What is the point of saying that the cave painters, who made their drawings so often under conditions obviously religious, and who painted an unmistakable religious ceremonial dance, had “as yet no religion”? What is the motive producing so absurd a saying as that later palæolithic men did not know the bow and arrow which they painted so clearly, and then, as an afterthought, bringing in palæolithic men who _did_ know the bow and arrow? What is the driving force which makes a man write—in the teeth of the evidence—that this art arose very gradually from rude beginnings and progressed—instead of declining (as, in fact, it did)? What is the point of saying that Neanderthal man may have spoken (_may_ have spoken! A man who made instruments, lit fires and buried his dead!)? Or why add that he had “nothing we should call language”? (On which point neither Mr. Wells nor any other man has the least information and which on the face of it is wildly improbable.) The answer is that you have to imagine facts without evidence, you have also to distort facts, you have also to suppress them if you are to present to your readers a childishly simple scheme of regular and, above all, slow “progress.” You must make Early Man last as long as possible and be as base as possible. If the facts will not fit in with that very slow process of development, which was felt (stupidly enough!) to make a Creator less necessary, so much the worse for the facts. Such very slow advance, unconscious, of imperceptible degrees—mechanical—such prolonged bestiality in true man, was dogma with all cultured people thirty or forty years ago. It is still dogma with Mr. Wells. Being dogma, and dogma divorced from reason, the facts must give way to it. Or turn to the origins of Sacrifice. We come at the outset on the very true remark that the killing of a man is a very violent and striking act. But immediately after we find the quite false remark that such ritual murder would be “naturally” associated with any propitiatory offer. Mr. Wells at once proceeds to postulate this horrible perversion as a universal human action and a precursor of all religion. He has no basis for that at all. It is made up, not indeed by him, but by the older men whom he copies—the writers who were authorities half a lifetime ago, notably Frazer. There is plenty of evidence to show that men have put their fellow-beings to death here and there, and have done so in _all_ states of culture and for all manner of widely differing reasons—ritual, vindictive, military, magical, judicial. But there is not a scrap of evidence to show that such murder was original to religion, and most certainly it was not universal. The attempt to prove it universal has not only failed, but ought never to have been made: for it is nonsense.