Still, these bad errors are after all no more than errors of the conventional old textbooks, written in the days when all History had the Protestant air, and any man who has to fill up a popular history in a hurry from our enyclopædias will naturally be behind the times to that extent. What is less excusable is a series of chance sentences which show real ignorance of essentials on which not even the popular textbooks would go wrong. For instance, the Comitatus of which Tacitus speaks as surrounding a German chieftain has nothing whatever to do with our words “Count” and “County.” These come from the Roman official, the “Comes.” Or, again, to talk of the Roman roads (p. 395) as being “destroyed” as early as the eighth century, is to show that the writer knows nothing of the lines of marching or even the sites of battles. The Roman roads remain the great means of communication much later than that. Take a map of Roman roads in Western Europe, put pins in it for the sites of the great religious foundations, the new markets, and especially for the battles up to, say, 1200, and you will see what their meaning was. In the same way, to talk of the Scandinavians “becoming bolder and ranging further at sea from the _Fifth_ century” is absurd. We know nothing appreciable about them as pirates or long-voyage men until the end of the _Eighth_, and the very fact that we know nothing about them is proof that they did not early or regularly take these very long voyages. The worst and most inexcusable direct error is again here in connection with the Filioque clause, on which, as we saw in my last chapter, Mr. Wells quite uncannily specializes in mistakes. He seems to think that this clause was put into the Creed through a sort of personal private whim of Charlemagne in the Council of Aix, and he compares that decree to some vulgar fancy or other of the “late Emperor William writing operas or painting pictures.” He knows that the Spaniards were the first to put it into the Creed, and he knows that the Pope delayed doing so; but he does not know apparently what the reason for the _Doctrine_ was, nor does he appreciate that the vital point at issue was the question of unity. The Greek-speaking half of the Church had never worried very much about the Procession of the Holy Ghost. The fact that the Procession was defined in the Creed as coming from the Father had nothing to do with the idea of excluding the double Procession. The Procession from the Father was only specifically stated in the Creed as against certain heretics who had denied that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father; and the real point about the schism is this: the Universal Church of the early Councils accepted the Primacy of Rome: of that there is no more doubt than of the Battle of Waterloo. But the official and State-ridden Church of the East tended to protest more and more against that Primacy as it developed into the strong Papal idea of the later Dark Ages and Early Middle.