Explore "Paris and the East" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
One of the things that set a modern man wondering is the nature of the survivor of our time.
It is customary to say that all human things decay and end; and if you will take a period long enough of course it is true, for at last the world itself shall dissolve. But when men point to dead Empires, as Egypt or Assyria are dead, or when they point to a fossilised civilisation, as it seems, according to travellers, that certain civilisations of the East are fossilised, or when they point to little broken cities where once were famous towns, one is tempted to remember that to all these there is an exceptional glorious sort which is ourselves. Atlantic Europe, the Europe that was made by the Christian Faith and in the first four centuries of our era, lives on from change to change in a most marvellous way, and for now two thousand years has not seemed capable of decline.