it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load
of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans,
we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad
of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight,
and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have
never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag.
But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and
was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were
forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the
Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said
of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can
we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages?
The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance
taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened
or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this
is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be
a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that
they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking
at what is said about them and look at what is DONE about them,
we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite
painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority
of their members are simply the conditions under which they were asked
to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much
with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority
that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply
out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these
islands who have forced their masters to disgorge. These people,
whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be
squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character,
the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the specially
HARD professions--the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier.
In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion:
the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not
looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes
in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions
left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average sceptic
wanted to know h