Materialistic determinism was viewed as a central philosophy underlying the Outline, with Wells portraying human progress to be both a blind and inevitable rise from the darkness of religious superstition to the light of scientific utopia.

He accused Wells of prejudiced provincialism and attacked his tacitly anti-Christian stance, stating that he had devoted more space in his "history" to the Persian campaign against the Greeks than he had to the figure of Christ.

In 1926, Belloc assembled the voluminous articles into a single volume entitled A Companion to Mr. Wells’s "Outline of History".

Wells responded to Belloc's articles with a series of six of his own, and found little interest in the academic dispute outside the Catholic publications.

May I point out to you that Mr. Belloc has been attacking my reputation as a thinker, writer, an impartial historian and an educated person for four and twenty fortnights in the Universe?