But, of course, the reader gets no hint of high verse or monumental prose, for our author has no idea of them. The reader of Mr. Wells’s _Outline_ is lucky to get one tiny hint of faces at least, and of buildings—of the latter very little—taken hastily from the most hackneyed photographs, but even these will be sufficient to destroy the folly of the text. It is a singular phenomenon this: the itch to kick against that which made one: the instinct to destroy the house in which one lives: the craving towards impiety and unfilial negation. But we Catholics who live in the anti-Catholic culture are woefully familiar with it. Mr. Wells himself is entirely the product of Rome; not, perhaps, the ripest fruit on that great tree, but a fruit none the less. Out of the Roman Empire come all things that we are—the sour and withered units of our Commonwealth, as well as the living parts; the noblest and most traditional, as well as the basest, the most vulgar, and the most impatient of majesty. Yet a sort of necessity compels men of this sort to oppose that by which they had their being. You see it in their disgust with all that is oldest and best in their own narrow community, in their bewilderment at any European thing which happens to be outside their parochial experience, in their pitiful astonishment at learning that the material details of their own lives—tramways and “last editions” and electric light—were not to be found in the daily life of classical antiquity. They cannot understand that bad poetry set down on a typewriter may be of less value than good poetry written on papyrus: the distinction is incomprehensible to such minds. That the creation of a busy, contented, rich, united culture from the Grampians to the Euphrates was an achievement of lasting grandeur escapes them. Well, we know that such minds exist and have always existed. We know that they are now being multiplied by the hundred thousand and the million under the conditions of our great towns and their press. We also, we of the higher and older culture, we of the Faith, know that all of this can only end in ruin. But meanwhile let us vigorously stamp with our own mark the expressions of such vulgarity whenever they come before us, and label them for what they are; which is rubbish: and degraded rubbish at that. But all this raving against the Empire from which we descend, is but a preface. Its cause is the fact that the high Græco-Roman Culture was the prelude to, and the setting of, the _Incarnation_. With this word we come to the supreme interest of mankind: the one essential question in human History which must always be answered by a “Yes” or “No”; and according to that answer our whole view, not only of human society upon earth, but upon the very nature and destiny of Man, depends.