stood out, and yet he saved throughout Europe the ideal thing for which he
was standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why the enthusiasm of the
populace rose: the guarantee of the plain man's healthy and moral existence
against the threat of the wealthy, and the power of the State--the
self-government of the general Church, had been defended by a champion
up to the point of death. For the morals enforced by the Church are the
guarantee of freedom.

Further the Catholic reader is not content, as is the non-Catholic, with a
blind, irrational assertion that the miracles _could_ not take place. He is
not wholly possessed of a firm, and lasting faith that no marvelous events
ever take place. He reads the evidence. He cannot believe that there was
a conspiracy of falsehood (in the lack of all proof of such conspiracy).
He is moved to a conviction that events so minutely 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