Whatever God might be to others, to His Church he could not be a sequence or a source.  That point had been admitted by William of Champeaux, and made the division between Christians and infidels.  On the other hand, if God must be proved as a true cause in order to warrant the Church or the State in requiring men to worship Him as Creator, the student became the more curious—­if a churchman, the more anxious—­to be assured that Thomas succeeded in his proof, especially since he did not satisfy Descartes and still less Pascal.  That the mystics should be dissatisfied was natural enough, since they were committed to the contrary view, but that Descartes should desert was a serious blow which threw the French Church into consternation from which it never quite recovered.

“I see motion,” said Thomas:  “I infer a motor!” This reasoning, which may be fifty thousand years old, is as strong as ever it was; stronger than some more modern inferences of science; but the average mechanic stated it differently.  “I see motion,” he admitted:  “I infer energy.  I see motion everywhere; I infer energy everywhere.”  Saint Thomas barred this door to materialism by adding:  “I see motion; I cannot infer an infinite series of motors:  I can only infer, somewhere at the end of the series, an intelligent, fixed motor.”  The average modern mechanic might not dissent but would certainly hesitate.  “No doubt!” he might say; “we can conduct our works as well on that as on any other theory, or as we could on no theory at all; but, if you offer it as proof, we can only say that we have not yet reduced all motion to one source or all energies to one law, much less to one act of creation, although we have tried our best.”  The result of some centuries of experiment tended to raise rather than silence doubt, although, even in his own day, Thomas would have been scandalized beyond the resources of his Latin had Saint Bonaventure met him at Saint Louis’s dinner-table and complimented him, in the King’s hearing, on having proved, beyond all Franciscan cavils, that the Church Intellectual had necessarily but one first cause and creator—­himself.

The Church Intellectual, like the Church Architectural, implied not one architect, but myriads, and not one fixed, intelligent architect at the end of the series, but a vanishing vista without a beginning at any definite moment; and if Thomas pressed his argument, the twentieth-century mechanic who should attend his conferences at the Sorbonne would be apt to say so.  “What is the use of trying to argue me into it?  Your inference may be sound logic, but is not proof.  Actually we know less about it than you did.  All we know is the thing we handle, and we cannot handle your fixed, intelligent prime motor.  To your old ideas of form we have added what we call force, and we are rather further than ever from reducing the complex to unity.  In fact, if you are aiming to convince me, I will tell you flatly that I know only the multiple, and have no use for unity at all.”