No one can say the two processes could mingle or exist side by side. You do not mix a northward direction with a southward one. There is contradiction. Either the process was in one direction or the reverse. If the historical order was in the direction, “First a recognition of God ... then the corruption of that idea by visible association ... then idolatry, perversion, and all the rest of it” (as the very slight evidences and analogies suggest, and as common sense suggests also), that is one thing. If it was “A confused memory of being bullied by the Old Man of the Tribe—then perversions such as human sacrifice—idolatries—later vague imagining of some overshadowing spirit,” that is the opposite. To postulate the _first_ process is to say, in terms of Theology, that man had an original apprehension of God, and later often overlaid it with false worship:—even to the degree of losing the original idea. To postulate the _second_ is to lay down the definite affirmation that God is but a fiction, man-made: and therefore has no being: is _not_. And it is the second which Mr. Wells repeats once more in this book, from the popular materialist works of our boyhood. Those who are of Mr. Wells’s generation, the men who date their birth from the sixties and seventies of the last century, will remember the many efforts then made to get rid of God. What efforts were made to get rid of Him as Creator I have described in my examination of the birth and death of that crude error known in its time as “Natural Selection.” There was a moment when those who were attacking the idea of creation tried to turn this error from a mere fashion into a dogma. Created beings had no End for which they were designed. This grossly mechanical system, Natural Selection, thus invented, has failed. They must seek for another. But meanwhile they went to the heart of the matter—or at least the bolder of them did—and proposed to show not only that Creation and Design were illusions of the human spirit, but that the idea of God Himself was such an illusion. They made many efforts; they started a dozen major theories, and scores of minor ones, to account for that illusion. Mr. Wells in this book characteristically follows one of the crudest—Grant Allen’s. But while all of them, old or new, differ, they differ most amicably as fellow-opponents of true religion; for men do not mind how much their theories disagree so long as they all have for their root-motive a common antagonism to the Faith and right living. Note that these people were not out to observe historical record or to ascertain prehistoric fact upon the actions and the thought of man. That would have been true science; and true science was not in their line. They were out to bolster up a theory. Facts must be twisted to meet theory, or, even more often, invented to support theory. A disciplined subjection to ascertained truth was abhorrent to them.