But the modern Catholic, especially if he is confined to the use of
the English tongue, suffers from a deplorable (and it is to be hoped),
a passing accident. No modern book in the English tongue gives him a
conspectus of the past; he is compelled to study violently hostile
authorities, North German (or English copying North German), whose
knowledge is never that of the true and balanced European.

He comes perpetually across phrases which he sees at once to be absurd,
either in their limitations or in the contradictions they connote. But
unless he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot put his finger
upon the precise mark of the absurdity. In the books he reads--if they
are in the English language at least--he finds things lacking which his
instinct for Europe tells him should be there; but he cannot supply their
place because the man who wrote those books was himself ignorant of such
things, or rather could not conceive them.

I will take two examples to show what I mean. The one is the present
battlefield of Europe: a large affair not yet cleared, concerning all
nations and concerning them apparently upon matters quite indifferent to
the Faith. It is a thing which any stranger might analyze (one would think)
and which yet no historian explains.

The second I deliberately choose as an example particular and narrow: an
especially doctrinal story. I mean the story of St. Thomas of Canterbury,
of which the modern historian makes nothing but an incomprehensible
contradiction; but which is to a Catholic a sharp revelation of the
half-way house between the Empire and modern nationalities.

As to the first of these two examples: Here is at last the Great War in
Europe: clearly an issue--things come to a head. How came it? Why these two