Such is the principal meaning of _Europe and the Faith_: as a matter of fact the Church arose within the bosom of the Roman Empire; as a matter of fact she alone saved the imperfectly formed humanism of the classical world; it is a fact that this tradition was absorbed into the larger Thing which was the Faith and which made Europe in her own image. If you would find anywhere on this earth a way of living that breathed the spirit of Christianity, you would find it in Western Europe that largely remained faithful through all the attacks from without, and from all the schisms from within. A free peasantry, the sacredness of marriage, the dignity of man, the steady rejection of every Manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation, the sacramental view of the universe: these are to be found in Catholic Europe and wherever else she has stamped her genius, and they are to be found as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this earth. The Church “lays her foundations in something other,” says Belloc, but “out of that something other came the art and the song of the Middle Ages.” And he adds his famous taunt to the Englishmen of his day, “and what art or song have you?”[53] Such is the basic Bellocian doctrine on the historical relationship between Catholicism and European Christendom. And yet he pushes his position even further in a daring move that links him with those early Christians who saw in Rome the special mark of Divine Providence, preparing a way for the Incarnation. As a man never exists outside of the supernatural order, with the result that even his natural perfection is achieved under the impetus of grace, one can say that God is operating with lavish gratuity wherever a cultural organism is found to have reached a certain high level of human perfection. Humanism is crowned by grace, but in a deeper sense, humanism is caused by grace. “The Church makes men,” Belloc puts it tersely in one sentence in _The Path to Rome_.[54] It is small wonder, then, that when viewing that sweep of Empire which is the foundation of the West, when seeing that high pitch of humanism that avoided the Eastern nihilisms, when gazing at that magnificent legal structure, imperfect though it was, that had as its end the defining of human dignity—when seeing all these things, it is no wonder Belloc frequently talked like those Latin Fathers who saw in Rome a Unity raised by God to prepare man for the Incarnation.