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Show CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY. The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience con-science which begins with the development of the Church in the basin of the Mediterranean; it goes back much further than that. He understands also 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 merchant empire of Carthage; what it derived from the light of Athens; what food it fount! in the Celtic tribes and their dim but awful memories of immortality; what analogy it had with the ritual of false but profound religions, and even why ami how the Jewish people, the little violent corporate tradition of Palestine, was so essential that he has a right to call it, in the old dispensation, dispensa-tion, divine. For the Catholic the whole perspective perspec-tive falls into its natural order; nothing is distorted dis-torted to him, and the procession of our great story is easy, natural, ami final. This being so, the odern Catholic, especially if he is confined to (Suse- of the English tongue, suffers from a curious, and it is to be hoped, a passing accident. X'obook, nor even as yet the; writings of one man in that tongue', gives him a conspectus of the past; he is compelled to study authorities, Xorth German or English copying X'orth German, whose view 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 things they connote, but. unless he has the leisure or an ex-temled ex-temled study, he cannot put his finger upon the precise characteristics of the absurdity. In the books he reads if they are in the English language lan-guage at least he finels things lacking which his Catholicism tells him should be there; but he cannot can-not supply their place, because the non-Catholic who wrote those books was himself ignorant of such things, or rather could not conceive them. Ililaire Belloc, in Catholic World. |