The detail of what will happen to Man in the future we do not know. One thing we do know quite certainly: he will be Man in the future just as he has been Man in the past. The type will not change. He will yield to the same temptations, be strengthened by discipline and renunciation, weakened by indulgence and excessive opportunity—especially weakened by his own material creations when they are abused. And we further know, from all the records of our race, that a contempt for the past and a planting of standards in an imaginary future is the destruction of culture. Of all popular moods which a failing civilization can catch, it is the most fatal. At the end of this section comes in again (with Chapter XVI) that note which is the principal motive for these comments. For it is with this Chapter XVI of his third book that we come again upon the Author’s reaction against religion and particularly against the essential idea of a Priesthood. Mr. Wells’s sixteenth chapter is entitled, “Gods and Stars, Priests and Kings.” He introduces it at the beginning of his account of recorded History, and it is the first example in this account of that personal and violent reaction of his against true religion which I am following throughout these articles. His reaction is, of course, only part of the general spirit of our time outside the Catholic Church, and in his attitude towards all religion properly so-called—especially in his contempt and dislike of the high religious functions of ritual, hierarchy, sacrifice and the rest—Mr. Wells is but one individual in the millioned English-speaking Protestant public for whom he writes, and whose ideas he repeats to their satisfaction. But he feels this hatred with a particular animosity where other people nowadays feel it but vaguely: he is stirred by an antipathy to the Catholic Church which they also feel, but do not feel so pointedly or so continually. And he can express it in a very readable, popular fashion, which enables the average reader of his own sort to say “This is what I have always thought, more or less, but more forcibly and better put than I could have put it.” He here declares himself fully for the first time on the special point of _Priesthood_. What he thinks about it in general his readers had already heard on an earlier page, where he made an imaginary picture of its origin (p. 72 of the _Outline of History_). He there tells them that “bold men, wise men, shrewd and cunning men, were arising” (in neolithic times) “to become magicians, priests and kings.”