the Continent and the cutting off of everything in this island save the
South and East from the common life of Europe. He knows that Christian
parliaments are not dimly and possibly barbaric, but certainly and plainly
monastic in their origin; he is not surprised to learn that they arose
first in the Pyrenean valleys during the struggle against the Mohammedans;
he sees how probable or necessary was such an origin just when the chief
effort of Europe was at work in the _Reconquista_.

In general, the history of Europe and of England develops naturally before
the Catholic reader; he is not tempted to that succession of theories,
self-contradicting and often put forward for the sake of novelty, which
has confused and warped modern reconstructions of the past. Above all, he
does not commit the prime historical error of "reading history backwards."
He does not think of the past as a groping towards our own perfection of
today. He has in his own nature the nature of its career: he feels the fall
and the rise: the rhythm of a life which is his own.

The Europeans are of his flesh. He can converse with the first century or
the fifteenth; shrines are not odd to him nor oracles; and if he is the
supplanter, he is also the heir of the gods.




EUROPE AND THE FAITH




I