If certain cultures as well as certain men seem better disposed to receive Faith than others, it is still true that Faith comes to them as a pure gift. Catholicism did not have to fix itself within the boundaries of the Greco-Roman world. But the historical fact is that it did so. That Rome was more apt to receive the Gospel than were her neighbours is, to Belloc, one of the clearest truths of Western history. Those who accuse Belloc of theoretically tying the Church to Rome confuse two questions: a theological question and an historical question. Doctrinally, the Faith belongs to no one by right; but if the Faith does come to a man, it will come to him as to one formed by a unique set of cultural exigencies, which will aid or will hinder his reception of the Divine Gift. The Faith belongs to no culture by right. Some cultures could never have received her; other cultures could have, but historically they did not. The fact remains that she came into Rome, transformed the Empire and built a Europe that had been humanized to a high level by the already existing Latin Order. It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing. The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument is equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among men must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church might have arisen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a fact, spring up in the high _Greek_ tide of the Levant and carries to this day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it did, as a fact, rise just at the inception of that united Imperial Roman system which we are about to examine. It might have carried for its ornaments and have had for its sacred language the accoutrements and the speech of any one of the other great civilizations, living or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies. As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced in its origins and development that its external accoutrements and its language were those of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome: of the Empire.[52]