What is at the back of his mind when he says that the Emperor, during the Reformation, “seems to have taken the religious theories as genuine theological differences”? What can he mean if he has any conception, however vague, of the meaning of the word “theological”? If one set of leaders take up arms under the principle that individuals, and not a corporate authority, are the recipients of revelation, that is what educated men call a theological position. When the streets of Paris were placarded with posters saying, “Your Sacrament is but bread, and we will throw it to the dogs,” that insult to devotion for the Real Presence (it was one of the many things which exasperated Paris into the St. Bartholomew) is said in educated language to have a theological connotation. Throughout all the rest of this Book VII and on into Book VIII the same false historical ideas run, and particularly the idea that the Catholic Church was, in the sixteenth century, destroyed. It is not easy to state in clear terms what is going on in an unclear mind, though it is a most useful thing to attempt the criticism of such a mind; but I fancy if one could unravel the underlying idea of Mr. Wells’s confused thought in this matter one would find something like this: “The Catholic Church is dead. No one who counts nowadays accepts its authority. Those who pretend to do so are only playing a game. The old sincere attachment to it was based upon ignorance and the lack of newspapers, Board Schools, Typewriters, Railways, Broadcasting, and Best-sellers. To-day you only have the old sincere Faith in a few very backward, uneducated peasant districts.” But is it not manifest that a man making such an enormous error upon the modern world must be incapable of giving an outline of the past? That is what makes him misunderstand, for instance, the struggle in the Netherlands. He talks of the populace as bitterly Protestant and the nobles as only reluctantly following them. The truth is exactly the opposite. The majority, the large majority of the Low Country _populace_ was strongly attached to the Faith and still is. It was the nobles here, as everywhere, and the great merchants of the towns who broke away—for loot. That is what makes him wholly misunderstand the action of Alva. He has read nothing but the old diatribes of Motley. The marvel was not that Alva failed. The marvel was that he was able to keep his end up at all with such small forces, with all the wealthy against him, and with his supplies seized at the critical moment by Cecil. That is what makes him misunderstand (to give a very small example) the nature of Charles V’s great renunciation. Because that great Christian remained in his retirement attached to his old habits of food and drink, therefore he must be ridiculed.—Why? Because Mr. Wells has read nothing but Prescott, if that, and Prescott ridicules Charles.