Saint Thomas saw God, much as Milton saw him, resplendent in

    That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
       And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
     Wherewith he wont, at Heaven’s high council-table,
       To sit the midst of Trinal Unity;

except that, in Thomas’s thought, the council-table was a work-table, because God did not take counsel; He was an act.  The Trinity was an infinite possibility of will; nothing within but

    The baby image of the giant mass
       Of things to come at large.

Neither time nor space, neither matter nor mind, not even force existed, nor could any intelligence conceive how, even though they should exist, they could be united in the lowest association.  A crystal was as miraculous as Socrates.  Only abstract force, or what the schoolmen called form, existed undeveloped from eternity, like the abstract line in mathematics.

Fifty or a hundred years before Saint Thomas settled the Church dogma, a monk of Citeaux or some other abbey, a certain Alain of Lille, had written a Latin poem, as abstruse an allegory as the best, which had the merit of painting the scene of man’s creation as far as concerned the mechanical process much as Thomas seems to have seen it.  M. Haureau has printed an extract (vol.  I, p. 352).  Alain conceded to the weakness of human thought, that God was working in time and space, or rather on His throne in heaven, when nature, proposing to create a new and improved man, sent Reason and Prudence up to ask Him for a soul to fit the new body.  Having passed through various adventures and much scholastic instruction, the messenger Prudence arrived, after having dropped her dangerous friend Reason by the way.  The request was respectfully presented to God, and favourably received.  God promised the soul, and at once sent His servant Noys—­Thought—­to the storehouse of ideas, to choose it:—­

Ipse Deus rem prosequitur, producit in actum
 Quod pepigit.  Vocat ergo Noym quae praepaert illi
 Numinis exemplar, humanae mentis Idaeam,
 Ad cujus formam formetur spiritus omni
 Munere virtutum dives, qui, nube caducae
 Carnis odumbratus veletur corporis umbra. 
 Tunc Noys ad regis praeceptum singula rerum

Vestigans exempla, novam perquirit Idaeam. 
 Inter tot species, speciem vix invenit illam
 Quam petit; offertur tandem quaesita petenti
. Hanc formam Noys ipsa Deo praesentat ut ejus
 Formet ad exemplar animam.  Tunc ille sigillum
 Sumit, ad ipsius formae vestigia formam
 Dans animae, vultum qualem deposcit Idaea
 Imprimit exemplo; totas usurpat imago
 Exemplaris opes, loquiturque figura sigillum.

God Himself pursues the task, and sets in act
 What He promised.  So He calls Noys to seek
 A copy of His will, Idea of the human mind,
 To whose form the spirit should be shaped,
 Rich in every virtue, which, veiled in garb
 Of frail flesh, is to be hidden in a shade of body,
 Then Noys, at the King’s order, turning one by one