For instance, he gives at great length the quarrel between the Popes and Frederic the Second. He does not appreciate the elementary point, that if Frederic the Second had won the Church would have broken up. It was a life-and-death duel in which religion was at stake; and though naturally a modern heir of Little Bethel sympathizes with Frederic merely because he finds Frederic in opposition to “Giant Pope,” yet the historian should take a larger view. He may dislike our Christian civilization, and wish it were destroyed. He may rejoice to think how nearly the successes of Frederic came to destroying it; he may praise Frederic for “irrigating us” with anti-Christian ideas—notably Moslem—and regret that our civilization won; but to represent it as a mere struggle between two sovereigns, Pope and Emperor, is not history at all. It is like making the struggle between revolutionary France and aristocratic England a struggle between the tyrant George III against virtuous Republicans; or the monster Robespierre against the Three Jolly Englishmen of the song. All through this dealing with the Papacy in the Middle Ages, Mr. Wells continues to show that intense local Protestant feeling, in which he was trained, and misses the wide historical view altogether. He does not recover it by his phrases—which are numerous—upon the grandeur of an international ideal. Popes have no international ideal, because the Catholic Church has no international ideal. There might be no such things as nations (any more than there were under the Roman Empire): perhaps in the near future there will again be no such things as nations. But there would still be a Catholic Church, and there would still be a Papacy. This provincial attitude towards the Papal position appears in all manner of phrases scattered up and down this part of Mr. Wells’s work, as, for instance, that “men of faith and wisdom believe in growth and their fellow-men; but Priests, even such Priests as Gregory VII, believe in the false ‘efficiency’ of an imposed discipline.” Here is a phrase which might have been written by a man in his sleep as to the first part, and which is composed of mere chapel doctrine as to the second—“believing in growth and one’s fellow-men” means nothing; nothing whatsoever. It is gas. And, on the other hand, it is not a special sort of lurking animal called “Priests,” who believe in the efficiency of an imposed discipline, it is everyone who ever organized Man for any end whatsoever; from coming down in time for breakfast to the salvation of the human race. I wonder that a man of Mr. Wells’s desire for intellectual distinction should lend himself to such things. But the worst historical blunder in all this is the repetition, at this time of day, that the simple faith of the Dark Ages gradually broke down through the increasing knowledge and intellectual activity of the Middle Ages until at last it came to the complete disruption of the Reformation.