance, when he follows the high authority of Miss Marie Corelli upon the motives of Judas), but he does in that sentence on Mithras show that he is away back in the dear old Renan Period of his youth, and that he prefers an utterly unsupported guess to known fact. The mysteries of Mithras do not turn on a human victim: contrariwise, the victim is a bull. The man gets much the best of it—with a knife. The idea that Mithraism was ever a serious rival to the Catholic Church is an old-fashioned piece of guesswork, which every succeeding year of research has done more and more to discredit. Mithraism was in no way universal. It was mainly a soldiers’ superstition, its relics are not numerous as are those of the main popular deities. There is not a shred of evidence, nor of anything that can be twisted into an implication of evidence, that St. Paul had ever heard of Mithras. To suggest that St. Paul got the dogma of the Atonement from the mysteries of Mithras is as though I were to suggest that Mr. Wells got his doctrine of Natural Selection from the Contrat Social; for (1) I have no proof that he has ever heard of the Contrat Social; he probably never has. And (2) the Contrat Social has nothing to do with Natural Selection. As for the added remark that the idea of a human victim offered for the whole human race to God as a complete propitiation “haunted the black-white races” (which is Wellsian for the Italians and Greeks), that again is historically nonsense. We have individual sacrifice, of course, but no universal one. The Mediterranean peoples other than the Semites were singularly free from such ideas. We seem to have some hint of them in the barbaric North, but very vague. As to the pivot point of the Resurrection, Mr. Wells cannot, of course, lay the burden of that corruption upon the shoulders of St. Paul; and for this we should be grateful. But his handling of the subject is very poor. Here it is: “Then presently came a whisper among them and stories, rather discrepant stories, that the Body of Jesus was not in the tomb in which it had been placed, and that one, then another, had seen Him alive. Soon they were consoling themselves with the conviction that He had risen from the dead and shown Himself to many.”