“The Church was losing its hold upon the consciences of Princes and rich and able people. It was also losing the faith and confidence of common people.” But Princes and common people _were_ the Church! Again: “The revolt of the Princes was essentially an irreligious revolt against the world rule of the Church.” It was a scramble for loot of Church Goods undertaken by avaricious men within the Society of Catholic Europe—not by men from something outside. I might quote many such sentences which we come across by the hundred in the sort of textbooks upon which Mr. Wells and the vast bulk of his readers have been brought up; they are all (to the historian) lamentable. The Catholic civilization of Europe broke up from within, because the evil will of men was, at one moment, too strong for their conscience of good, and the opportunity for loot too strong for man’s underlying knowledge that the Church was the salvation of mankind. To talk of criticism of the clerical organization and its abuses as an attack on “the Church” is unhistorical. It is thinking of the past in modern terms. To contrast Catholic Christendom with some ideal, impossible (and unpleasant) system, of vague, enthusiast religion, and to imagine the latter suppressed by the former is, historically, unreal. One might as well imagine English cricket rules persecuting an imaginary ideal cricket in which there were no rules. The Catholic Church, in any society which is Catholic, no more stands outside the community as an odd tyrant than the social habit of the Londoner stands outside the Londoner as a tyrant, or than the public school system stands as a tyrant outside the man trained under it. The whole thing is one. That unity may suffer attack. It may break down. It may suffer the loss of certain portions while maintaining the rest intact. But to regard any vital principle (such as the Church) as something _outside_ the body which it vivifies, is bad history. It is exactly the sort of bad history written by anyone who doesn’t understand the personality, the identity, the spirit of his subject. Mr. Wells and his readers (and those who wrote the textbooks on which he has been trained) are not themselves Catholics; but cannot they exercise enough imagination to call up a world in which their ancestry and their blood were Catholic? Apparently they cannot; and in so far as they cannot, their history is worthless; for they miss the main fact that Catholic Europe was still Catholic while the disruption was proceeding, and that the idea of the Church as an alien thing was only possible _after_ the full effect of the break-up. So much for the first piece of bad history. This obsession of the Catholic Church as an alien tyrant of Catholic men.