Mr. Wells is also unable, in this very clear, readable, and interesting summary of the early Chinese story, to avoid two passing references to his own exceedingly simple theology of “progress.” One is that in which he makes certain that images of animals and men put into graves are but substitution for earlier living sacrifices; the other is that in which he refers to mankind as (in the matter of its conservatism) “still an animal.” But, on the other hand, he modifies the general commonplace, mechanical, explanation that the lack of change in Chinese culture is due to the nature of its script. He modifies such a conclusion (which he repeats from an earlier page) by the word “plausible.” He says, “There is much that is plausible in this explanation,” and that is a perfectly reasonable way of putting it. So also, he keeps his nationalism within reasonable bounds when he calls the London Royal Society “the Mother Society of Modern Science.” Many foreigners would be angry at reading that phrase, and nearly all foreigners would smile at it; but there is something to be said for it, all the same. Just before his account of the early Chinese, he has a fairly clear, though very brief, account of the origin of Manichæism, and clearly states the very great effect it had upon producing Christian heresy: but he is, I think, a little out of it in confining that effect to a thousand years. It is most powerful to-day. The whole of what is called Puritanism is based upon it. It is probably inseparable from true religion, of which it seems to be a necessary parasite or poisonous by-product. He also here brings in his King Charles’s head of Mithras, and makes the error of saying that the cult was “enormously popular” among the “common people.” We have no proof of that at all. What we do find (as Mr. Wells also quite rightly notes) is what I have already pointed out, its presence in the Roman army; but, as I have said in a previous chapter, the idea of Mithraism was never really widespread in the sense of affecting millions, let alone was it ever a serious rival to the Catholic Church. That was one of those exploded guesses of the nineteenth century, which still do duty in popular textbooks, but have lost all serious historical value. We have in the next sentence, by the way, another of those little half-informed sneers at the Catholic Church which Mr. Wells seems to be quite unable to avoid, when he talks of Mithras “proceeding from the Deity” and gratuitously adds, to relieve his feelings, “in much the same way that the Third Person in the Christian Trinity proceeds from the First.” (He prints God the Father, by the way, without capitals—to put Him in His place.) Here, again, I can do Mr. Wells a good service, by giving him a little elementary instruction in the outworn creed of Augustine, Anselm and Mercier.