That is really the whole affair; and the Filioque was but a pretext. There appear, of course, those phrases deriving from Mr. Wells’s own anti-Catholic theology, on which it would be tedious to linger after so many earlier examples. Thus the Nestorians—because they are anti-Catholic and far more heretical than the Byzantines—are called “more intelligent and active-minded than the Greeks,” and, of course, “on a much higher level of general education than the Latin-speaking Christians of the West.” Theology, when in a Catholic form, excites nothing but ridicule in minds of Mr. Wells’s level of culture—but when it is Persian—and, best of all, Pagan Persian—it becomes “intense” and “subtle.” The Blessed Trinity is something of which one “cannot make head nor tail,” while an obscure Eastern Heresy is respectable. But the worst mixture of ignorance and sneering at Divine things combined is on page 386. It is something which I hope it it not too disrespectful to call balderdash. Because certain Mohammedans seem to have wondered whether the Koran had been always in the mind of God (I suppose it was—as all things realized have been in the mind of God), Mr. Wells immediately makes up out of his head an imaginary Christian convert to Islam who is introducing to that world the Gospel of St. John; he actually puts forward the phrase “The Word was God” as meaning that the Bible was God! I confess I am bewildered. Mr. Wells cannot be ignorant of the term Logos—he cannot possibly be as ignorant as that. And yet here he is plainly thinking that Logos means Holy Writ. Ignorance is ignorance and muddle-headedness is muddle-headedness; but when they mix and reach that degree criticism must be silent. There runs through the whole of this division the nineteenth-century idea of “progress.” It is taken for granted, in all its crudity, all its tautology, all its unproved and untrue postulates, and all its flagrant contrast with reality—for of all forms of mystical enthusiasm that of “progress” is the stupidest. Here is an example from page 385. “Politically, Islam was not an advance, but a retrogression from the traditional freedoms and customary laws of the desert.” Retrogression towards what—in the name of Heaven, common sense and the rudiments of education? If I say a motor-bus is not an “advance” but a “retrogression” from the old horse bus, I must mean, I suppose, that I like the old horse bus better than the motor-bus (which I do). Does Mr. Wells mean that the Arab of the desert, unorganized, and doing what he liked, is his ideal? Then why does he give us his whole idea of progress as that people should get more and more together, and regard the stricter unity of mankind as a thing at once good and inevitable? What does he mean?