CHAPTER X.
HISTORY.
"We have heard, O God, with our ears: our fathers have declared to us, 'The work thou hast wrought in their days, and in the days of old.'"—Psalm XLIII.
"Thus independent of times and places, the Popes have never found any difficulty, when the proper moment came, of following out a new and daring line of policy (as their astonished foes have called it), of leaving the old world to shift for itself and to disappear from the scene in its due season, and of fastening on and establishing themselves in the new.
"I am led to this line of thought by St. Gregory's behaviour to the
Anglo-Saxon race, on the break-up of the old civilisation."—Cardinal
Newman, "Historical Sketches," III, "A Characteristic of the Popes."
Of the so-called secular subjects history is the one which depends most for its value upon the honour in which it is held and upon the standpoint from which it is taught. Not that history can be truly a secular subject if it is taught as a whole—isolated periods 01 subdivisions may be separated from the rest and studied in a purely secular spirit, or with no spirit at all—for the animating principle is not in the subdivided parts but in the whole, and only if it is taught as a whole can it receive the honour which belongs to it as the "study of kings," the school of experience and judgment, and one of the greatest teachers of truth.
In modern times, since the fall of the Western Empire, European history has centred, whether for love or for hatred, round the Church; and it is thus that Catholic education comes to its own in this study, and the Catholic mind is more at home among the phenomena and problems of history than other minds for whom the ages of faith are only vaults of superstition, or periods of mental servitude, or at best, ages of high romance. Without the Church what are the ideals of the Crusades, of the Holy Roman Empire, of the religious spirit of chivalry, or the struggle concerning Investitures, the temporal power of the Popes and their temporal sovereignty, the misery of the "Babylonian Captivity," the development of the religious orders—in contemporary history—the Italian question during the last fifty years, or the present position of the Church in France? These are incomprehensible phenomena without the Church to give the key to the controversies and meaning to the ideals. Without knowing the Catholic Church from within, it is impossible to conceive of all these things as realities affecting conscience and the purpose and direction of life; their significance is lost if they have to be explained as the mere human struggle for supremacy of persons or classes, mere ecclesiastical disputes, or dreams of imperialism in Church matters. Take away the Church and try to draw up a course of lessons satisfactory to the minds even of girls under eighteen, and at every turn a thoughtful question may be critical, and the explanations in the hands of a non-Catholic teacher scarcely less futile than the efforts of old Kaspar to satisfy "young Peterkin" about the battle of Blenheim.
What about Investitures?
"Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for?"
What about Canossa?