The Path to Rome

The Path to Rome

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Path to Rome, by Hilaire Belloc
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Title: The Path to Rome
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7373] [This file was first posted
on April 22, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE PATH
TO ROME ***

Eric Eldred

The Path to Rome
Hilaire Belloc

'. .. AMORE ANTIQUI RITUS, ALTO SUB NUMINE ROMAE'

PRAISE OF THIS BOOK
To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book,
and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit), greeting--and
whatever else can be had for nothing.
If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this way.
One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley
where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them
all--when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great
lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a
Christian by force of rhetoric--what should I note (after so many years)
but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more than
mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new, as
though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a
change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of
some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this shrine (built
there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered, and there saw
that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as the outer part; and
this pleased me as much as though a fortune had been left to us all; for
one's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the
kernel of that nut.
Moreover, saying my prayers there, I noticed behind the high altar a
statue of Our Lady, so extraordinary and so different from all I had ever
seen before, so much the spirit of my valley, that I was quite taken out
of myself and vowed a vow there to go to Rome on Pilgrimage and see

all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved; and I said, 'I will start
from the place where I served in arms for my sins; I will walk all the
way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I will sleep rough and
cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every morning; and I will
be present at high Mass in St Peter's on the Feast of St Peter and St
Paul.'
Then I went out of the church still having that Statue in my mind, and I
walked again farther into the world, away from my native valley, and
so ended some months after in a place whence I could fulfil my vow;
and I started as you shall hear. All my other vows I broke one by one.
For a faggot must be broken every stick singly. But the strict vow I
kept, for I entered Rome on foot that year in time, and I heard high
Mass on the Feast of the Apostles, as many can testify--to wit:
Monsignor this, and Chamberlain the other, and the Bishop of
_so-and-so--o--polis in partibus infidelium;_ for we were all there
together.
And why (you will say) is all this put by itself in what Anglo-Saxons
call a Foreword, but gentlemen a Preface? Why, it is because I have
noticed that no book can appear without some such thing tied on before
it; and as it is folly to neglect the fashion, be certain that I read some
eight or nine thousand of them to be sure of how they were written and
to be safe from generalizing on too frail a basis.
And having read them and discovered first, that it was the custom