He brings in the old tag from Gibbon of the contrast between Mass at St. Peter’s and the state of mind of St. Peter himself. He brings in the fifth-century sneer against Our Lady, identifying her with Isis (and here there is clearly no knowledge of documents illustrating the veneration of our Lady as Mother of God and going back to at least the second century). He has the old error which, I suppose, one may still find surviving in certain remote conventicles—that sundry minor Catholic practices, such as the offering of candles, take the place with us of spiritual action. He even seems in one place to be under the extraordinary delusion—it may be no more than confused writing—that we sprinkle ourselves not with holy water but with blood! (Where on earth did he get that?) He knows nothing of the way in which the early morning Sunday Mass at dawn followed naturally on the Jewish Sabbath, and of which there is evidence as late as St. Ambrose; instead of appreciating that concrete piece of historical evidence, he makes a vague guess at the “Sunday” of Mithras: for Mithras is his King Charles’s head. He ends up by the wildly unhistorical statement that the idea of orthodox unity was imposed by Constantine in A.D. 325, imagining it to be unknown to the whole body of the first three centuries! I marvel that those to whom he went for information did not warn him. There is—to quote from memory, at random, only the instances known to all men of average culture—St. John’s attitude towards Cerinthus (_c._ 70–90). The Clementine Epistle to the Corinthians (_c._ 90). The whole story of Marcion (_c._ 150–160). The Montanists a lifetime later. The tremendous _De Unitate_ of St. Cyprian (A.D. 251). The whole note of those three centuries _before_ Constantine is a story of the expelling of heresy and the maintaining of unity. Yet Mr. Wells thinks Constantine invented such things! Moreover, he calls such unity “the stamping out of all _thought_” (my italics). But I think the most revealing piece of ignorance is what he says about the Arian creed of the late federate troops of barbarian extraction. He thinks they were Arian “because their simple minds found the Trinitarian position incomprehensible.” He thinks Arianism to have been a mere affirmation that Our Lord was only a man; and he has no knowledge of the plain, historical fact that most of the federate Roman troops, other than the Franks, got their complicated and highly metaphysical heresy from heretical missionaries at a moment when the official powers at Constantinople favoured heresy. He has no grasp of the peculiarly subtle—indeed, over-subtle—Arian position. How surprised Mr. Wells would be if someone were to take him through the outline of that affair: “The Conditioned Procession of the Logos,” “The All-creative no part of the Ingenerate,” etc. Talk of simplicity! You might as well say that the London Sunday newspapers boomed the Einstein theory in its day because it was “so simple.”