... Two charges disputed their certain victory. First, the Hungarian cavalry ... then the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles, swept upon the French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely into death. They streamed with the huge white flag of the old Monarchy above them, the faint silver lilies were upon it, and from either rank the cries that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since Christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle fronts of Christendom.... These also failed: a symbol in name and in flag and in valour of that great, once good, and very ancient thing which God now disapproved.[49] This kind of writing is art, literary art at its best, wedded here to historical judgment, keen sensibility, and poetic vision. This felicitous unity of things not often found together is not a rare perfection, blessing a dozen odd pages of a life of historical writing; it is steady, filling volume after volume, informing and pleasing through the years; a life’s work of art in which the intended result obtains: the resurrection of the past, so that the men of the West can come into their own once again. Chapter Three CHRISTENDOM: “ESTO PERPETUA” Today when Western man thinks of Christendom, he thinks of an historical order that is dead, or he thinks of an academic humanist tradition that synthesizes the Greek and Roman heritage with the doctrinal truths of the Faith. Western man rarely thinks of himself as being a man in Christendom, for Christendom is no longer a place, existing in space, enduring in time. Hilaire Belloc was the last representative of a long tradition of Catholic thinkers who actually thought of the Christian Unity in terms of a cultural and geographical order minted into a unity by the genius of the Faith. His understanding of Christendom is the most serious problem facing anyone who would penetrate his thought. Belloc has been accused of identifying Western Europe and Catholicism to the point where it would appear that the Universal Religion was a uniquely Latin thing that carried with it of necessity the temporal and cultural trappings of Mediterranean regionalism. “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.” Belloc’s position is neither so obviously naive as his critics would assert, nor can it be identified with the attitude of most contemporary Christians when they think of “Christendom.” In the first place it is simply false to assert that he identified Catholicism necessarily with Western Europe. He expressly states the contrary in the famous and controversial _Europe and the Faith_.[50] Operative behind his passionate and concrete love of European Catholicism is a doctrinal position that can be stated rather simply: grace perfects nature, and grace can operate in human nature at any time and under any conditions, but grace operates the better, the more perfected is man on the natural level.