Under any conceivable system the process of getting God and man under the same roof—­of bringing two independent energies under the same control—­required a painful effort, as science has much cause to know.  No doubt, many good Christians and some heretics have been shocked at the tour de force by which they felt themselves suddenly seized, bound hand and foot, attached to each other, and dragged into the Church, without consent or consultation.  To religious mystics, whose scepticism concerned chiefly themselves and their own existence, Saint Thomas’s man seemed hardly worth herding, at so much expense and trouble, into a Church where he was not eager to go.  True religion felt the nearness of God without caring to see the mechanism.  Mystics like Saint Bernard, Saint Francis, Saint Bonaventure, or Pascal had a right to make this objection, since they got into the Church, so to speak, by breaking through the windows; but society at large accepted and retains Saint Thomas’s man much as Saint Thomas delivered him to the Government; a two-sided being, free or unfree, responsible or irresponsible, an energy or a victim of energy, moved by choice or moved by compulsion, as the interests of society seemed for the moment to need.  Certainly Saint Thomas lavished no excess of liberty on the man he created, but still he was more generous than the State has ever been.  Saint Thomas asked little from man, and gave much; even as much freedom of will as the State gave or now gives; he added immortality hereafter and eternal happiness under reasonable restraints; his God watched over man’s temporal welfare far more anxiously than the State has ever done, and assigned him space in the Church which he never can have in the galleries of Parliament or Congress; more than all this, Saint Thomas and his God placed man in the centre of the universe, and made the sun and the stars for his uses.  No statute law ever did as much for man, and no social reform ever will try to do it; yet man bitterly complained that he had not his rights, and even in the Church is still complaining, because Saint Thomas set a limit, more or less vague, to what the man was obstinate in calling his freedom of will.

Thus Saint Thomas completed his work, keeping his converging lines clear and pure throughout, and bringing them together, unbroken, in the curves that gave unity to his plan.  His sense of scale and proportion was that of the great architects of his age.  One might go on studying it for a lifetime.  He showed no more hesitation in keeping his Deity in scale than in adjusting man to it.  Strange as it sounds, although man thought himself hardly treated in respect to freedom, yet, if freedom meant superiority, man was in action much the superior of God, Whose freedom suffered, from Saint Thomas, under restraints that man never would have tolerated.  Saint Thomas did not allow God even an undetermined will; He was pure Act, and as such He could not change.  Man alone was allowed, in act, to change direction.