to give an ever-increasing power of working the mines and extracting
the gold.

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 ideal