History added to classical man a depth he needed in order to be himself. The Faith taught Christian man that nothing is ever lost: the ages themselves live a timeless and ever fresh life in the Vision of God. Tradition, which is nothing but the corporate life of the past existing in the present, is the human analogue of the Eternal Morning Who is the End of us all. Historical tradition, to grow as it should, must commence with that society which is most natural to man: the family. Familial memory incarnated in a host of rites, observances, and actions lifts the members of this primordial community out of the impermanence of a present ever passing, and life is invested with a fullness that the immortal in man demands. The moment is salvaged, and the suffering and estrangement forced on humanity by the sheer duty of living becomes: ... part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude.... Not only death (which shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys), not only death, but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability.[38] This immemorial _sense_ for history has always run through every artery of the corporate life of Christendom, and in Hilaire Belloc it finds a final champion. Read _A Remaining Christmas_ or _The Mowing of a Field_ for an insight into Belloc’s sense of history as tradition. For him, and here he is one with that past he claimed for himself, history is simply the recovery of the self: a personal and communal act of memory. For Belloc, as for the West, tradition begins in the family: the Yule log was burnt in his home. From the family, tradition spread to the region: he rendered Sussex immortal. From the region, man recovers those wider circles of his story—the nation, the state, the broad sweep of the Empire: some forty books enshrine the Bellocian effort. All of this is finally stamped one by the Faith that issued from the Incarnation.