It may be taken that whatever form truth takes among men will be the more perfect in proportion as the men who receive that form are more fully men. The whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything finite; and truth as it appears to this species or to that is most true when the type which receives it is the healthiest and the most normal of its own kind.[51] Linked with this doctrinal position is his favorite historical thesis that Roman Europe represented the very best man had achieved on the temporal level of existence prior to the advent of the Son of God. In Rome man began to come into his own; in Rome man discovered the possibility of an immortal destiny, because Rome had conceived, even if imperfectly, the nature of human dignity. Roman man is Myself, the Four Men—integrated on one level of life but realizing the essential incompletion of his own handiwork. Christianity came into the Empire and found there a mentality peculiarly apt for the reception of the Gospel. It was with such stuff that the Church molded Western Europe. The result was Christendom. The conception of Christendom lies at the heart of Belloc’s Christian humanism. The necessity for the Faith to penetrate a culture and erect a civilization that bears her lineaments is both a deduction from Belloc’s humanism and an historical cause of his humanism, though it is principally the latter. Let us first look to the matter theoretically. There is no consciously articulated “philosophy of Christendom” in Belloc, and this for two reasons: Christendom was an historical fact in his eyes; you do not theorize about the possibility of that which _is_; one Thing had preserved the best of the Roman Order, had sanctified the human hearth, and had worked toward the erection of a social and personal dignity unheard-of in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England—and this one institution was the Roman Catholic Church; secondly, and this is a weakness in his armour, Belloc had little interest in (or talent for) purely philosophical and theological issues as such; outside of a vigorous defence of the validity of the human reason against skepticism, and an almost inarticulate loathing of German Idealism, he remained aloof from formal philosophy. Christendom is not a “concept” or a “thesis” for him: she is Europe and the ages.