If it be asked why I envisage a Catholic audience in particular, I answer that the issue in such matters lies between the Catholic Church and its modern opponents. The hosts of modern writers in all countries, of whom Mr. Wells is a local example, act more or less consciously in reaction against the Catholic Church. It is her doctrines they are concerned to attack; and soon, with the increasing effect of the Church upon the one hand, the increasing abandonment (outside her boundaries) of all transcendental belief on the other, there will be but two opposed camps: the Faith and its enemies. Already the denial of a Personal God, of Immortality, of the Redemption, of the Fall, of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, is no longer directed against some vague “Christianity”—a word with twenty meanings or none—but against that defined and existing corporation which alone defends in its entirety that body of dogma upon which our civilization has been founded and with the loss of which it will perish. Further, I have the legitimate motive of sustaining others. There are Catholics into whose hands a work of this kind falls, and it is possible that here and there a Catholic may be disturbed in his faith by popular literature of this kind. For the sake of this very small number of chance Catholics, who may suffer from a popular (though ephemeral) work of this kind, I desire to examine the book and distinguish its merits from its absurdities. One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more important than a host of the average reading public of England and America, drowsily accepting stuff they have heard all their lives, and reading it because they have always believed it to be true. A Catholic disturbed in his faith is like a man troubled with his sight. A Catholic losing his faith is like a man going blind. One should take a great deal of trouble to prevent a man from going blind. I am aware that to aver such a motive reads presumptuous and a little ridiculous. For faith is strongest in the humble. But the motive is there, and at any rate the important thing is that Mr. Wells’s widely read, though necessarily short-lived, survey of human affairs, with its violently anti-Catholic motive, should not be of effect on any Catholic mind so far as a Catholic critic can provide the antidote. Every man, even the idlest, occupies his time with something or other. The vast majority of men have their energies absorbed by their daily tasks. So when a man comes forward with a mass of historical facts, drawn from Encyclopædias (which not one man in a thousand has had the leisure to look up in those books of reference), and tacks on to these historical facts all manner of false conclusions (destructive of the only truth worth having, destructive of the one grasp on reality which is of any value to men), the reader may well be misled.