the most vulgar professional politicians and their rich paymasters shouting
for "Democracy;" pedants mumbling about "Race." On the side of Prussia (the
negation of nationality) you have the use of some vague national mission of
conquest divinely given to the very various Germans and the least competent
to govern. You would come at last (if you listened to such varied cries)
to see the Great War as a mere folly, a thing without motive, such as the
emptiest internationals conceive the thing to have been.

So much for the example of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to the
tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The Catholic
alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe: he alone can see and
judge in this matter.

From so recent and universal an example I turn to one local, distant,
precise, in which this same Catholic Conscience of European history may be
tested.

Consider the particular (and clerical) example of Thomas à Becket: the
story of St. Thomas of Canterbury. I defy any man to read the story of
Thomas a Becket in Stubbs, or in Green, or in Bright, or in any other of
our provincial Protestant handbooks, and to make head or tail of it.

Here is a well-defined and limited subject of study. It concerns only a
few years. A great deal is known about it, for there are many contemporary
accounts. Its comprehension is of vast interest to history. The Catholic
may well ask: "How it is I cannot understand the story as told by these
Protestant writers? Why does it not make sense?"

The story is briefly this: A certain prelate, the Primate of England at the
time, was asked to admit certain changes in the status of the clergy. The