What he does not understand is the medieval Church, its necessary unity; and that the Papacy was the condition and guardian of that unity. There he is altogether wrong. He is out of perspective, and misses the elements of the affair. Here, again, I must make myself clear by yet another of what I fear my readers may call ceaseless repetitions of an obvious principle. Unfortunately it is not a principle obvious to Mr. Wells, or to the readers for whom he writes, and it must be repeated again and again, for it is almost certain to be misunderstood. The principle is this. We are not primarily concerned in an historian with his philosophy but with his history. No doubt bad philosophy must always make bad history. And there is no true history, in the absolute sense of the word “true,” which is written upon the basis of, or to prove, a false philosophy. But in ordinary language, when we say “bad history,” we do not mean “bad philosophy”; we mean a statement of facts in false proportion: a bad outline. And it is most emphatically a bad outline which those who coached Mr. Wells have given him of the medieval historical period. He seems to think of it as something dominated by the old “Giant Pope” of his traditional Bunyan. He shows some admiration for the idea of the Papacy uniting Christendom because that subserves his Comtist ideal of humanity-worship. But what he doesn’t understand at all is that the real point of issue was not the Papacy—which is the central organ of the universal Church—but the conception of the universal Church itself: and of a Church not only universal, but visible and corporate. To read these pages one would think such an idea of visible, corporate unity had never existed—and yet it is the whole historical point and meaning of the Catholic Church: then, now and for ever. He seems to think that the Papacy was a particular institution doing something on its own, artificial, like the League of Nations, and through defects in organization failing to pull it off. But the Papacy was nothing of the sort. It was original in the foundations of the Church. It remains dominant in the Church to-day. It is the exemplification of unity, and, to put it shortly, of the prime historical truth that the Catholic Church is not a theory, but a thing.