It is incredible to me that a man professing to write even a cursory popular history such as this should not know that the monastic institutions especially flourished in the ancestry of those to whom Mr. Wells applies the term Nordic (which simply means modern Protestant). It does not flourish among them _now_; but to imagine that the past was like the present is the very test of historical incompetence. Or again, take what he says about Wycliffe and about Huss. These two worthies fill the greater part of a whole page (466), and they might be taken straight out of a Kensitite tract. He repeats the ineptitude that Wycliffe “translated the Bible into English in order to set up a counter authority to that of the Pope.” He appealed to the Bible, of course, and he and his followers certainly translated the Bible (though their work has probably disappeared), but can he be so ignorant as to think that Vernacular Scriptures were unknown to the fourteenth century? I suppose he is thus ignorant. If that is so he ought not to attempt history at all. Wycliffe wanted a Bible as a textbook out of which to cite particular quotations against developments later than the Canon. But he was not speaking to a society ignorant of the Canon. He wanted to make an idol of the existing Bible—but he did not fashion that idol. Probably he put in particular phrases and interpretations of his own, as all heresiarchs have; but what they were we shall never know, for they have disappeared. And there is more. Mr. Wells imagines that Wycliffe started the heretical doubts on the Blessed Sacrament, making them the principal part of his teaching. What lamentable history! It is as though I were to say that Mr. Snowden started Socialism in Europe and made it the great message of his glorious career. Wycliffe’s main doctrine—the only thing that really counted in the mass of contradictory things which he put together—was a doctrine which he got from people of a century before, the doctrine that the right to holding property depends on our being in a State of Grace. What he thought about the Blessed Sacrament I defy Mr. Wells or anybody else to elucidate. He never touched upon the matter until quite late in his career, and it was more as a piece of intellectual gymnastic than as anything else. But because, generations later, the main attack was upon the Blessed Sacrament, Mr. Wells imagines that Wycliffe was in the same case.