We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain for ever. What happens in this life of ours, which we had from you, _Salva Fide_, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this world. It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her “_Esto Perpetua!_” which means in her undying language: “You shall not die.”...[56] We pass over the matchless splendour of the prose until another time. Suffice it to say that this man has seen something that calls forth that “piety of speech” reminiscent of the seventeenth century.[57] As Prudentius sees classical Roman Europe as caused by God in order to be a highway, a Roman Road, over which will pass the message of the Gospel, so does Belloc look back on this prophecy, fulfilled through a thousand years full of a Christendom, armed, proud, conscious of its destiny. Aware that nations pass and that cultures are subject to the cruel laws of time, he nonetheless prays that historic Christendom may remain one Thing, “the standing grace of this world.” To a contemporary thinker, even a contemporary Christian thinker, Christendom is something apart from himself—an historic era, good in its day, but its day is now done. He stands outside of the old European Unity, for it exists no longer, except perhaps in “the river-valleys,” and in the mountains, as yet unpenetrated by technological secularism. _He_ looks to a new synthesis of Christianity with the modern world, and in desiring this thing he tends to condemn those who would look back and who would still hope for the Resurrection of Europe. But Belloc always saw Christendom as some one historic Reality, thrusting itself into the dimension of present time—a Reality within which he has consciously situated himself. Having become one with the men of old Europe (how he knew and loved the peasantry and the soldiery of the Continent, the silent men of South England, and the company of those that sail) he could only look _back_ for corporate salvation. To look to a new synthesis that transcended the essential elements of the Roman Order would be for him to destroy himself. You cannot uproot an unalienated man. Supporting this hidden marriage with his origins is Belloc’s firm opposition to the Hegelian conception of history, in which the old is necessarily overcome by the new, and in which nothing historical remains that is not powdered into ashes by an iron determinism. Those men who say that the old Christendom is dead may be right, but when they ground their opinion in an historical determinism, they demonstrate their inability to understand the _organic_ nature of a traditional society, in which the past can be renewed through an ever recurrent act of collective memory.