The Catholic brings to history (when I say “history” in these pages I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true, and what other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in this blame, he is absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive, so can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. _They_ have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: _he_ sees it all from its centre in its essence, and together. I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is the Church.[41] The Bellocian concept of history, as set forth in the above passage, might well be called Anselmian: historical understanding follows Faith. If history is an extension of a complex line of traditions unified through a common religion, then it follows necessarily that history can be grasped only from within. The historian who views the European story as a series of “phenomena” external to himself must either fall into the Aristotelian conception of history as mere chronology, or he must superimpose on this series some conceptual framework to render it intelligible. He simply cannot enter into its spirit and see with the eyes of the men he would know, or feel with them as they erupt into common action. He is alienated from them. Belloc has been attacked by historians, both Catholic and non-Catholic, for partisanship, bias, and narrow dogmatism. There is more than a little truth to their charges. Belloc frequently bludgeons his readers. In the later books he forces them into line with a prose that is almost martial in its proud magnificence: its certainty. But all this is part of the price Belloc had to pay to become the kind of historian he did. He is within what he is writing. Do not ask for impartiality when reading of the First Crusade. Belloc is there: he is one of the Crusaders. When you know Belloc, you know the Crusades, you know the revolutionary spirit that swept all France in the eighteenth century; when you have read _Esto Perpetua_ the grandeur of the first three centuries of the Christian era comes home to the soul amidst the contrast of the barren desert of Islam. You understand what Islam meant to Europe. Belloc gives a reader a one-sided history, but the irony is that, to a Bellocian, history must always be one-sided. The man “on no side” is outside history.