Europe and the Faith | Page 3

poor, no pressure of
undeveloped barbarians against developed lands, no plan of
exploitation, nor of men organized, attempting to seize the soil of less
fruitful owners.
How came these two opponents into being, the potential antagonism of
which was so strong that millions willingly suffered their utmost for the
sake of a decision?

That man who would explain the tremendous judgment on the
superficial test of religious differences among modern "sects" must be
bewildered indeed! I have seen the attempt made in more than one
journal and book, enemy and Allied. The results are lamentable!
Prussia indeed, the protagonist, was atheist. But her subject provinces
supported her exultantly, Catholic Cologne and the Rhine and tamely
Catholic Bavaria. Her main support--without which she could not have
challenged Europe--was that very power whose sole reason for being
was Catholicism: the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine which, from Vienna,
controlled and consolidated the Catholic against the Orthodox Slav: the
House of Hapsburg-Lorraine was the champion of Catholic
organization in Eastern Europe.
The Catholic Irish largely stood apart.
Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not Catholic because those
things are foreign, was more than apart. Britain had long forgotten the
unity of Europe. France, a protagonist, was notoriously divided within
herself over the religious principle of that unity. No modern religious
analysis such as men draw up who think of religion as Opinion will
make anything of all this. Then why was there a fight? People who talk
of "Democracy" as the issue of the Great War may be neglected:
Democracy--one noble, ideal, but rare and perilous, form of human
government--was not at stake. No historian can talk thus. The
essentially aristocratic policy of England now turned to a plutocracy,
the despotism of Russia and Prussia, the immense complex of all other
great modern states gives such nonsense the lie.
People who talk of "A struggle for supremacy between the two
Teutonic champions Germany and England" are less respectable still.
England is not Teutonic, and was not protagonist. The English Cabinet
decided by but the smallest possible majority (a majority of one) to
enter the war. The Prussian Government never dreamt it would have to
meet England at all. There is no question of so single an issue. The
world was at war. Why? No man is an historian who cannot answer
from the past. All who can answer from the past, and are historians, see
that it is the historical depth of the European faith, not its present
surface, which explains all.
The struggle was against Prussia.
Why did Prussia arise? Because the imperfect Byzantine evangelization

of the Eastern Slavonic Plains just failed to meet, there in Prussia, the
western flood of living tradition welling up from Rome. Prussia was an
hiatus. In that small neglected area neither half cultivated from the
Byzantine East nor fully from the Roman West rose a strong garden of
weeds. And weeds sow themselves. Prussia, that is, this patch of weeds,
could not extend until the West weakened through schism. It had to
wait till the battle of the Reformation died down. But it waited. And at
last, when there was opportunity, it grew prodigiously. The weed patch
over-ran first Poland and the Germanies, then half Europe. When it
challenged all civilization at last it was master of a hundred and fifty
million souls.
What are the tests of this war? In their vastly different fashions they are
Poland and Ireland--the extreme islands of tenacious tradition: the
conservators of the Past through a national passion for the Faith.
The Great War was a clash between an uneasy New Thing which
desired to live its own distorted life anew and separate from Europe,
and the old Christian rock. This New Thing is, in its morals, in the
morals spread upon it by Prussia, the effect of that great storm wherein
three hundred years ago Europe made shipwreck and was split into two.
This war was the largest, yet no more than the recurrent, example of
that unceasing wrestle: the outer, the unstable, the untraditional--which
is barbarism--pressing blindly upon the inner, the traditional, the
strong--which is Ourselves: which is Christendom: which is Europe.
Small wonder that the Cabinet at Westminster hesitated!
We used to say during the war that if Prussia conquered civilization
failed, but that if the Allies conquered civilization was
reestablished--What did we mean? We meant, not that the New
Barbarians could not handle a machine: They can. But we meant that
they had learnt all from us. We meant that they cannot _continue of
themselves_; and that we can. We meant that they have no roots.
When we say that Vienna was the tool of Berlin, that Madrid should be
ashamed, what do we mean? It has no meaning save that civilization is
one and we its family: