Whatever truth lies in the charge that the schools discussed futile questions by faulty methods, one cannot decently deny that in this case the question was practical and the method vital.  Theist or atheist, monist or anarchist must all admit that society and science are equally interested with theology in deciding whether the universe is one or many, a harmony or a discord.  The Church and State asserted that it was a harmony, and that they were its representatives.  They say so still.  Their claim led to singular but unavoidable conclusions, with which society has struggled for seven hundred years, and is still struggling.

Freedom could not exist in nature, or even in God, after the single, unalterable act or will which created.  The only possible free will was that of God before the act.  Abelard with his rigid logic averred that God had no freedom; being Himself whatever is most perfect, He produced necessarily the most perfect possible world.  Nothing seemed more logical, but if God acted necessarily, His world must also be of necessity the only possible product of His act, and the Church became an impertinence, since man proved only fatuity by attempting to interfere.  Thomas dared not disturb the foundations of the Church, and therefore began by laying down the law that God—­ previous to His act—­could choose, and had chosen, whatever scheme of creation He pleased, and that the harmony of the actual scheme proved His perfections.  Thus he saved God’s free will.

This philosophical apse would have closed the lines and finished the plan of his church-choir had the universe not shown some divergencies or discords needing to be explained.  The student of the Latin Quarter was then harder to convince than now that God was Infinite Love and His world a perfect harmony, when perfect love and harmony showed them, even in the Latin Quarter, and still more in revealed truth, a picture of suffering, sorrow, and death; plague, pestilence, and famine; inundations, droughts, and frosts; catastrophes world-wide and accidents in corners; cruelty, perversity, stupidity, uncertainty, insanity; virtue begetting vice; vice working for good; happiness without sense, selfishness without gain, misery without cause, and horrors undefined.  The students in public dared not ask, as Voltaire did, “avec son hideux sourire,” whether the Lisbon earthquake was the final proof of God’s infinite goodness, but in private they used the argumentum ad personam divinam freely enough, and when the Church told them that evil did not exist, the ribalds laughed.

Saint Augustine certainly tempted Satan when he fastened the Church to this doctrine that evil is only the privation of good, an amissio boni; and that good alone exists.  The point was infinitely troublesome.  Good was order, law, unity.  Evil was disorder, anarchy, multiplicity.  Which was truth?  The Church had committed itself to the dogma that order and unity were the ultimate truth, and that the