Within my own memory there remained of the Catholic scheme a most insufficient, but still solid, skeleton structure maintaining society in the English-speaking non-Catholic world. Within my own memory the Incarnation was commonly held by rich and poor in England and America, and very much of what the Incarnation implies was taken for granted in the structure of society. An attack upon that doctrine, stated in so many words, would have been violently offensive not forty years ago. As for a mere taking for granted that it was false, the books doing this were then thought eccentric. By a curious irony, the non-Catholic English-speaking world connected such blasphemy with the specifically Catholic cultures which were (in those days) alluded to as “Continental.” Side by side with this fundamental doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity, which certainly such a brief time ago was the commonplace of all our society, it possessed sundry other essential dogmas of Catholic truth—the Personality of God, His omnipotence, His creation of all things, the Immortality of the Human Soul, _and_ the dual destiny of mankind: the conviction that man by his own free will might lose the grace of God, and that if he lost it his eternal existence would be marred and deprived of the end for which it was created. In plain English, men believed in Heaven and Hell: particularly wicked men—upon whom such ideas have the most salutary effect. The whole range of emotions which arise from such doctrines as surely, and are as inseparable from them, as a scent from a flower or the emotions of landscape from the living eye, permeated society. Not only were these doctrines retained with all their effect, but the chief Catholic social disciplines still had value. Property was still held to be a right, not a mere arrangement or a system. Its proper distribution was thought a good: its capture by a few, an evil: the Socialist attack on it as a principle, inhuman. The family was still the unit of the State. The control of the parent over the child was taken for granted and the action of the State, or of any other authority, was regarded as a delegation, and a perilous delegation at that. Marriage was normally regarded as indissoluble. Behind all this remaining grasp of the last but most essential factors in the general scheme of Catholic society—all that by which men could still vaguely be called “Christians”—went the common-sense appreciation of the truth that Man was Man: that we could not deal with Man by experiment as a changeable being, that he was not a mere phase in process of passing, but a fixed type with a known nature.