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