could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in his
blame, he is absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive so
can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions
of the European story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not
Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. _They_
have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and
disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: _he_ sees it all from its centre in
its essence, and together.

I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The
Church.

The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience which begins with
the development of the Church in the basin of the Mediterranean. It
goes back much further than that. The Catholic understands the soil in
which that plant of the Faith arose. In a way that no other man can, he
understands the Roman military effort; why that effort clashed with the
gross Asiatic and merchant empire of Carthage; what we derived from the
light of Athens; what food we found in the Irish and the British, the
Gallic tribes, their dim but awful memories of immortality; what cousinship
we claim with the ritual of false but profound religions, and even how
ancient Israel (the little violent people, before they got poisoned,
while they were yet National in the mountains of Judea) was, in the old
dispensation at least, central and (as we Catholics say) sacred: devoted to
a peculiar mission.

For the Catholic the whole perspective falls into its proper order. The
picture is normal. Nothing is distorted to him. The procession of our great
story is easy, natural, and full. It is also final.