Mohammedan came within three days' march of Tours, the Mongol was seen from
the walls of Tournus on the Sâone: right in France. The Scandinavian savage
poured into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul, and almost overwhelmed
the whole island of Britain. There was nothing left of Europe but a central
core.

Nevertheless Europe survived. In the refloresence which followed that dark
time--in the Middle Ages--the Catholic notes not hypotheses but documents
and facts; he sees the Parliaments arising not from some imaginary
"Teutonic" root--a figment of the academies--but from the very real and
present great monastic orders, in Spain, in Britain, in Gaul--never outside
the old limits of Christendom. He sees the Gothic architecture spring high,
spontaneous and autochthonic, first in the territory of Paris and thence
spread outwards in a ring to the Scotch Highlands and to the Rhine. He sees
the new Universities, a product of the soul of Europe, re-awakened--he
sees the marvelous new civilization of the Middle Ages rising as a
transformation of the old Roman society, a transformation wholly from
within, and motived by the Faith.

The trouble, the religious terror, the madnesses of the fifteenth century,
are to him the diseases of one body--Europe--in need of medicine.

The medicine was too long delayed. There comes the disruption of the
European body at the Reformation.

It ought to be death; but since the Church is not subject to mortal law it
is not death. Of those populations which break away from religion and from
civilization none (he perceives) were of the ancient Roman stock--save
Britain. The Catholic, reading his history, watches in that struggle
_England_: not the effect of the struggle on the fringes of Europe, on