him who propagates it) which treats of the religious life of Europe as
though it were something quite apart from the general development of our
civilization.

There are innumerable text-books in which a man may read the whole history
of his own, a European, country, from, say, the fifth to the sixteenth
century, and never hear of the Blessed Sacrament: which is as though a man
were to write of England in the nineteenth century without daring to speak
of newspapers and limited companies. Warped by such historical enormities,
the reader is at a loss to understand the ordinary motives of his
ancestors. Not only do the great crises in the history of the Church
obviously escape him, but much more do the great crises in civil history
escape him.

To set right, then, our general view of history it is necessary to be ready
with a sound answer to the prime question of all, which is this: "What was
the Roman Empire?"

If you took an immigrant coming fresh into the United States today and let
him have a full knowledge of all that had happened since the Civil War: if
you gave him of the Civil War itself a partial, confused and very summary
account: if of all that went before it, right away back to the first
colonists, you were to leave him either wholly ignorant or ludicrously
misinformed (and slightly informed at that), what then could he make of the
problems in American Society, or how would he be equipped to understand the
nation of which he was to be a citizen? To give such a man the elements of
civic training you must let him know what the Colonies were, what the War
of Independence, and what the main institutions preceding that event and
created by it. He would have further to know soundly the struggle between
North and South, and the principles underlying that struggle. Lastly,