H. G. WELLS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 386, 15 November 1946, Page 22

(Milford.)

H. G. WELLS

Sir,-If Mr. Bell will take another look at his book on logic, he will discover that "best,’’ as I used it, was not a "coloured" term, but simply the literal expression of an objective fact; for it is an, objective fact, admitted by all historians, that such men as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Shake--speare, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, were among the best minds of their age, and it is generally agreed that Maritain is the equal of any thinker now alive. It is likewise an objective historical fact that Christianity is the source of all that is best in our western civilisation, such as our conviction of the supreme worth of the individual man as an individual. I suppose, of course, that one has a scale -of values, in which moral convictions rank higher than mechanical invention,

economic processes, or political organisation. The history of recent years would seem to have provided an empirical proof of the validity of that scale of values. If Mr. Wells’s mission was, as Mr. McCracken has declared,, "to produce equality and plenty from the horrors of class and monetary distinction" and "to do this without authoritarianism," it is small wonder that he died a disappointed man. Squaring the circle would have been much easier. However, as Mr. Wells died almost a millionaire, I doubt whether the abolition of monetary values was part of his programme. Mr. McCracken’s reference to religion as "humbug" is amusing; he seems unaware of the fact that the biological term for man is "homo sapiens’; and he has taken literally the phrase "a battering down of open doors," whose metaphorical significance I should have thought was obvious. As for the vigorous language used by Christ, eg., in St. Matthew XXIII, the tone is quite different from that of Mr. Wells’s utterances; besides it is by no means certain that the persons attacked by Mr. Wells were comparable to the Pharisees. Surely Mr. Wasmuth’s canons of good taste are excessively refined if they condemn a criticism of the ideas and work of Mr. Wells, simply because that criticism is occasioned by a_ laudatory obituary. And what harm is there in "parading values" or "advancing a spiritual diet,’’ when those values are accepted by about a third of the human race, some of them even by the vast majority of mankind? Christianity, despite the pressing invitation of secularists, will not ‘forsake its mysteries," _and their threat of "leaving it in the discard" it treats with a tolerant smile.

G.H.

D.

(Greenmeadows).