The Barbarian hopes—and that is the very mark of him—that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers. ... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot _make_; that he can befog and destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.[34] Belloc is one of the few writers in the English world of the last fifty years who wanted to remain himself, and who desired to stand exactly where he was: a Christian man standing in a tradition whose religion is Catholic and whose origins are in the Roman Order. Because of this, Belloc will never be considered an Intellectual. He should not be so considered. He detested the term. The contemporary Intellectual of the Western World has come out of the same past as Belloc, but he rejects that past as he rejects its religion. That is why the past fifty to seventy-five years of intellectual life have been fevered with experiment—in literature, in philosophy, in politics, in all the arts, and in morals. If some new truth has emerged from it all, and if some beauty has been etched in the darkness, does it not seem as nothing to what has been given up? Christopher Dawson stated once that the modern soul is at bottom anti-ontological. It hates being. Hilaire Belloc has said that the modern soul hates proportion and limitation. They are both affirming the same truth, because the condition of all being save God is limitation. Integrated Christian humanism accepts the finite goodness that constitutes the nature of man. Out of this affirmation the soul can build of itself a work of art; without this affirmation, man gives himself over to the darkness in the suicide of self-alienation. We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.[35] These faces are masks of that one Evil that has ever enticed man into the wilderness. Belloc the soldier saw it riding out of the Eastern wastes, trampling under the vineyards and desecrating the shrines of Christian men, giving over the soil to the sands and the mind to an awful simplicity. He saw it rising within the great Universities of Europe, rubbing out the certitudes and the songs of Catholic Men.