But my attitude towards the human story will not become catholic by that or any similar concession. _The Outline of History_ is not a catholic history; it is rather an ultra-protestant history—using protestant in a sense that would shock a good Ulsterman profoundly—in a sense, that is, that would make Professor Huxley a good protestant. Dr. Downey in his opening passage regrets that I have allowed my “preconceived philosophical and religious notions to enter so largely into what purports to be a record of fact.” But no one can write a history of mankind without expressing one’s own philosophical and religious ideas at every turn. You cannot stand on nothing and hold up a world. You may pretend and attempt to do so, but that will be a dishonesty. You cannot even arrange a chronological table without a bias to prefer one sort of fact to another. I am “tendential”; that is perfectly true. But I give my readers full warning that my views are views. And the bulk of Dr. Downey’s pamphlet (and Mr. Belloc’s criticisms) is not so much an exposure of “errors” in the narrower sense of the word, as a discussion of quite fundamental differences of interpretation between the story I tell and the story implicit in orthodox Catholic teaching. Three main issues are raised by Dr. Downey, and they are all acutely interesting ones: the Historical Fall of Man, the Origin of Religion, and the _rôle_ of the Catholic Church in restraining knowledge. The issue of the Fall has been made a very important one in Catholic theology. In the _Outline_ I discuss some consequences of this insistence upon the Fall in the account given of the moral disorganisation of the middle and later nineteenth century. I may be profoundly wrong, but I share a now widespread belief that there is no evidence of anything in the nature of a moral Fall, such as Catholic theology requires, in human history; that, on the contrary, there is now a pressure of evidence, which I find irresistible, towards the belief that the human species arose through a quite natural series of changes, side by side with various kindred species of apes and man-like creatures, out of a monkey-like ancestry deriving itself through vast periods of time from reptilian and fish-like progenitors. Most interesting of all the species related to men are these man-like creatures, the Neanderthal men, who also made fires and shaped huge flint implements and buried their dead. I give these facts as I conceive them, and Dr. Downey finds it necessary to treat my description as though it was a complete argument designed to state and prove the human family tree, and to pretend that, when I mention such intermediate types between ape and man as _Pithecanthropus_, I mean that they are genetically intermediate. It is, I submit, rather girlish to write in this fashion: “We are thrilled to think that in this chapter Mr. Wells is at last about to solve the knotty problem of our simian ancestry.” I do not believe Dr.