From G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man:
... in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not merge until they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.
Once again, our ancestors in the Faith were no dummies, nor were they the cowled obscurantists they are often depicted to have been on the History Channel. Instead, they broke good new intellectual ground for the whole human race. We can be proud of them.
In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach", a haunting poem evoking the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith. As a boomer who finished Catholic elementary school in 1964 and then watched my Church falter, I've found the roar all too audible. So here I wait, listening for the whispers of that Sea's invincible return.
