During the great development which has taken place in the study of
history within the last century, and especially within the last fifty
years, the mass of materials has grown so enormous and the list of
authors of eminence so imposing that one might almost despair of
adapting the subject in any way to a child's world if it were not for
this central point of view, in which the Incarnation and the Church are
the controlling facts dominating all others and giving them their due
place and proportion. On this commanding point of observation the child
and the historian may stand side by side, each seeing truth according to
their capacity, and if the child should grow into a historian it would
be with an unbroken development--there would not be anything to unlearn.
The method of "concentric" teaching against which there is so much to be
said when applied to national history or to other branches of teaching
is entirely appropriate here, because no wider vision of the world can
be attained than from the point whence the Church views it, in her
warfare to make the kingdoms of the world become the kingdom of God and
His Christ that He may reign for ever and ever. The Church beholds the
_rational_ not the _sensible_ horizon of history, and standing at her
point of view, the great ones and the little ones of the earth,
historians and children, can look at the same heavens, one with the
scientific instruments of his observatory, the other with the naked eye
of a child's faith and understanding.
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