Hilaire Belloc

“ Propose that there is no ultimate vengeance for injustice, and you will discover despair in those who admit such a doctrine. You will find those who deny God—and those who find the Universe unjust are deniers of God—to be in despair, and you will find this despair showing just as clearly in the most corrupt Parisian or Londoner as you would in the most candid savage. Yet with this difference, that the savage is much less likely to accept such a proposition than the worn-out dregs of a luxurious civilization are likely to accept it. ”

“ If Natural Selection be true, then what we call a pig is but a fleeting vision; all the past he has been becoming a pig, and all the future he will spend evolving out of pigdom, and pig is but a moment’s phase in the eternal flux, while, all around us should be quarter-pigs, half-pigs, near-pigs, all-but-pigs, slightly super-pigs, just beginning—and so on. But there aren’t. There are just pigs. In other words, the evidence is all in favour of Fixed Types and all against a ceaseless process of change. ”

“ Wells’s History is obviously and fatally distorted through Provincialism.
Provincialism does not mean a limitation of experience to some one small department of life—we are all of us subjected to such limitations, and any man’s petty personal experience is always infinitely small compared with the total possible field of knowledge. Nor does Provincialism mean seeing things through the medium of one’s own habitat and character, both necessarily limited. All men must see, and can only see, through some such limited medium. ”

“ We are not primarily concerned in an historian with his philosophy but with his history. No doubt bad philosophy must always make bad history. And there is no true history, in the absolute sense of the word “true,” which is written upon the basis of, or to prove, a false philosophy. But in ordinary language, when we say “bad history,” we do not mean “bad philosophy”; we mean a statement of facts in false proportion: a bad outline. And it is most emphatically a bad outline which those who coached Mr. Wells have given him of the medieval historical period. ”

“ There came a time when it desired to destroy Christendom as an external thing, whereas the heirs of the Reformation have always attempted and are still doubtfully attempting to destroy it from within.
It may well be that we have lived out the disease. It may well be that we are on the threshold of a time when we shall be immune to it, and when Catholic unity shall return. Certainly that is the only hope for our civilization. But on the other hand there is a possibility of yet greater peril, of a yet increased decline in our culture. ”

“ The materialists are always loudly protesting that they “do not meddle with Theology,” that they “have nothing to do with Theology.” They deal with nothing else. Their whole object is Theological—though they do not know it. Mr. Wells himself protests that he is not concerned with Theology in his Outline. It is his one preoccupation—though he may not realize it. The only criticism that really moves him is theological criticism. The only opponent he seriously challenges is a theological opponent; and the moment he attempts to reason upon his subject, Theology at once and inevitably appears. ”

“ Already the denial of a Personal God, of Immortality, of the Redemption, of the Fall, of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, is no longer directed against some vague “Christianity”—a word with twenty meanings or none—but against that defined and existing corporation which alone defends in its entirety that body of dogma upon which our civilization has been founded and with the loss of which it will perish. ”

“ We must distinguish between what is evidence for truth and what is evidence only of human mood. We Christians may argue from philosophy upon the survival of the soul, or we may argue from authority upon it; and we shall triumph in that argument, for we have all the trumps in our hands. We may, and I hope, do, accept Immortality simply on faith, as a truth which the Church teaches; and we affirm it equally strongly whether we feel it little or much; for the Faith is the best ground for certitude. ”

“ No one persecuted the Jews for believing in one God and refusing to accept Pagan gods. But then, they did not say that their religion had universal authority: the Catholic Church and its Founder did say that of theirs—and do so still. It is simply silly to think that anyone would have persecuted anyone else for telling people to be gracious and to look to happiness from a good life: yet in order to fit facts in with his theory, the Modernist has to descend to that silliness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why is man alone treated as an unique anomaly, perpetually changing not his implements but the very nature of his mind, and changing vastly in a few centuries, while his fellow creatures stand unchanged for countless generations? Because their theories have for object a denial of man’s Divine connection, and these theories break down unless facts are twisted to fit them.
Whether Man became a fixed type by this or by that process may be debated, but that when he had once appeared as true Man he remained a fixed type is certain. ”

“ In the first place he always speaks of the Catholic Church as something separate from Europe, something, as it were, imposed upon Europe like an alien conqueror; a man who thinks in those terms of Europe before the Reformation manifestly ignores the nature of all our History. A man who thinks in those terms is like a foreigner talking of England as an aristocratic tyranny grinding down a mass of rebellious people. ”

“ You can say that the unity of Christendom was wrecked, but you cannot say that Christendom was wrecked. The Divine Authority is not now universal over Europe, but it is universal over its own very wide, exalted, and increasingly active department of the European mind. We are still numerically the majority of Western Europe and, in intellectual weight, the centre of gravity lies within our sphere. The intellectual centre of gravity of Europe to-day does not lie within the culture of Britain and North Germany aided by the moribund French anti-clericals and Scandinavia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Writing is made to play a part far too great in the creation of something like a new man. That is not, historically, what happens to Man through any of his own inventions. Man’s inventions do not change Man in essentials. Man remains Man throughout. And when Mr. Wells goes on to say that the very widespread use (and abuse) of printing to-day will create a further apocalyptic transformation of our poor minds, he is going right against the common experience of all cultivated men, and living in an unreal newspaper world of his own. ”

“ The environment changes not in one respect, or fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as many as you like to catalogue. The living animal consists not in one function, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as many more as you care to examine. To every change of climate, or what not, there are an indefinitely large number of consequences. The organism has to be adapted to meet all the changes. But that living thing also must, in order to have a special survival-value, discover, somehow, a corresponding change in all its own innumerable functions. ”

“ He challenges no one. He risks nothing. He follows the sheep. Mr. Wells makes no attempt to be a leader. He merely puts, in a nice, clear, simple fashion, that which the myriads to whom he addresses himself already believe—that there is no Creator, no Saviour, no Resurrection, no Immortality, no Communion of Saints.
Is not this a portent? In my judgment it is. It is not true that the modern world as a whole has suffered such a revolution. The Catholic culture in the continent of Europe not only stands strong, but is rapidly increasing in strength. ”

“ Wells’s confused thought in this matter one would find something like this:
“The Catholic Church is dead. No one who counts nowadays accepts its authority. Those who pretend to do so are only playing a game. The old sincere attachment to it was based upon ignorance and the lack of newspapers, Board Schools, Typewriters, Railways, Broadcasting, and Best-sellers. To-day you only have the old sincere Faith in a few very backward, uneducated peasant districts.”
But is it not manifest that a man making such an enormous error upon the modern world must be incapable of giving an outline of the past? ”

“ That is why he is best when he talks of China or Islam, third rate when he talks of his own blood, the European, and quite below the average level of his popular contemporaries when he has to deal with the great debate as to whether religion be from God or from man, and as to whether the Catholic Church be what it claims to be or a maleficent illusion.
It is perfectly possible to write enduring and, in a fashion, valuable, historical stuff with as complete a conviction as Mr. Wells himself has that all religion is from mankind, and the Catholic Faith not only man-made, but ill-made. ”

“ It is a talent extremely rare: the very essential of good imaginative writing, but of particular importance in historical writing. For History, as the great Michelet finely put it, should be a resurrection of the flesh. Were I engaged upon a critique of Mr. Wells’s more permanent literary claims I would dilate on this: for such a gift is of quite exceptional power in him. None of our contemporaries possesses it in anything like the same degree. ”

“ But though I quote these startling examples of ignorance in detail, I think they are quite unimportant, compared with the inability of the writer, whether from lack of opportunity, or from anti-Catholic enthusiasm, to understand what he is dealing with.
The distinction between the good and the bad historian is the power—or lack of power—to survey things detachedly from above. A bad historian can only write in terms of his present experience; the good historian, or even the tolerable historian, writes from his fullness in the past. ”