Well and good. That has been the attitude of a great many people, from the remotest antiquity. But people worth arguing with know that there is another, exactly contrary, attitude which may be stated thus: Men make up Gods precisely because they have an instinctive recognition of the existence of a God and of subordinate spirits: the process is one corresponding to reality, though led into errors of appreciation. Both positions may be argued, and have been argued, by the strongest of human intelligences. One man will say, like Diderot, that the whole affair is a mere projection of Man himself by his own imagination upon the void, and be confirmed in this view by every new discovery of men’s gods in various eras and places. While another will say, like Newman, “On the contrary, if I find in all false religion something in common with true religion, it does not weaken my hold on true religion; it confirms it.” Now we find Mr. Wells in strange ignorance of the fact that this opposite point of view exists. Nor is this all. Over and over again he shows ignorance of general European movements, of the results of modern scholarship, of definite discoveries which have changed all our thought since he was young. Not only does he not know his Europe: he does not know his books. A very striking example of this I have noted in the early part of this book. Mr. Wells thought, when I spoke of a widespread European (and American) criticism of Natural Selection which is making that theory untenable, that I had imagined the whole thing! He denied the existence of such authorities and challenged me, in a violent pamphlet, to quote names. He (and the reader) will find a few of the most prominent in an appendix to this book. Next I notice a violent necessity in him for simplification. The general lines of History must indeed be simple; an outline must never allow confusion through too much detail. But I do not mean that our author has a powerful grasp of general ideas; I mean that he suffers from a weak simplification due to an inability to grasp the multitudinous complexity and the inhabiting mystery of things. One example of this extreme simplification through weakness is the facile reference of everything social to race. Thus the “black-white” races of the Mediterranean have certain devotions, as, for instance, to Our Lady; the superior “Nordic” stock has not. Then, what will you do with the fact that the one province in Europe where there was the most passionate devotion to Our Lady for century after century was Britain? The desperate need for simplicity leads Mr. Wells to leave it out altogether. I might multiply instances. They abound throughout the work.