moiety of the synthesis, on the other towards an exaggerated
intellectualism the seeds of which are inherent even in St. Thomas
himself. The new mysticism withdrew further and further from the common
life, finding refuge in hidden sanctuaries in Spain, Italy, the
Rhineland; the old intellectualism became more and more dominant in the
minds of man and the affairs of the world, and with the Renaissance it
became supreme, as did the other qualities of paganism in art as well as
in every other field of human activity.

The first fruit of the new intellectualism was the philosophy of Dr.
John Calvin--if we can call it such,--Augustinian philosophy, misread,
distorted and made noxious by its reliance on the intellectual process
cut off from spiritual energy as the sufficient corrective of
philosophical thought. It is this false philosophy, allied with an
equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who
accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the
Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the
protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was
un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the
year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined
through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism
played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of
mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased. During the
nineteenth century their control was absolute, and what we are today we
have become through this dominance, coupled with the general
devitalizing or abandonment of religion.

And yet are we not left comfortless. Even in the evolutionary philosophy
engendered by Darwin and formulated by Herbert Spencer and the Germans,
with all its mistaken assumptions and dubious methods, already there is