Philosophies of world history always wear that curious air of unreality typified by academic journals or international youth congresses. So long as these historians simply record facts they are safe, but as soon as they attempt explanations they break down because of their necessary lack of inside understanding. World historians frequently fail to grasp even the story of their own nations. They are within nothing at all, but are self-estranged cultural strangers looking at the world from an academic outside; hence they fail to grasp the spirit of anything that has ever moved men to common action. These historians tend to succumb to the facile temptation of writing history synthetically; they perpetually find meetings between an East and West, where there is only conflict; they fall into the trap of treating history cyclically; they build vast structures in the air that reveal nothing to a man searching for his own antecedents. A Christian comes away from Belloc knowing his own soul. The _Weltanschauung_ historian must fail in the end because no “world view” has ever acted to cause anything historically. History is caused within cultures, and the clash of civilizations occurs when two cultures in act meet on the field of battle, be it economic, military, or spiritual. The final objection that the “world historian” has against Belloc is that he takes sides, and the final answer to that objection is simply this: to refuse to take sides is to refuse to enter history. A historian who does not see that rather brutal fact will never see more than the surface of things. He cannot see the inside of the spiritual drama of, let us say, the Reformation or the Arian heresy, without being touched by an absolute: absolutes either wound or enlist the assent of the spirit. There can be no impartiality when a man has been actually grazed by the realities that have stirred all Christianity to its roots. Intellectual aloofness to the issues of life and death simply demonstrates that these frontiers of the soul have not been reached by the historian, and unless they are reached and elected for or rejected, nothing historical can be known in its very substance. _Credo ut intelligam._ Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from without, he understands it from within ... he is also that which he has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.