He shows the same fundamental ignorance about the Hussite movement. He thinks of it lovingly as Kensitite. The Hussite movement was a Slav anti-German movement, for which heresy was but the pretext. It was not a heresy which happened by some strange accident to be coincident with the Czech dislike of Germans. I even find here the hoary howler about the “safe conduct” of Huss. Huss never had a safe conduct guaranteeing him against trial and condemnation. I should have thought that by this time everyone knew that. Huss had a safe conduct to attend the Council, i.e. to pass through the territories leading to Constance; as a rebel he would naturally have been arrested or killed save for such safe conduct, but he was never given a guarantee against trial. He arrived for the purpose of trial. But though I quote these startling examples of ignorance in detail, I think they are quite unimportant, compared with the inability of the writer, whether from lack of opportunity, or from anti-Catholic enthusiasm, to understand what he is dealing with. The distinction between the good and the bad historian is the power—or lack of power—to survey things detachedly from above. A bad historian can only write in terms of his present experience; the good historian, or even the tolerable historian, writes from his fullness in the past. Mr. Wells intended, quite honestly, to write history. He has failed, because, naturally opposed to the Catholic Church by training and social circumstances, he did not know the nature of what he was opposing. So much for the Preliminaries: now for the Reformation itself. The Reformation is the most important incident in the history of our race since the Incarnation; and that for this reason: That Christendom disunited is wounded; that the unity of Christendom was broken by the Reformation after a different and more lasting fashion than in all the breaches which had hitherto occurred. The separation of the East from the West was mainly a political separation and is mainly a political separation to-day. Such doctrinal differences as were pleaded, are an excuse, not a cause. The great heresies one after the other (of which the Arian was much the most important) did the harm they did and rocked the ship of Peter, but they never created what may be called a “separate realm” in Christendom; a whole with its own heretical traditions, its own roots in its own soil, and producing evil fruit. Any one of them might have done so, and the Albigensian very nearly did so. Had not the Albigensian Crusade been tardily but successfully fought, and had not the Battle of Muret (which English boys are never allowed to hear about in their textbooks—it was as important as Marathon) saved European culture, the Albigensians would have swamped us all. At an enormous expense of energy and by a Providential good fortune that disaster was avoided.