This exclusion of what men commonly called freedom was carried still further in the process of explaining dogma.  Supposing the conduction to be insufficient for a given purpose; a purpose which shall require perfect conduction?  Under ordinary circumstances, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the conductor will be burned out, so to speak; condemned, and thrown away.  This is the case with most human beings.  Yet there are cases where the conductor is capable of receiving an increase of energy from the prime motor, which enables it to attain the object aimed at.  In dogma, this store of reserved energy is technically called Grace.  In the strict, theological sense of the word, as it is used by Saint Thomas, the exact, literal meaning of Grace is “a motion which the Prime Motor, as a supernatural cause, produces in the soul, perfecting free will.”  It is a reserved energy, which comes to aid and reinforce the normal energy of the battery.

To religious minds this scientific inversion of solemn truths seems, and is, sacrilege; but Thomas’s numerous critics in the Church have always brought precisely this charge against his doctrine, and are doing so still.  They insist that he has reduced God to a mechanism and man to a passive conductor of force.  He has left, they say, nothing but God in the universe.  The terrible word which annihilates all other philosophical systems against which it is hurled, has been hurled freely against his for six hundred years and more, without visibly affecting the Church; and yet its propriety seems, to the vulgar, beyond reasonable cavil.  To Father de Regnon, of the extremely learned and intelligent Society of Jesus, the difference between pantheism and Thomism reduces itself to this:  “Pantheism, starting from the notion of an infinite substance which is the plenitude of being, concludes that there can exist no other beings than the being; no other realities than the absolute reality.  Thomism, starting from the efficacy of the first cause, tends to reduce more and more the efficacy of second causes, and to replace it by a passivity which receives without producing, which is determined without determining.”  To students of architecture, who know equally little about pantheism and about Thomism,—­or, indeed, for that matter, about architecture, too,—­the quality that rouses most surprise in Thomism is its astonishingly scientific method.  The Franciscans and the Jesuits call it pantheism, but science, too, is pantheism, or has till very recently been wholly pantheistic.  Avowedly science has aimed at nothing but the reduction of multiplicity to unity, and has excommunicated, as though it were itself a Church, any one who doubted or disputed its object, its method, or its results.  The effort is as evident and quite as laborious in modern science, starting as it does from multiplicity, as in Thomas Aquinas, who started from unity; and it is necessarily less successful, for its true aims, as far as it is science and not disguised religion, were equally attained by reaching infinite complexity; but the assertion or assumption of ultimate unity has characterized the Law of Energy as emphatically as it has characterized the definition of God in theology.  If it is a reproach to Saint Thomas, it is equally a reproach to Clerk-Maxwell.  In truth, it is what men most admire in both—­the power of broad and lofty generalization.