196	LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY
wave' wash up the historian's own culture, country, and clan on to a
pinnacle on which History finds its denouement and its consummation.1
Article Four is a no longer avowed, yet none the less patently implied,
ascription of this plot of Human Destiny to a divine playwright and
stage-manager who, by a sovereign act of predetermination, has selected
the historian's tribe to be God's own Chosen People. Article Five is the
Christian doctrine that God's choice has been transferred from Israel to
the Christian Church. Article Six is the Medieval Western Christian
dogma that the truly orthodox Christian Church is not the canonically
Orthodox Church but the Western (notwithstanding any play that a
Photius may make with ihefilioque). Article Seven is the Late Modern
Western postulate that the mantle of a Medieval Western Christendom
has fallen upon the shoulders of an ex-Christian Modern Western
Society by the divine oversight of a God who has now ceased to govern
and perhaps even ceased to reign. Article Eight is the equation of this de-
consecrated shadow of a defunct Western Christendom with the imagi-
nary cultural continent already labelled 'Europe', Article Nine is a
parrot cry that was being refuted by fresh strokes of the anthropologist's
pencil and the orientalist's pen and the archaeologist's spade as often as
it was being repeated by the tongues of Western historians, Its burden
was that 'Europe' was distinguished alike from an 'Unchanging East'2
and from primitive 'peoples that have no history'3 by being History's
only possible subject; and it will be seen that this slogan was an assertion
that the only possible history was the history of Europe because Euro-
pean affairs alone had a rhythm.
A citation of the remaining thirty articles of religion that still lie
packed in an expanding Pandora's Box labelled 'Europe' might tax the
reader's patience without being strictly necessary for clinching the pre-
sent argument. On the strength of Articles I-IX, as those have been
recited above, we may perhaps take it as having been already demon-
strated that an historian's professed inability to discern in History any
plot, rhythm, or predetermined pattern is no evidence that blind Sam-
son has actually won his boasted freedom from the bondage of 'laws of
Nature'. The presumption is, indeed, the opposite; for, when bonds are
imperceptible to the wearer of them, they are likely to prove more diffi-
cult to shake off than when they betray their presence and reveal some-
thing of their shape and texture by clanking and galling.
It is, no doubt, also true that, even when a thinker is salutarily aware
of an intellectual pattern in his mind, this awareness is not in itself any
guarantee that he will be able to get rid even of the particular pattern that
is obsessing him, not to speak of his finding himself able to dispense with
intellectual pattern-making altogether. Yet, short of that, Man's con-
sciousness is likely to prove itself Man's guardian angel in this pass as in
others; for, in so far as he manages to bring one of these patterns within
1 This misconception of the process of growth as being a movement in a straight line
culminating in the historian's own time and place has been examined in I, i. 160-71,
* The catchword of 'the Unchanging East* has been dissected in this Study in J. i«
164-8.
3 The grounds for rejecting this opprobious label as a misnomer have been examined
in I. i. 179-80.