It is essential to realize that the Christian community in the past was not a pious ideal, but a juridical fact which underlay the social organization of Western culture.
The difference between God and the rational animal is far greater than that between man and the insect world, and it is inconceivable that the human intelligence can understand the process of divine revelation, even though he is the recipient of it.
No culture is so primitive that it is entirely determined by the natural influences of environment and economic function, nor yet any is so advanced that it is not conditioned by these influences.
No less important than the ideal of martyrdom was that of virginity, which also goes back to the first age of the Church. Indeed the two ideals were associated – first by the cult of virgin martyrs, like St. Agnes, which was so popular, and secondly by the idea that virginity was a kind of living martyrdom, a witness to the power of the faith to transcend human weakness.
For the immense extension of the scale of education and its ramification into a hundred specialisms and technical disciplines has left the state as the only unifying element in the whole system. In the past the traditional system of classical education provided a commo intellectual background and a common scale of values which transcended national and political frontiers and formed the European or Western republic of letters of which every scholar was a citizen.
There is in human nature a hunger and a thirst for the transcendent and the divine which cannot be satisfied with anything less than God.
If we look at the world today in isolation from the past and the future, the forces of secularism may seem triumphant. This, however, is but a moment in the life of humanity, and it does not possess the promise of stability and permanence.