Europe and the Faith | Page 9

emplacement of the great European cities, the routes of communication
between them, the universities, the Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and
their jurisprudence, all these derive entirely from the old Roman
Empire, our well-spring.
It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly
foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion of
it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing.
The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in
history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but
with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave
the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument is
equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among men
must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church might
have risen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a fact, spring
up in the high Greek tide of the Levant and carries to this day the noble

Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it did, as a fact, rise just
at the inception of that united Imperial Roman system which we are
about to examine. It might have carried for its ornaments and have had
for its sacred language the accoutrements and the speech of any one of
the other great civilizations, living or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of
Persia, of China, of the Indies. As a matter of historical fact, the Church
was so circumstanced in its origin and development that its external
accoutrement and its language were those of the Mediterranean, that is,
of Greece and Rome: of the Empire.
Now those who would falsify history from a conscious or unconscious
bias against the Catholic Church, will do so in many ways, some of
which will always prove contradictory of some others. For truth is one,
error disparate and many.
The attack upon the Catholic Church may be compared to the violent,
continual, but inchoate attack of barbarians upon some civilized
fortress; such an attack will proceed now from this direction, now from
that, along any one of the infinite number of directions from which a
single point may be approached. Today there is attack from the North,
tomorrow an attack from the South. Their directions are flatly
contradictory, but the contradiction is explained by the fact that each is
directed against a central and fixed opponent.
Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the Roman Empire as a pagan
institution; they will pretend that the Catholic Church was something
alien to that pagan thing; that the Empire was great and admirable
before Catholicism came, weak and despicable upon its acceptation of
the Creed. They will represent the Faith as creeping like an Oriental
disease into the body of a firm Western society which it did not so
much transform as liquefy and dissolve.
Others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable
Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and
vigorous barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all manner of
splendid pagan qualities--which usually turn out to be nineteenth
century Protestant qualities. These are contrasted against the diseased
Catholic body of the Roman Empire which they are pictured as
attacking.
Others adopt a simpler manner. They treat the Empire and its
institutions as dead after a certain date, and discuss the rise of a new

society without considering its Catholic and Imperial origins. Nothing
is commoner, for instance (in English schools), than for boys to be
taught that the pirate raids and settlements of the fifth century in this
Island were the "coming of the English," and the complicated history of
Britain is simplified for them into a story of how certain bold seafaring
pagans (full of all the virtues we ascribe to ourselves today) first
devastated, then occupied, and at last, of their sole genius, developed a
land which Roman civilization had proved inadequate to hold.
There is, again, a conscious or unconscious error (conscious or
unconscious, pedantic or ignorant, according to the degree of learning
in him who propagates it) which treats of the religious life of Europe as
though it were something quite apart from the general development of
our civilization.
There are innumerable text-books in which a man may read the whole
history of his own, a European, country, from, say, the fifth to the
sixteenth century, and never hear of the Blessed Sacrament: which is as
though a man were to write of England in the nineteenth century
without daring to speak of newspapers and limited companies. Warped
by such historical enormities, the reader is at a loss to understand the
ordinary motives of his ancestors. Not only do the great crises in the
history of the Church obviously escape