What was more curious still, man might absolutely prove his freedom by refusing to move at all; if he did not like his life he could stop it, and habitually did so, or acquiesced in its being done for him; while God could not commit suicide or even cease for a single instant His continuous action.  If man had the singular fancy of making himself absurd,—­a taste confined to himself but attested by evidence exceedingly strong,—­he could be as absurd as he liked; but God could not be absurd.  Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right to contradict Himself, which is one of man’s chief pleasures.  While man enjoyed what was, for his purposes, an unlimited freedom to be wicked,—­a privilege which, as both Church and State bitterly complained and still complain, he has outrageously abused,—­God was Goodness, and could be nothing else.  While man moved about his relatively spacious prison with a certain degree of ease, God, being everywhere, could not move.  In one respect, at least, man’s freedom seemed to be not relative but absolute, for his thought was an energy paying no regard to space or time or order or object or sense; but God’s thought was His act and will at once; speaking correctly, God could not think; He is.  Saint Thomas would not, or could not, admit that God was Necessity, as Abelard seems to have held, but he refused to tolerate the idea of a divine maniac, free from moral obligation to himself.  The atmosphere of Saint Louis surrounds the God of Saint Thomas, and its pure ether shuts out the corruption and pollution to come,—­the Valois and Bourbons, the Occams and Hobbes’s, the Tudors and the Medicis, of an enlightened Europe.

The theology turns always into art at the last, and ends in aspiration.  The spire justifies the church.  In Saint Thomas’s Church, man’s free will was the aspiration to God, and he treated it as the architects of Chartres and Laon had treated their famous fleches.  The square foundation-tower, the expression of God’s power in act,—­His Creation,—­rose to the level of the Church facade as a part of the normal unity of God’s energy; and then, suddenly, without show of effort, without break, without logical violence, became a many-sided, voluntary, vanishing human soul, and neither Villard de Honnecourt nor Duns Scotus could distinguish where God’s power ends and man’s free will begins.  All they saw was the soul vanishing into the skies.  How it was done, one does not care to ask; in a result so exquisite, one has not the heart to find fault with “adresse.”

About Saint Thomas’s theology we need not greatly disturb ourselves; it can matter now not much, whether he put more pantheism than the law allowed or more materialism than Duns Scotus approved—­or less of either—­into his universe, since the Church is still on the spot, responsible for its own doctrines; but his architecture is another matter.  So scientific and structural a method was never an accident or the property of a single mind even with