Moreover, in the whole of these thirteen pages he admits only two sneers at Catholic doctrine; one in which he remarks that the plain man cannot make head or tail of it (on p. 379); the other a few lines further on, where he discovers a new and strange Catholic tenet to the effect that Priests and Kings have a place in heaven equal to the great saints, and superior to the common herd! (What fun it would be to put Mr. Wells through an elementary examination on that philosophy which the whole of our civilization once held, and which the more intelligent of us still hold!) He emphasizes quite rightly and very strongly the strength of _simplicity_ in the Arab enthusiasm, and the solvent effect of this upon the first societies which it approached. But there is one bad unhistorical note running through the whole description which spoils it: he does not understand the greatness of his own people, of Europe: the European religion: the Græco-Roman culture, even in its material decline. He does understand that its complexity of social rank, of bureaucratic administration in the East, and of minute legal regulations everywhere (a complexity inseparable from the heights it had reached) subjected it to a heavy strain, and that the new enthusiasm out of the desert relaxed that strain; but he does not appreciate that the relaxation was also a general breakdown. Nor does he appreciate the strength and majesty, the toughness and dignity, of this age-long structure of European civilization now faced with so sudden and overwhelming an attack of “levellers.” But there is a worse failure: he does not grasp the fact that Islam, being but a reaction against the highly developed Christian system of society, law, and religion, therefore proceeded from that system. Islam started more as a heresy than anything else, and was talked and felt about as a sort of heresy. It is a modern error, due to our long separation from it, which makes it look like a new religion. It is a pity Mr. Wells has got this fundamental point wrong; but for that essential misunderstanding of the situation and for his inability to keep his text quite clean from insults against the Catholic Church—usually dragged in by the hair—these pages might have had a permanent value and might have been reckoned among the best pieces of generalization of our time.