the result of a serious struggle for power between the Dominican and Franciscan Orders.  Apparently the Church compromised between them by condemning the errors of both.  Some of these errors, springing from Alexander Hales and his Franciscan schools, were in effect the foundation of another Church.  Some were expressly charged against Brother Thomas.  “Contra fratrem Thomam” the councils forbade teaching that—­“quia intelligentiae non habent materiam, Deus non potest plures ejusdem speciei facere; et quod materia non est in angelis”; further, the councils struck at the vital centre of Thomas’s system—­“quod Deus non potest individua multiplicare sub una specie sine materia”; and again in its broadest form,—­“quod formae non accipiunt divisionem nisi secundam materiam.”  These condemnations made a great stir.  Old Albertus Magnus, who was the real victim of attack, fought for himself and for Thomas.  After a long and earnest effort, the Thomists rooted out opposition in the order, and carried their campaign to Rome.  After fifty years of struggle, by use of every method known in Church politics, the Dominican Order, in 1323, caused John XXII to canonize Thomas and in effect affirm his doctrine.

The story shows how modern, how heterodox, how material, how altogether new and revolutionary the system of Saint Thomas seemed at first even in the schools; but that was the affair of the Church and a matter of pure theology.  We study only his art.  Step by step, stone by stone, we see him build his church-building like a stonemason, “with the care that the twelfth-century architects put into” their work, as Viollet-le-Duc saw some similar architect at Rouen, building the tower of Saint-Romain:  “He has thrown over his work the grace and finesse, the study of detail, the sobriety in projections, the perfect harmony,” which belongs to his school, and yet he was rigidly structural and Norman.  The foundation showed it; the elevation, which is God, developed it; the vaulting, with its balance of thrusts in mind and matter, proved it; but he had still the hardest task in art, to model man.

The cathedral, then, is built, and God is built into it, but, thus far, God is there alone, filling it all, and maintains the equilibrium by balancing created matter separately against created mind.  The proportions of the building are superb; nothing so lofty, so large in treatment, so true in scale, so eloquent of multiplicity in unity, has ever been conceived elsewhere; but it was the virtue or the fault of superb structures like Bourges and Amiens and the Church universal that they seemed to need man more than man needed them; they were made for crowds, for thousands and tens of thousands of human beings; for the whole human race, on its knees, hungry for pardon and love.  Chartres needed no crowd, for it was meant as a palace of the Virgin, and the Virgin filled it wholly; but the Trinity made their church for no other purpose than to accommodate