I may sum up by saying that the whole of this attitude towards the Catholic Church, and even towards the religious sense as a whole, reminds me of an incident in my own life. A certain commercial traveller in the town of Lichfield confided to me his conviction that “_all this talk about wine is great rot. One wine is much the same as another; and, anyhow, it’s all sour, nasty stuff, as everybody would admit if people weren’t afraid of their neighbours._” CHAPTER XV THE FRUIT OF DISRUPTION With the Reformation the chief motive of my examination disappears and the main matter of it. For I set out to examine whether Mr. Wells were competent as an historian to attack the Faith of Christian men, and the matter to my hand was his attitude towards the main doctrines of Faith and his acquaintance with the rise and character of the thing he hates so much. The essential work is over when we come to the end of the great disruption which broke up the Unity of our Civilization and has bred the increasing ills from which we suffer. I shall, therefore, do no more in this, the close of my book, than very briefly survey Mr. Wells’s competence to deal with the modern world since, say, 1600: testing that competence by one or two special points. I shall conclude with a Summary. Since the Reformation Western Europe has stood divided into a Catholic and a Protestant culture. This does not to-day mean a division into two groups of opposing religious profession. It means two whole social developments proceeding from original Religious differences. Your Atheist of the Protestant culture is a different man altogether from your Atheist of the Catholic culture. Mr. Wells writes in the midst of the Protestant culture. He knows nothing of the Catholic. He understands the motives and general character of that Protestant part of our civilization to which he himself belongs. He understands it more or less when it is Prussian, better when it is English, and best of all when it is of the neighbourhood of London. When he is dealing with such things he does his job reasonably well. With the other part of modern Europe and the Catholic part of all Europe he deals ill; for it thinks and talks in what is to him spiritually a foreign and unknown language, and he even deals ill with that part of his own region—e.g. the new English Aristocratic State produced by the Reformation—which requires a feeling for tradition.