As a result of its autocratic and centralized system, further, Catholicism is a special force of political conservatism in Catholic countries, with the single exception of Ireland, where its dependence on the mass of the people has thus far kept it in close alliance with their nationalist movement in despite of any papal restrictions. Such an alliance is of course unfavourable to intellectual progress on other lines; and English Protestant policy, largely directed by sectarian feeling, has thus preserved in Ireland the type of Catholicism it fears. Such Catholicism still tends to retard popular education; and the one general advantage the Protestant countries can claim over the Catholic is their lower degree of illiteracy. On the other hand, the rationalism of the more enlightened Catholic countries, where the Church lacks official power, is as a rule more explicit, more awake to the nature of the force opposed to it; while in Protestant Germany it is little concerned to oppose a Church with small organized or academic influence, and till lately attempted little popular criticism of faith. Every country thus presents some special type of intellectual harm or drawback resulting from the presence of organized Christianity; and in all alike it makes in varying degrees an obstacle to light. In the highest degree does this seem to be true of the land where it has had the longest continuous life. Alone among the nations Greece contributes nothing to the world's renovation. Italy, despite the papacy, has a swarm of eager and questioning thinkers, working at the human sciences; Spain stirs under all the leaden folds of clericalism; but Greece, where the faith has never undergone eclipse since Justinian's day, remains intellectually almost Byzantine, vainly divided between Christian dogma and an external classic tradition, neither ancient nor modern. Yet this is the one European country where belief is ostensibly untroubled by its enemy. It is hard to say how far the surface of orthodoxy conforms to the mental life underneath; but there is no escape from the conclusion that a new mental life can return to the land of Aristotle only in the measure in which it fully readmits from the West the spirit of search and challenge which he and Socrates left to re-inspire a world growing moribund under the spell of faith. § 3. Conclusion and Prognosis