The second point in which Mr. Wells fails to understand his task is in his idea that the Reformation was an inevitable event. It is the curse of nearly all our modern popular writers (who are most of them inferior to, and outside the Catholic culture) that they read history in terms of that physical science which is the model for all their thought. They cannot understand the effect of Free Will: they cannot understand that spiritual good and evil come to men, not of fate, but from their own choice. Europe was not shaking and breaking up before the Reformation. Europe was imperilled before the Reformation, as it had often been imperilled before, but it might easily have been saved. Only a very few political incidents turned the scale against the recovering of unity, and produced the trouble from which we are increasingly suffering to-day. Each of these events depended upon certain perverted human wills. The folly of looting the Church lands in England came from the immediate impulse of greed in a few, and _that_ was what, sorely against their bewildered hearts, stole the Faith from the English. The principal incident in the tragedy, without a doubt, was (let me repeat) the policy of Richelieu, of which, so far as I can make out, Mr. Wells has not heard. Had Richelieu backed up the Empire, the whole of Europe would be Catholic to-day. It is worth remarking that Mr. Wells on account of this defect in his historical vision (which is a defect of Provincialism) does not appreciate the fact that the Catholic Church still carries on. I have already pointed that out to him. You can say that the unity of Christendom was wrecked, but you cannot say that Christendom was wrecked. The Divine Authority is not now universal over Europe, but it is universal over its own very wide, exalted, and increasingly active department of the European mind. We are still numerically the majority of Western Europe and, in intellectual weight, the centre of gravity lies within our sphere. The intellectual centre of gravity of Europe to-day does not lie within the culture of Britain and North Germany aided by the moribund French anti-clericals and Scandinavia. It lies most certainly in those who have always accepted, or are now again beginning to reaccept the full doctrine which made the culture by which we live. I have not the space to quote at length sentence after sentence in which the inability of the writer to deal with this prime matter appears. But take such a sentence as “Cease to be ruled by Dogmas and Authorities!” Mark the underlying conception that Authority merely means force and that Dogma is necessarily a falsehood; mark the characteristic inability to grasp what should be, to the thinking mind, an obvious truth: that all teaching is dogmatic, all acceptation of all truth necessarily under some authority, of reason, of judgment, of sense, or of accepted experience in others.