Yet upon the assumption that this horror was universal and original, all Mr. Wells’s argument in this department is based; including what is not argument at all, but mere fiction, his elaborate and purely imaginary description of human sacrifice at Stonehenge. Oh! That Human Sacrifice at Stonehenge! How well we know it! In how many cheap magazines, in how many journalistic allusions! With such a lineage it could hardly fail to turn up in such a best-seller as this _Outline of History_. In point of fact we have no knowledge whatever of the use of Stonehenge or its purpose, and not a scintilla of evidence on its being used for human sacrifice. But the cinema public will have it so. Historically the whole talk of human sacrifice as original to religion is quite worthless. There is no general evidence of the thing in the remains of prehistoric civilization; no picture, no sculpture, no language test. We may safely prophesy that if this nameless perversion reappears among men—as it well may—it will reappear not in their simplest societies, but rather in their most refined. The bulwark against all such things—and such murder is but one out of myriads of possible monstrosities—is that general tradition of our morals and culture which depends upon the Catholic Church. Men do not grow out of their evils: they return to them, lacking a Divine guide. When, therefore, I lay down Mr. Wells’s book (not without relief) and find my eyes following the phrase upon page 72, “it _must_ be clear from what has gone before that primitive man could have had no idea of God or of religion,” I leave that comic phrase “it must be clear” to the judgment of the reader. There never was any writer _less_ clear in his ideas than the author of this work when he deals with Early Man: and as to the few real facts and his conclusions from them, they dance such a saraband that you never know where you are, nor which is first or last, nor which is top and which is tail. First religion arises in some beast living before man who gets a “complex” of terror from his horrible old father; then it is neolithic man who gets it—after an immense interval with no religion at all. On one page a thing is possible; two pages later probable; four pages on it is certain. A man having put forward a theory in 1893, it is still gospel in 1926, though exploded in 1895. A feathered chieftain waving bows and arrows at you is ignorant of the bow, and the poor devils of deer with arrows stuck into them everywhere are told that their hunters knew nothing of arrows. It is on science of this kind, instruction of that calibre, and culture of such a tone, that we are asked to abandon the Faith, which made, and on whose retention depends, the civilization of our race. CHAPTER VI WE COME TO REAL HISTORY