I propose at this conclusion of a long examination upon Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_, first, to present a summary of the author’s work as a typical popular teacher of our time in the English-speaking countries, and then to end on a much more important note; the attitude of the popular mind in that same world with regard to the only questions which are of ultimate moment in human life: the decay of Christian religion in that world, and the pace at which Christian truth is being lost in it; the religious revolution through which the English-speaking Protestant culture is passing, and the pace of that revolution. The two subjects are closely connected, for it is clear that a man could not be a popular writer on these things unless he agreed more or less with his audience. Yet they are distinct; because the Follower of the Herd, the popular expositor of which Mr. Wells is an example, is not quite the same thing as the average of the Herd. It is in tune with the average of the Herd; but it presents a separate object of study from the Herd. You find in the Author the way in which reading and evidence react upon a certain kind of mind: you find in his innumerable readers what kind of faith or philosophy must be inhabiting them that they should devour wholesale the stuff thus delivered to them as food. First, then, as to the Author. The most prominent point I discover in Mr. Wells as an historian is the acceptation of authority. It is a false authority, and it is an acceptation bearing everywhere that mark which is to the Catholic mind almost incomprehensible: blind acceptation of textbooks. He does not reason with himself, and say: “What are my first principles? Why and how have I come to believe in them”? On the contrary, he takes them for granted, as though they were something so native to the human race that no class of reader could question them. For instance, all through his work he takes it for granted that the supernatural does not exist; that the conception of it as real is an illusion—particularly in the case of miracles. He holds then, unconsciously, a certain philosophy and certain first principles: to wit, what is called materialist _Monism_; that effect follows fatally from material cause. That, therefore, we are in the hands of fate and have no free will. That the words “right” and “wrong” in human decisions are meaningless.