tendencies of race—­the most powerful of all—­can avail against the degenerative force of a life without religion, or, what is worse, that maintains only a desiccated formula; and the post-Renaissance philosophies are one and all definitely anti-religious and self-proclaimed substitutes for religion.  As such they were offered and accepted, and as such they must take their share of the responsibility for what has happened.

I believe we must and can retrace our steps to that point in time when a right philosophy was abandoned, and begin again.  There is no impossibility or even difficulty here.  History is not a dead thing, a thing of the past; it is eternally present to man, and this is one of the sharp differentiations between man and beast.  The material monuments of man crumble and disappear, but the spirit that built the Parthenon or Reims Cathedral, that inspired St. Paul on Mars’ hill or forged Magna Charta or the Constitution of the United States is, because of our quality as men, just as present and operative with us today, if we will, as that which sent the youth of ten nations into a righteous war five years ago, or spoke yesterday through some noble action that you or I may have witnessed.  It is as easy for us to accept and practice the philosophy of St. Thomas or the divine humanism of St. Francis as it is to accept the philosophy of Mr. Wells or the theories of Sir Oliver Lodge.  No spiritual thing dies, or even grows old, nor does it drift backward in the dwindling perspective of ancient history, and the foolishest saying of man is that “you cannot turn back the hands of the clock.”

It is simply a question of will, and will is simply a question of desire and of faith.

Manifestly I cannot be expected to recreate in a few words this philosophy to which I believe we must have recourse in our hour of need.  I have no ability to do this in any case.  It begins with St. Paul, is continued through St. Augustine, and finds its culmination in the great Mediaeval group of Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas.  I do not know of any single book that epitomizes it all in vital form, though Cardinal Mercier and Dr. De Wulf have written much that is stimulating and helpful.  I cannot help thinking that the great demand today is for a compact volume that synthesizes the whole magnificent system in terms not of history and scientific exegesis, but in terms of life.  Plato and Aristotle are so preserved to man, and the philosophers of modernism also; it is only the magisterial and dynamic philosophy of Christianity that is diffused through many works, some of them still untranslated and all quite without coordination, save St. Thomas Aquinas alone, the magnitude of whose product staggers the human mind and in its profuseness defeats its own ends.  We need no more histories of philosophy, but we need an epitome of Christian philosophy, not for students but for men.

Such an epitome I am not fitted to offer, but there are certain rather fundamental conceptions and postulates that run counter both to pagan and to modern philosophy, the loss of which out of life has, I maintain, much to do with our present estate, and that must be regained before we can go forward with any reasonable hope of betterment.  These I will try to indicate as well as I can.