the European faith, not its present surface, which explains all.

The struggle was against Prussia.

Why did Prussia arise? Because the imperfect Byzantine evangelization of
the Eastern Slavonic Plains just failed to meet, there in Prussia, the
western flood of living tradition welling up from Rome. Prussia was an
hiatus. In that small neglected area neither half cultivated from the
Byzantine East nor fully from the Roman West rose a strong garden of weeds.
And weeds sow themselves. Prussia, that is, this patch of weeds, could not
extend until the West weakened through schism. It had to wait till the
battle of the Reformation died down. But it waited. And at last, when there
was opportunity, it grew prodigiously. The weed patch over-ran first Poland
and the Germanies, then half Europe. When it challenged all civilization at
last it was master of a hundred and fifty million souls.

What are the tests of this war? In their vastly different fashions they
are Poland and Ireland--the extreme islands of tenacious tradition: the
conservators of the Past through a national passion for the Faith.

The Great War was a clash between an uneasy New Thing which desired to live
its own distorted life anew and separate from Europe, and the old Christian
rock. This New Thing is, in its morals, in the morals spread upon it by
Prussia, the effect of that great storm wherein three hundred years ago
Europe made shipwreck and was split into two. This war was the largest, yet
no more than the recurrent, example of that unceasing wrestle: the outer,
the unstable, the untraditional--which is barbarism--pressing blindly
upon the inner, the traditional, the strong--which is Ourselves: which is
Christendom: which is Europe.