We affirm the Fall: _First_ on the authority of the Catholic Church itself, which we have discovered from experience to be the only teaching body whose voice and nature correspond with reality; answering justly the queries and fulfilling the needs and ends of man. _Secondly_, because this truth, like all other truths which we receive from that same Authority, we discover to be but one in a consistent scheme of many co-ordinated doctrines, which scheme alone explains the world, and is consonant with the nature of the individual and with the nature of society: with the nature of man himself as he discovers it to be when he examines the recesses of his own being and with the nature of man in corporate action. Nor has the firm hold which the high Catholic intelligence maintains upon this essential and reasonable dogma of the Fall any conceivable link with the denial or the acceptation of some piece of physical evidence. It does not depend upon the existence of the Garden of Eden somewhere between Mosul and Baghdad, nor upon the date 4004 B.C. The truth is that Mr. Wells, in some confused way, regards the Catholic Church as a sect; an extreme right wing of the various Protestant sects, with which he is fully acquainted, from which he himself derives, and whose ethics and general attitude towards life are part of his being. For he goes on to tell us “that no considerable Christian body _now_ (my italics) insists upon the exact and literal acceptance of the Bible narrative.” He does not know—so ignorant is he of history—that this attitude towards the Bible came very late—in the seventeenth century—and was during its brief career highly local. He does not know that this conception of the Old Testament as an exact text book of history and science, not a word of which must be taken as allegory or generalization, was mainly confined to England and her colonies. The Catholic Church never held it or could of its nature hold it. I wonder what effect it would have upon him to read a few passages from, say, Origen, on the allegorical interpretation of Genesis, or from St. Augustine? He need not do more than that. He need not waste energy in a long examination of the Christian past. It would be quite enough for him to consult a couple of passages, or, indeed, for any competent historian to inform him that the only body of people who ever dreamt of taking Genesis as a literal and sufficient guide to all the details of history and physical science were the members of a small and local Puritan sect (now rapidly disappearing) of which he is himself a product and which held this amazing view of the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew scripture into archaic English. These people loom so large in Mr. Wells’s personal experience as to obscure all else; but I can assure him that they count for next to nothing in the general culture of Europe.