supposed student in some remote future, reading history in some place from
which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly departed, and to which the
habits and traditions of our civilization will therefore be wholly alien,
would each, in proportion to his science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped
today by the Catholic student who is of European birth, the truth that
Europe and the Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who
do _not_ grasp it (or do not admit it) are those writers of history whose
special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic Church,
or who have a traditional bias against it.

These men are numerous, they have formed, in the Protestant and other
anti-Catholic universities, a whole school of hypothetical and unreal
history in which, though the original workers are few, their copyists are
innumerable: and that school of unreal history is still dogmatically taught
in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the world.

Now our quarrel with this school should be, not that it is
anti-Catholic--that concerns another sphere of thought--but that it is
unhistorical.

To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and its
spirit was the sole origin of European civilization; to forget or to
diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its maturity a certain
religion; to conceal the fact that this religion was not a vague mood, but
a determinate and highly organized corporation; to present in the first
centuries some non-existant "Christianity" in place of the existant Church;
to suggest that the Faith was a vague agreement among individual holders
of opinions instead of what it historically _was_, the doctrine of a fixed
authoritative institution; to fail to identify that institution with the
institution still here today and still called the Catholic Church; to