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 civilisation 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.