Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.
It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.
If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery
the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean
civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world
was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun,
when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true
that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that
the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross
still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did:
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