and for sister water; and for brother fire; and for mother earth!  We are all yours, mi signore!  We are your children; your household; your feudal family! but we never heard of a Church.  We are all varying forms of the same ultimate energy; shifting symbols of the same absolute unity; but our only unity, beneath you, is nature, not law!  We thank you for no human institutions, even for those established in your name; but, with all our hearts we thank you for sister our mother Earth and its fruits and coloured flowers!”

Francis loved them all—­the brothers and sisters—­as intensely as a child loves the taste and smell of a peach, and as simply; but behind them remained one sister whom no one loved, and for whom, in his first verses, Francis had rendered no thanks.  Only on his death-bed he added the lines of gratitude for “our sister death,” the long-sought, never-found sister of the schoolmen, who solved all philosophy and merged multiplicity in unity.  The solution was at least simple; one must decide for one’s self, according to one’s personal standards, whether or not it is more sympathetic than that with which we have got lastly to grapple in the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

CHAPTER XVI

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

Long before Saint Francis’s death, in 1226, the French mystics had exhausted their energies and the siecle had taken new heart.  Society could not remain forever balancing between thought and act.  A few gifted natures could absorb themselves in the absolute, but the rest lived for the day, and needed shelter and safety.  So the Church bent again to its task, and bade the Spaniard Dominic arm new levies with the best weapons of science, and flaunt the name of Aristotle on the Church banners along with that of Saint Augustine.  The year 1215, which happened to be the date of Magna Charta and other easily fixed events, like the birth of Saint Louis, may serve to mark the triumph of the schools.  The pointed arch revelled at Rheims and the Gothic architects reached perfection at Amiens just as Francis died at Assisi and Thomas was born at Aquino.  The Franciscan Order itself was swept with the stream that Francis tried to dam, and the great Franciscan schoolman, Alexander Hales, in 1222, four years before the death of Francis, joined the order and began lecturing as though Francis himself had lived only to teach scholastic philosophy.

The rival Dominican champion, Albertus Magnus, began his career a little later, in 1228.  Born of the noble Swabian family of Bollstadt, in 1193, he drifted, like other schoolmen, to Paris, and the Rue Maitre Albert, opposite Notre Dame, still records his fame as a teacher there.  Thence he passed to a school established by the order at Cologne, where he was lecturing with great authority in 1243 when the general superior of the order brought up from Italy a young man of the highest promise to be trained as his assistant.