December 1999 Print

 

Matthew Anger & Edward Lengel, Ph. D.

H. G. Wells was both man and symbol. To his friends, he represented one of the foremost thinkers of his day, a prophet of the humanist new millennium whose calls for a socialist world state might serve as a beacon for mankind. For many, he was simply an exciting and entertaining novelist. Others both before and after his death possessed insight enough to see the sinister qualities that lurked beneath his rather bland exterior, qualities that symbolized an extremely dangerous cancer in modern society.

Wells was no peaceful dreamer. He was a determined utopianist whose new society, parodied by Aldous Huxley in the novel Brave New World, would have no place for either intellectual dissent or the "inferior." Most importantly, H. G. Wells was an implacable enemy of the Catholic Church. The Church stood for everything he despised; but at the same time he admired what he imagined to be its ruthlessness. The Spanish Inquisition was criminal, Wells believed, not because it tortured or killed (as he falsely imagined), but because it tortured or killed in opposition to, rather than in support of, "progress." It may be fair to say that no other single person in the English-speaking world more fully embodies, both in his ideals and his actions, the psychosis of 20th century culture.

Victorian Radical

Modern readers are indebted to conservative Catholic journalist Michael Coren, who has revealed the true Wells in an unflinching biography called The Invisible Man (1993). It is the first full-length study to honestly appraise the abilities of a great but flawed man. Though sloppy at times, Coren's analysis is far superior to that of any other of Wells's modern biographers, most of whom admire him as a prophet of modern liberalism and enemy of tradition.

Wells's humble origins, as Coren shows, were central to the formation of his character. Born of lower middle class parents—his father was an agnostic cricket enthusiast and his mother a narrow Protestant fundamentalist—Wells's mind was like a wax tablet on which random and indiscriminate experiences and opinions would leave their deep imprint. The education of the late 19th century, while quite disciplined and demanding compared to current standards, was becoming fully materialist and secularist in its orientation.

The simplistic low church universe of Wells's childhood would satisfy the young boy still tugging at his mother's apron strings, but it could hardly appease the curiosity of the blooming adolescent. Fundamentalism was not equipped to deal with either the moral dilemmas or insatiable inquisitiveness of the young lad, whose great delight was sneaking up into old libraries in attics and devouring all the books he could lay his hands on. It is hard not to sympathize with the young man's desire to explore new worlds amid the crushed, stifling atmosphere of frowsy brick row houses and factories, in which the only pleasure was the making of money (the remaining virtue of English Calvinism). As for the spiritual life, English "Christianity" was little more than a warm glow imparted by sanitized sermons and, more often than not, an onerous duty to be fulfilled two or three times a year for the sake of familial or social propriety. This virtual straw man of religion, and not the hard creed of Catholicism, was what Darwinism had to confront in Victorian England. It was an uneven contest. As Wells says in his autobiography, his preoccupation with materialist advancement and the future was born of his "contact with evolutionary speculation at my most receptive age."

 

From Future Fiction to Future Fact

The rapid advances of science and industry in the 19th century, in a society as yet unclouded by the horrors of world war, gave way to a glowing optimism in scientific progress, a rosy view that will probably never again be equaled, even in our own technology-­obsessed age. Nevertheless, there was a difference between the classical Whig liberalism of the 19th century and the socialism that Wells came to expound. For the former, social progress was "inevitable." But Wells knew it needed a helping hand.

Such grand schemes lay some years ahead when H. G. Wells embarked on his highly profitable career as a writer. If scientific progress was the hallmark of Wells's age, it is not surprising that it created its own unique literary genre, soon to be dubbed science fiction. Fantasy tales had been around since the time of Lucian, but not until the Victorian epoch did the reading public become fascinated by technological advancements, or for what these advancements were thought capable of producing. That elusive temporal paradise, which traditional religion seemed incapable of providing, at last seemed attainable.

Wells's early fiction made his reputation as a writer. As entertainment, his novels and short stories approach the brilliant. At the same time, they are almost unremittingly grim, reflecting Wells's equally stern philosophy. In the War of the Worlds (1898), Wells wrote with palpable relish of the destruction of large numbers of people at the hands of the Martian invaders and the helplessness of civilization to defend itself. Freud might have called it a sort of wish-fulfillment, for it is evident that Wells was acting out his own desire to obliterate European civilization and replace it with something new. More obviously, he sought to rattle what he viewed as the complacent faith of his contemporaries in the power and wealth of their civilization. Wells embodied his belief in the backwardness and impotence of religion in the character of a hysterical curate, a "spoilt child of life" whose "rigidity of mind" prevented him from thinking intelligently, and an inferior human who is killed indirectly by the narrator. Wells no doubt rolled over in his grave with the appearance of the film version of this novel in 1953, with its implication that the destruction of the Martians came as a gift from God.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) was an allegory of human evolution and the origins and purpose of religion. Dr. Moreau is a scientist who conducts horrible experiments on a remote Pacific island, transforming animals through extremely painful surgery into half-humans who struggle to attain full humanity. Moreau, their "creator," institutes "the Law" which the animals observe in a primitive form, though they constantly fight against it and often breach it, enduring subsequent guilt and punishment. Moreau himself masquerades as lawgiver and executioner, as well as the healer, but meets his death under the claws of one of his more awful creations. The narrator, an unwilling visitor to the island, maintains order for a time by claiming to the beasts that Moreau has only left his body and is watching them from above; but the animals gradually revert to their true form. The book was essentially an attack on "creationism" and a proclamation of the animal nature of humanity.

Wells said of his other early productions, like the Time Machine (1894) and When the Sleeper Awakes (1898), that they were "merely an exaggeration of contemporary tendencies." The Time Machine was part fantasy, part socialist-evolutionary parable, describing how over the millennia the upper and lower classes become so polarized as to develop into completely different races.

Though these works were well-received by both critics and the public, Wells was not satisfied with frightening reflections on "what might be" if man remained unenlightened. Therefore, in 1900 he penned an original and extremely controversial book Anticipations. He called it the "keystone to the main arch of my work." While subsequent utopian tracts would elaborate upon and refine this prototype, the essential values and ideas expressed in Anticipations were never disowned. This is a telling admission, because to us today, as to many of his contemporaries, it was a truly horrifying vision of the future. State control was absolute, beyond even the crude totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin. Yet, says Coren, it set an obvious intellectual precedent for the emergence and acceptance of such regimes with its advocacy of physical expulsion and quarantining or elimination of "degenerate" and anti-progressive elements.

 

The Open Conspirator

Perhaps the best evocation of the Wellsian revolutionary program in our own times can be found in Wired magazine, a journal of internet anti-culture:

The spread of democracy, open markets, freedom of speech, and consumer choice around the globe accelerates economic growth. Global openness not only enlarges the potential market for any invention, it also creates intense competition among governments to construct environments hospitable to progress. Prosperity can no longer be segregated to one part of the globe, and when prosperity does break out, it is amplified quickly by ever-spreading freedoms.

Wells had long ago described this global secular movement based on a coalescence of heterogeneous forces, relying on no particular class or group, yet including all sympathetic elements in society in The Open Conspiracy (1928). Anyone reading the book will at once be struck by the uncanny accuracy of its discussion of modern trends which have been fulfilled in our own time.

Wells terms the revolution an "open conspiracy" because he felt that secret organization was unnecessarily deceptive and not exposed to healthy criticism. While every subversive ideology has its sub rosa element, it is equally true that any movement away from God can only succeed once the mass of people become openly indifferent or hostile to Catholic teaching. Short of that, even the most devious and secretive planning can effect little.

One historical example is that of the Albigensian heresy of the Middle Ages. It began as a truly underground movement dating back to Roman times, yet it became a major threat only insofar as it exploited pre-existing and widespread religious indifference and clerical corruption in southern France. By contrast, sects like the Waldenses, potentially just as dangerous, soon faded into obscurity because they never achieved an open mass following.

Wells's understanding of revolution is considerably more accurate than those views that posit the origins of anti-traditional ideas primarily in groups rather than in individuals. For the conspiracy-obsessed these groups become convenient scapegoats for our own failings, and thus a spiritual error anathema to Catholic belief. Extending Wells's thesis into a supernatural dimension, the Open Conspiracy appears as part of the larger Conspiracy of Sin that has afflicted the social order since Man's first fall from grace. Whether understood in its outward guise or its inner metaphysical aspect, the primal pride and hatred driving revolution is ultimately more important than its proximate promoters—be they Communists, Freemasons, Zionists, etc. To say that the abolition of the Council on Foreign Relations would end liberal globalism is like saying that the elimination of the Italian mafia would end organized crime. Even if these groups ceased to exist tomorrow, the ideals that they represent would arise in new forms. Or, to use the language of St. Augustine, the strife between the City of Man and the City of God would remain.

Despite their often vicious in-fighting, all anti-­Christian groups are motivated in a similar direction. It is a false harmony based more on common hatreds than common affections. Thus there is an appearance of organized unity which does not really exist on the human or natural level (hence the absurdity of trying to locate a single, ultimate conspiratorial cabal), but does exist very much on the supernatural level. In conclusion, the answer to a universal anti-Christian movement is a universal Catholic revival, not hindered by national, party or class-based rivalry and ignorance. Anything less than this, as Wells said of secular patriotic opponents of his day, will be destroyed piecemeal and prove futile in the face of revolutionary momentum.

 

Beyond Marxism

An important point of departure from doctrinaire socialism lay in Wells's invocation of a "modern religion." This is not so much the New Age phenomena of the moment as the fundamental ethos which underlies any contemporary expression of "religiosity," be it Wiccan cults or the sanctimonious displays of politicians carrying copies of unread Bibles. Like Robespierre, Wells believed that man would have to invent a god if he didn't exist. The presence of religion "seems to have been necessary for collective life. Without it morality was baseless and law unjustifiable." Of course, his modified creed was a far cry from Christianity and was really the sort of mental crutch which people mistakenly accuse true religion of being. The Wellsian creed in its essence is the "faith" of the common man in America and the rest of the Western world.

During the early 1900's Wells earned the reputation of being a socialist renegade. Though briefly a member of the influential Fabian Society, headed by such left-wing luminaries as Eugene and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, Wells soon split with them over ideological and tactical issues. Nor would he be pigeon-holed as a "doctrinaire Marxist." Perhaps his ego had something to do with it. Wells never enjoyed sharing the limelight with others, and no small part of his squabble with the Fabians was about who would be the party leader. Yet he deserves credit as an original thinker whose recipe for revolution surpassed that of the rigid class-based steam-age theories of Karl Marx. He once referred to Das Kapital as "a monument of pretentious pedantry." For once he was right.

An obvious and crucial aspect of the Wellsian thesis is that the Revolution is shaped, focused, and led by elites. Of course, strictly Marxist societies invariably end up as oligarchic tyrannies, but only Wells is honest enough to state the fact. Socialist elitism was anticipated in early writings such as The Modern Utopia (1905) in which he discusses in some detail his idea of a leader class which he designated the "Samurai." This would "replace the crude electoral methods of contemporary politics."

Wells's visits to Soviet Russia in 1921 and 1934 urged the impracticability of unlimited collectivization. Nor could he fail to appreciate that under the moderately successful "New Economic Policy" of Lenin, Communism relied heavily on capitalistic measures to cover the many gaps in its cumbersome theory, since Communism "antagonized property and the expropriated too crudely."

When the English writer met and talked with Stalin, he quickly opined that Russia under its new Soviet Tsar and its policy of "Socialism in One Country" was embarking on a course of isolationism, a kind of "national Bolshevism," taking it out of the mainstream leftist agenda. With the benefit of hindsight it may be countered that Stalin was more pragmatic than Trotsky, whose plans of immediate worldwide revolution were utterly fantastic. For Stalin, it was a matter of tactical withdrawal to make possible the vast expansion of Communism into Eastern Europe and Asia after 1945. Yet Wells was wise enough to note that whatever material failures might confront Soviet Russia in the short term, it "has cleared out of its way many of the main obstructive elements" then present in the West. Furthermore the "Open Conspiracy is the natural inheritor of socialist and communist enthusiasm; it may be in control of Moscow before it is in control of New York." As it turns out, it is very much in control of both.

Opposed to the mythical working-class, Wells offered (as in his 1928 novel William Clissold) the intelligent professional or businessman who, disillusioned with the purposelessness of old-style liberalism, would put his energy, time and money into building the New Republic. It was what he called "big brains in key places." This explains an element of our current regime which conservatives have at times grasped by intuition but have never fully understood or clearly explained. No doubt this is why the affable and politically supple Franklin D. Roosevelt, rather than Russia's strongman in Moscow, impressed Wells as "the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order."

Such prescience is not to be dismissed lightly. This was at a time when most people were unsure of Roosevelt's intentions, when even many conservative populists, like Fr. Charles Coughlin, were courting the President as much as liberal Democrats. In an amusing anecdote, Wells recalls a pair of Red Communists, Marxist purists, who were "as intolerant as puritans" and believed Roosevelt was simply "bolstering up capitalism."

Seeing things in a univocal "black and white," and failing to appreciate the force of ideology, Americans took Roosevelt as simply a crusader against big business. To Wells, it was the newly elected President who would propel the country towards socialism, inaugurating an entirely new sense of the "American State" while creating a powerful civil service where previously only vastly understaffed and undermanned bureaucracy had existed. He indulged himself in a further bit of prophesy saying that ultimately the United States would supplant the United Kingdom as the world power. As it turned out, Roosevelt helped dismember the bankrupt British Empire after World War II.

 

Sex and Marriage

For Wells, as for the devotees of our contemporary cyber-utopian virtual reality, man's goal can be summed up simply in the twin commandments of Comfort and Safety. Death is either mocked or ignored, and human beings are distracted by the apparently limitless domination they have continually extended over their environment. That this domination is frequently disputed by nature matters little to the person who is upheld by the faith in futurity. In the meantime, such sham spiritual comforts distract us from the increasingly base reality of modern existence. This was no less true in the case of H. G. Wells's private life.

Stepping from the socialist macrocosm to the personal microcosm, we see the English writer's humanist beliefs acted out with often shocking and callous insensitivity. In 1894 Wells divorced his first wife, Isabel, after only three years of marriage. A year later he set up house with his lover Amy Catherine Robbins, to whom he was to remain faithlessly married until her death in 1927. Wells's treatment of women, which Michael Coren describes as crassly exploitative and abusive, forms an interesting contrast to his oft-professed, and oft-lauded, feminist beliefs. Yet Wells was quite a shameless rake, and admitted to these hormonal rampages in his autobiography.

It was easy for him to excuse such behavior on environmental or biological grounds. A life-long advocate of free love, romance was no more than "sex and physical contact"; the sort of intermittent "refreshment" Wells advocated for his Samurai ruling-class in The Modern Utopia.

Feminist Rebecca West was unlike most of Wells's fawning companions, and she once challenged the writer's progressivist assumptions. Who, she asked, benefitted most from birth control, men or women? Wells was taken aback and admitted he had never tried to answer the question. Rebecca replied she had a sneaking suspicion that it was less a matter of female liberation than an acquiescence to the unrestrained male desire. For him contraception was the solution, however imperfect, to lax sexual relations and the supposed need to control population. He ignored both the moral and psychological pitfalls, but pitfalls there were, as Wells himself was to realize.

Unearthed by Coren, the letters between Wells and his women make for awful reading. Most often he reveals himself as a petulant, self-indulgent man-child, who is dominated and obsessed by his passions. One day when he decided that he didn't care for Amy Catherine Robbins's Christian name, he simply changed it to "Jane." And from then on she was known as Jane, or, rather excusably, "silly Jane" to their friends. After all, she had stolen the man from his lawful spouse, only to spend the rest of her life as a glorified housekeeper. An ironic "liberation."

Fellow leftist ideologue and anti-Christian writer Bertrand Russell never forgave Wells's opportunistic surrender to contemporary snores which caused him to conduct his affairs more secretively. Yet, as far as the Wellsian program was concerned, it paid off. Socialists could advance other, more palatable items, and within a few decades "free love" would become as blasé as class struggle. Meanwhile Wells struggled through middle-age with the messy facts of human nature and that implacable nemesis known as conscience, never to be adequately explained away by Darwinian excuses. When Rebecca West became pregnant with his child in 1914, she refused an abortion contrary to Wells's suggestion and despite the interruption to her very promising journalistic career.

In 1927 the much abused Jane died, leaving him with pangs of guilt for the ill-treatment of the women in his life; though it was less a matter of repentance than remorse. Wells could not bring himself to abandon his old ideals which were certainly convenient if not very consoling.

 

History and Mr. Belloc

Like many writers subject to the sin of pride, Wells's regard for himself had expanded with each of the adulatory reviews of his literary efforts. By the end of the First World War he considered himself qualified to attempt his most ambitious project, the Outline of History; not just the history of humanity, but of the world itself, embodying all of the current learning on physics, geology, biology, anthropology, and history, to say nothing of literature and religion. In so doing, Wells hoped to demonstrate that the course of human development in the past must have its inevitable culmination in the Wellsian "world federation" of the future. He wrote that "...for a new order in the world there must be a new education and...for a real world education there must be a common basis of general ideas."

The story of humanity, Wells believed, was a Social Darwinist one of struggle, adaptation, and constant change, part and parcel of the evolution and development of the animals and all living things.

As Michael Coren has pointed out, the Outline of History was not written by Wells alone but by a team of leftist scholar friends under Wells's general direction. Exactly how much they were responsible for writing is unclear, but given Wells's own ignorance of many of the subjects he was to cover, it must have been substantial. Even so, Wells distilled much of the Outline of History from passages of the Encyclopedia Britannica or other general historical and scientific works. The result was a dense, very long and nearly unreadable mishmash that treated most subjects in a superficial and often inaccurate manner.

The book sold, however, and ran into several editions after its publication in 1919, with millions of copies (most of which now lie unsalable in the darker corners of used bookstores) being printed around the world. Like The Origin of Species, or more recent works of popular history or science like The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the Outline of History became a fashionable book to buy and possess. As with these other books, it is doubtful that many people actually read the Outline of History; but the faddish-­minded professed to know what it was about, and expressed the certainty that it had "proved" this or that, or turned conventional ideas on their heads. Wells could not conceive of his book as merely a passing craze, and convinced himself that industrial workers, shopkeepers and young mothers were all devoting their spare time to the studious perusal of the book. He reveled in the rapturous reception of the Outline of History by progressivists in the England and America.

For all his supposed gifts in the matter of predicting the future, however, Wells did not foresee the utter humiliation he would undergo at the hands of Hilaire Belloc, tarnishing the triumph of the Outline of History and eventually contributing to the book's consignment to the dust-heap of history. Belloc responded to the Outline of History in a series of articles published in Catholic periodicals. Wells wrote a defense, but Belloc could not resist having the last word; and the result was Mr. Belloc Still Objects to Mr. Wells' "Outline of History." Most of Wells's biographers, sympathizing with Wells's leftist opinions, either pass over the Belloc episode with embarrassed silence or focus instead on the support Wells received in this debate from his literary and scientific friends. Coren, though, discusses the debate at length, characterizing it as a devastating humiliation from which Wells never recovered.

Belloc attacked the Outline of History on so many points—reflecting the multitude of egregious historical and scientific errors in the book—that it is difficult to summarize them all. The main battleground of the debate, however, took place in the field of the origins of man, or the question of Darwinian Natural Selection, and human prehistory. Although Belloc devoted a number of chapters to Wells's clearly abysmal summary of recorded history since ancient times, which was characterized by a preoccupation to deny the miraculous and insist on the insidious influence of religion on human development, Wells never replied to Belloc's criticisms in this area; and Belloc, naturally, claimed victory by default. Wells probably sensed Belloc's superior knowledge in the field of history; but his unwillingness even to attempt a defense certainly did him no credit.

On the questions of Natural Selection and human prehistory, however, Wells considered himself supported by the whole of informed scientific opinion, and attempted to put up a defense. Belloc's attacks on Wells's blind faith in Darwinian Natural Selection were detailed and uncompromising. In article after article the great Catholic apologist dissected and dismantled Darwin's ideas, pointing out the numerous flaws in the theory that had come to light in the first two decades of the 20th century. Natural Selection, Belloc self-assuredly proclaimed, was "dead" and "exploded"; and indeed had been so since the 1890's. Turning to the Outline of History's discussion of human prehistory, Belloc demonstrated the obvious fallacies and self-contradictions of Wells's fantasies concerning an initially irreligious humankind that, through some obscure experience, began to imagine the idea of God, promptly turning celebration into near-universal human sacrifice and priestly domination. Belloc's microscope focused mercilessly on such a multitude of howlers throughout the book, such as Wells's confusion of the Incarnation and the Immaculate Conception, that any commonly-educated person would find difficulty in taking the Outline of History seriously.

Gleefully, Belloc provided his readers with a list of dozens of contemporary scientists throughout Europe and America who rejected Darwinian Natural Selection, naming and quoting liberally from their works. Wells's other ripostes were swatted like flies by the astute Belloc, who made them appear as mere examples of Wells's pedantry. Belloc's triumph was complete. Wells, who had been an acquaintance of Belloc's for many years before this debate took place and who had been surprised and hurt by Belloc's attack, later ran into his tormentor at a London club. Attempting to shake hands, he proposed that the debate be called a draw. Belloc, perhaps putting plain fact before good grace in this instance, refused the proffered hand and rejected the idea of a draw, stating "best to save your palm for the evolutionary struggle, Wells. Do they still take Neanderthal men as members here?"

Belloc's critics have chastised him for his now-unfashionably uncompromising nature, as manifested in the brutal manner in which he trounced his enemies. In reality, Belloc was simply that rarest of all creatures, the plain-speaking man. He was not blindly hostile to Wells. Indeed, he went out of his way to express his sincere admiration for Wells's imagination and writing ability, though the latter dismissed this as empty flattery.

Primary among these flaws was Wells's "provincialism," or his contempt for what he did not understand. In the case of tradition, or the Catholic Church in particular, Wells's provincialism expressed itself in an unreasoning, irrational hatred that, as Belloc realized, was rooted at least in part in Wells's Protestant background. In his view of history, ironically enough considering his professed socialism, Wells was hopelessly Victorian. Like the Victorians, Wells believed that history was the tale of human "progress" in science, politics, and social standards. Belloc had spent much of his life smashing the Victorian "Whig" view of history, and he knew it when he saw it in Wells's naive belief that "whatever is earlier must be worse than what comes later." Though the Victorians saw 19th-century British institutions as the culmination of that progress, Wells placed that culmination firmly in the future world state; but both were agreed that the Catholic Church represented a sort of anti-historical force of reaction, an enemy of human progress and development whose defeat and destruction was essential to the realization of human happiness.

 

An Old Fashioned Anti-Papist

With characteristic acumen, Belloc pointed out that the roots of Wells's anti-Catholicism were in his evangelical Protestant upbringing. Wells's mother, an old-fashioned Bible Christian, had attempted to imbue her son with her Puritanical principles. But, although Wells rebelled against the moral and intellectual strictures of his mother's religion, he retained the violent anti-Catholicism that characterized evangelical Protestantism. Wells's metamorphosis from anti-Catholic Protestant to anti-Catholic secularist was, of course, representative in the sense that secular humanism and liberalism are deeply rooted in the Protestant heresy. In Wells, however, one detects a particularly violent and even paranoid hatred of the Church reminiscent of evangelical rantings about the "scarlet lady" or the "whore of Babylon."

Wells expressed hatred for the Church throughout his life. The culmination of these attitudes came with the publication of the pamphlet Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church in 1943. For the most part, this pamphlet is simply a restatement of arguments made two decades earlier in the Outline of History, but distilled into a more vitriolic form. The Catholic Church appears in Crux Ansata as the monolithic and "autocratic" enemy of "independent thought"; one in addition that would supposedly "brook no discussion" of its theology, although Wells at the same time claimed that Church theologians were constantly arguing over the subject. As in the old Whig tradition of history to which Wells was so attached, the Catholic Church appears throughout the centuries as the "reactionary" enemy to Progress, as opposed to the "living and progressive Protestantism" that emerged in opposition to it.

While he was at pains to insist that the Catholic Church was "dying" after the 16th century, and largely composed of criminals, prostitutes and illiterates in the 20th century, Wells nevertheless demonstrated a paranoia concerning Catholicism that belied his insistence on its insignificance. In the shadow of the darkest years of World War II, this fear blossomed into a paranoia that appears to have threatened the author's mental balance. Pope Pius XII, whom Wells dubbed for some bizarre reason the "Shinto-Catholic Pope," was, he argued, a mental inferior; and yet somehow this same Pope had managed to unleash a "Catholic blitzkrieg" on Great Britain, taking control of the BBC and the British War Office, and making use of his "meddling" Jesuits to spread the "mental cancer" of Catholicism throughout the country. World War II embodied for Wells the "world-wide struggle of our species to release itself from the strangling octopus of Catholic Christianity," with Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito presumably being Jesuits in disguise. Rome, Wells demanded, must be bombed flat and Pope Pius XII recognized as an enemy of world peace. Stalin, of course, came in for no such criticism.

Perhaps nowhere else, however, is the essential hypocrisy of Wells's philosophy more apparent than here. While condemning the Church for its "autocratic" and intolerant methods, Wells expressed admiration for its attempt to create and enforce what he called a "world government...a government ruling men through the educated co-ordination of their minds in a common conception of human history and human destiny."

For all of his rhetoric (borrowed from Protestant evangelicals as well as mainstream Victorian Whig historians) about the Church as the enemy of independent thought, constitutionalism, free speech and so on, Wells really had no quarrel with what he imagined to be the Church's tactics. Like the Nazis who urged the most ruthless and inhuman methods in the destruction of Bolshevism, and vice-versa, Wells argued that the key in the war against the Church was to "fight intolerance with intolerance." At the very least, he favored a return to the anti-Catholic penal laws of Elizabethan England. Clearly implied in his work is a belief that the war on the Church should be a war of extermination, carried out with unmerciful harshness. There is no reason to believe that Wells would have balked at concentration camps for Catholics, who he considered anyway to be physically and mentally inferior degenerates.

It is probably safe to say that the outpouring of Catholic indignation in response to this pamphlet gave it much more credit than it was worth. Crux Ansata was the rambling, pathetic gibberish of a dying man in the last stages of mental decay. Wells's prose had become both hysterical and feeble, while the contradictions in his arguments were so copious and blatant as to be a disgrace even to the pages of a secular humanist publication. As with the Outline of History, Wells eschewed serious research, relying instead on the redoubtable Encyclopedia Britannica for most of his assertions. He even used the pamphlet as a platform to argue, for some strange reason, on the "mixed origin" of Shakespeare, whom Wells insisted was not a real man but the creation of several different writers. Few even noticed it.

 

Conclusion

With every new war or revolution, civilization seemed to be devolving into greater barbarism rather than advancing to the communal nirvana that Wells had anticipated. Such was the admission in his last work, Mind at the End of Its Tether, written in 1945 when the rest of the world was too busy reeling from yet another bloody bout of progress to mind the self-­indulgent laments of its erstwhile prophet. Nor could Wells quite appreciate to what depths his own students would lead us. Libertine though he was, Wells was still a product of late Victorian culture, cloaking his private obscenity in a public garment of gentility. He would have been dismayed by the crass eroticism of modern marketing and culture. But our present society is merely the logical consequence of the Wellsian attitude, which was always asking "why not?" and pushing the moral envelope as far as it could go. We see just how bankrupt the secularist vision is—both in terms of Wells's own life and in the lives of millions of others who became the tortured playthings of the social engineering that he championed.

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Matthew Anger has written for traditional Catholic journals on history, politics, literature and popular culture. He was an assistant editor for the Puritans' Progress series, published by Angelus Press. Mr. Anger currently resides in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and four children.

Edward G. Lengel, who holds a Ph.D. in British History from the University of Virginia, currently works as a documentary editor with the Papers of George Washington. He has previously written articles on history and current affairs for Catholic Family News. Mr. Lengel resides in Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife and three children.