Now for a second more detailed point. Mr. Wells is obsessed, as the less intelligent part of Protestant society was obsessed a lifetime or more ago, with the extraordinary conception that the Catholic Church restricts the powers of reason and the action of the human mind. A man who writes that of the Catholic Church is like a man who should say (and indeed there are nowadays some men who do say it) that a formula in mathematics restricts the freedom of the human mind. Here you have a popular novelist dealing with what he himself has vaguely heard to be one of the great phenomena of History, and what every educated man knows to be the greatest phenomenon of all History, the Catholic Church; and yet, in attacking it, he does not know what it was. A little while ago the greatest purely political phenomenon in the world—it is still, perhaps, the greatest—was the sudden expansion of the British Empire; with its unique bond of a nominal crown, its vast territorial extent, its exceedingly rapid growth. What should we say of a foreigner who, writing of this phenomenon, should judge (because he hated it) that it was all due to tyranny? We should say of him exactly what I say of Mr. Wells. He does not know what he is talking about. The Catholic Church propounds certain truths, and those who accept her authority accept those truths. They do not accept Her authority by discovering the truths and piecing them together. They do not accept Her authority like your modern reader who accepts whatever he reads. They discover Her authority by Her character. Then, and only then, and as a consequence, not a cause, of such recognition, they accept Her teaching. Those born into Her society inherit that knowledge of truth and have it taught them in childhood, as other truths are taught; but it remains knowledge of truth none the less; not meaningless suggestion. The Faith is not imbecile acceptation of something heard before the age of reason; on the contrary, it is the highest act of the intelligent will. Mr. Wells seems to be sincerely of the opinion that Lacordaire and Newman accepting the mystery of predestination and free will, did so through some base itch for obeying blindly. It is as though one in admiration of the Heavens and Earth were told he was but repeating an art critic’s essay. Here is Mr. Wells telling us with wearisome reiteration that at the end of the Middle Ages the common man began to “think for himself.” The Church, he tells us (p. 464), had for its object the “subjugation of minds.” Again, in the thirteenth century, “a new arbitrator, greater than Pope or monarchy, had come into the world.” “Public opinion.” (P. 465.) John Huss is a martyr “not for any specific doctrine, but for the free intelligence and free conscience of mankind.” And so on: all the tags of a long lifetime ago, as they ran current once in Exeter Hall.