Europe and the Faith | Page 6

recorded and so amply testified, happened. Here again is the European,
the chiefly reasonable man, the Catholic, pitted against the barbarian
skeptic with his empty, unproved, mechanical dogmas of material
sequence.
And these miracles, for a Catholic reader, are but the extreme points
fitting in with the whole scheme. He knows what European civilization
was before the twelfth century. He knows what it was to become after
the sixteenth. He knows why and how the Church would stand out
against a certain itch for change. He appreciates why and how a
character like that of St. Thomas would resist. He is in no way
perplexed to find that the resistance failed on its technical side. He sees
that it succeeded so thoroughly in its spirit as to prevent, in a moment
when its occurrence would have been far more dangerous and general
than in the sixteenth century, the overturning of the connection between

Church and State.
The enthusiasm of the populace he particularly comprehends. He
grasps the connection between that enthusiasm and the miracles which
attended St. Thomas' intercession; not because the miracles were
fantasies, but because a popular recognition of deserved sanctity is the
later accompaniment and the recipient of miraculous power.
It is the details of history which require the closest analysis. I have,
therefore, chosen a significant detail with which to exemplify my case.
Just as a man who thoroughly understands the character of the English
squires and of their position in the English countrysides would have to
explain at some length (and with difficulty) to a foreigner how and why
the evils of the English large estates were, though evils, national; just as
a particular landlord case of peculiar complexity or violent might afford
him a special test; so the martyrdom of St. Thomas makes, for the
Catholic who is viewing Europe, a very good example whereby he can
show how well he understands what is to other men not understandable,
and how simple is to him, and how human, a process which, to men not
Catholic, can only be explained by the most grotesque assumptions; as
that universal contemporary testimony must be ignored; that men are
ready to die for things in which they do not believe; that the philosophy
of a society does not permeate that society; or that a popular
enthusiasm ubiquitous and unchallenged, is mechanically produced to
the order of some centre of government! All these absurdities are
connoted in the non-Catholic view of the great quarrel, nor is there any
but the Catholic conscience of Europe that explains it.
The Catholic sees that the whole of the à Becket business was like the
struggle of a man who is fighting for his liberty and is compelled to
maintain it (such being the battleground chosen by his opponents) upon
a privilege inherited from the past. The non-Catholic simply cannot
understand it and does not pretend to understand it.
Now let us turn from this second example, highly definite and limited,
to a third quite different from either of the other two and the widest of
all. Let us turn to the general aspect of all European history. We can
here make a list of the great lines on which the Catholic can appreciate
what other men only puzzle at, and can determine and know those
things upon which other men make no more than a guess.
The Catholic Faith spreads over the Roman world, not because the

Jews were widely dispersed, but because the intellect of antiquity, and
especially the Roman intellect, accepted it in its maturity.
The material decline of the Empire is not co-relative with, nor parallel
to, the growth of the Catholic Church; it is the counterpart of that
growth. You have been told "Christianity (a word, by the way, quite
unhistorical) crept into Rome as she declined, and hastened that
decline." That is bad history. Rather accept this phrase and retain it:
"The Faith is that which Rome accepted in her maturity; nor was the
Faith the cause of her decline, but rather the conservator of all that
could be conserved."
There was no strengthening of us by the advent of barbaric blood; there
was a serious imperilling of civilization in its old age by some small
(and mainly servile) infiltration of barbaric blood; if civilization so
attacked did not permanently fail through old age we owe that happy
rescue to the Catholic Faith.
In the next period--the Dark Ages--the Catholic proceeds to see Europe
saved against a universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, the
Scandinavian: he notes that the fierceness of the attack was such that
anything save something divinely instituted would have broken down.
The Mohammedan came within three days' march of Tours, the
Mongol was seen from the walls of Tournus on the Sâone: right in