Religion: The Professor's Ark

In a mountain cave near Subiaco, Italy, a tall, white-haired Englishman with gentle eyes stood in silent prayer. The place was Sacro Speco, where, tradition says, St. Benedict spent years as an anchorite. The Englishman was Historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, and (aloofly in the third person) he now describes what he felt there three years ago: "Here was the primal germ of Western Christendom; and, as the pilgrim read . . . the names of all the lands, stretching away to the ends of the Earth, that had been evangelized by a spiritual impetus...

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