Aquinas was a Neapolitan of noble family, who ran away from home as a boy to join the Dominicans, an Order of wandering preachers of whose foundation we shall shortly speak. Thomas was recaptured and brought home by his elder brother, a noble at the court of Frederick II; but neither threats nor imprisonment could persuade the young novice to give up the life he had chosen. After a year he broke the bars of his window, escaped from Naples, and went to Cologne and Paris, where he studied theology, emerging from this education the greatest lecturer and teacher of his day. In his _Summa Theologiae_, his best-known book, he set forth his belief in man’s highest good as the chief thought of God, using both the commentaries of the Church Fathers and the works of Aristotle as quarries to provide the material for fashioning his arguments. Like Abelard, he believed in the voice of reason, but without any of the Breton’s probing scepticism. Human reason bridled by divine grace was the guide he sought to lead his pen through the maze of theology; and so clear and judicial were his methods, so brilliant the intellect that shone through his writings, that Aquinas became for later generations an authority almost equal to St. Augustine. [Sidenote: Mediaeval Faith] The intense preoccupation of mediaeval minds with theology and the importance attached to ‘right belief’ are the most striking mental characteristics of the period with which we are dealing. To-day we are inclined to judge a man by his actions rather than by his beliefs, to sum up a character as good or bad because its owner is generous or selfish, kind or cruel, brave or cowardly. In the twelfth or thirteenth centuries this would have seemed a wholly false standard. The ideal of conduct, for one thing, maintained by monks like St. Bernard of Clairvaux was so exalted that, to the ordinary men and women in an age of cruelty and fierce passions, a good life seemed impossible save for Saints. The sins and failings of the rest of the world received a very easy pardon except from ascetics; and it was generally felt that God in His mercy, through the intercession of the kindly Saints, would be compassionate to human weakness so long as the sinner repented, confessed, and clung to a belief in the teaching of the Church. This teaching, or ‘Faith’, declared to have been given by Christ to His Apostles, set forth in the writings of the Christian Fathers, gathered together in the Creeds and Sacraments defined by Church Councils, preached and expounded by the clergy and theologians, defended by the Pope, was the torch that could alone guide man’s wavering footsteps to the ‘City of God’. ‘Do you know what I shall gain,’ asked a French Count of the thirteenth century, ‘in that during this mortal life I have believed as Holy Church teaches? I shall have a crown in the Heavens above the angels, for the angels cannot but believe inasmuch as they see God face to face.’