Here we have Mr. Wells’s pronouncement that the “more tolerating countries” became Protestant with happy little Catholic lumps inside them, while the “less tolerating countries—France, Italy and Spain,” produced societies in which men are either definitely Catholic or Atheist, or, at any rate, strongly anti-Catholic. A man who writes sentences of that sort about the processes which have produced modern Europe, singling out France, Spain and Italy(!) as specially intolerant, does not know what he is talking about. The Protestant countries persecuted religion with a ferocity unknown elsewhere. You find that persecution rampant in the exclusion of Catholicism in the early laws of the Protestant culture in North America as in England. The whole story of the Cecils is a story of drastic and murderous persecution, the determination of the new Reformation millionaires under Elizabeth and James I to stamp out the last vestiges, and the first beginnings, of Catholic truth. Persecution of the most extreme kind, relentless and overwhelming, is the one striking characteristic of later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Does Mr. Wells imagine that he could find in any province under the Princes of France, Italy or Spain the wholesale confiscation that went on in Ireland: a whole people dispossessed of their land in the effort to crush out the Church? Did the Valois or Louis XIII string up and disembowel Protestant pastors for no other crime than the reciting of their service? Again, Mr. Wells does not understand what it is that makes men in the Catholic culture either definitely Catholic or definitely and wholly sceptical. It is that men in the Catholic culture _think_; they use the human reason. If they have the Faith they argue that a Divine authority will be infallible; they therefore accept _all_ its doctrine. If they have lost the Faith, if they think the Church to be of human institution, their reason bids them as a consequence combat an organization which makes such enormous pretensions to authority without (as they believe) any right to it. The reason, for instance, that you do not have mawkish religious sentiment hanging about such minds as, in Catholic countries, have lost the Faith, is that those minds are founded upon Intelligence and despise muddle-headed emotionalism. They admit their loss of doctrine, and they are not afraid to face the consequence of whatever they conceive to be the truth. But in nations not of Catholic culture it is the other way about. Men like Mr. Wells, who have ceased to believe that Our Blessed Lord was God, or even that He had Divine authority, cling desperately to the emotions which the old belief aroused—because they find those emotions pleasant. That is a piece of intellectual weakness for which corresponding men, atheists of the Catholic culture, very properly feel a hearty contempt.