Yet he has no idea of what his own first principles are; for he contradicts them at every turn. He is full of indignation—against the Catholic Church, for instance—and indignation involves an idea of right and wrong. He has a strong moral sense—as, for instance, of man’s duty to his fellow-men. Again, his attitude towards the miraculous in the story of Our Lord, and particularly towards the Resurrection, is not only that of a man who disbelieves—which is natural enough—but that of a man who thinks that everybody else will disbelieve the moment the unusual character of such events is pointed out to them. Mr. Wells thinks that people who believe are simply people who have not yet had the advantage of being told that the things in which they believe are not obvious nor of daily occurrence. He starts from a first principle that only the obvious or the common can be true. Yet if he set down that first principle in black and white its absurdity would appear, even to him. This inability to tell you what his first principles were or why he held them, this taking for granted as admitted what all the best minds of humanity have discovered to be worthy of profound questioning and anxious debate, I call blind faith—faith which accepts without question and without even the knowledge that question is possible. I have heard it discussed whether such faith even in _true_ authority is an advantage or a disadvantage. You get it in little children, and in some morally admirable but intellectually over-simple minds. But to have that faith in various _false_ (and conflicting) authorities which have no common basis of intelligible theory is a very bad mark indeed against a man’s intelligence. The next major quality I discover in Mr. Wells’s historical writing is one closely allied to the first. It is ignorance of the other side: not knowing what is to be said for the case which the author not so much rejects as remains unaware of. For instance, Man imagines Gods; therefore, it would seem, the Gods he worships are illusions: therefore any God he worships, including the supreme God of Catholic theology, is a man-made illusion.