There is a very good example of the woolly way of writing which carries conviction to the man who is already convinced. Legends and falsehoods arise continually in History, but they do not arise like that. You may say of such a story that you disbelieve it: then it will have arisen by any one of the four known ways in which _false_ stories of the marvellous do proceed. (1) Hearsay, with no witnesses available. (2) Conspiracy and falsehood. (3) The substitution (in a considerable lapse of time) of affirmation for what was originally metaphor, and definite statement for what was originally poetic expression. (4) Hallucination, individual or collective. But the idea that “stories getting about” transform themselves into a group of living and contemporary _sincere_ witnesses is psychologically impossible. And who were these witnesses?—according to the only accounts we have, they were Peter, the authority for Mark; John; later all the Apostles. One can say the story is late, or madness, or a lie, and each hypothesis is arguable. But Mr. Wells’s hypothesis that the witnesses did _not_ witness a highly definite, most extraordinary event repeated over many days, and then were persuaded they _did_ witness it, is not worth arguing; he only puts it in from a Modernist fear of shocking himself or his readers by ridiculing venerated names. The best example we have of a false legend in our time is that of the Russians in England during the early part of the War. You can get myriads to say that they were heard of, but I (who received sheaves of letters written to me at the time by people who believed in the story) have never met a single individual who said he had _himself_ seen them. Indeed, I have only heard of one such, and he turned out to be a practical joker. Had Mr. Wells not been fettered by his Modernist necessity of treating the story of Our Lord with a veneration due only to His Divinity, he would boldly have said what the stronger and more intellectual sceptics have always said: that the story of the Resurrection is either contemporary falsehood or a piece of hallucination or a later legend; he would not have tried to rationalize it in this ludicrously insufficient fashion. I have no space to make a full catalogue of Mr. Wells’s lack of sufficient reading for his purpose. It needed no great amount. Even a few days among those Encyclopædias with which he is acquainted (and the articles in which are as anti-Catholic as he could wish) would have enlightened him. But he never spent those few days. He has copied the conclusions of the more commonly known anti-Christian writers of his youth as those conclusions have been presented in popular rationalist tracts, but he does not know how those scholars worked nor what has been said since their time.