With Aquinas, who taught the inextricable union of Faith and Reason, Christian philosophy reached its zenith.[76] Too long has it been the fashion to look on orthodoxy as a sign of mental inferiority. Professors still dismiss the _Summa_ with a scathing line. They have never opened its pages, perhaps, but second-hand knowledge to vast regions of human thought is no impediment to a chair in the modern university. "Abstractions as repulsive as they are frivolous," is the dictum of a group of present-day French scholars who seem to think that to belittle things mediæval is proof of patriotism. We have looked on at the rehabilitation of certain mediæval saints. It was not so long ago that the poor man of Assisi was patronized as an ignorant fanatic. The appeal of St. Francis is to the emotions, while that of St. Thomas Aquinas is to the intellect, so, perhaps, it is expecting too much to hope that some day the average man may appreciate this thinker who set sane boundaries round the human mind. Too long have the prime sanities of reason been flouted by hazy abstract thinking in the void; too long has man shut his eyes to the fact that a crime of the intellect is of more consequence to mankind than a crime against the civil law; too long has applause been given to philosophers who obliterated the distinctions between right and wrong--like Hegel, teaching the identity of Being and non-Being--so that the very soul of the peoples grew perverted and appalling cataclysms threatened civilization. What the older centuries thought of Aquinas, the painter as well as the poet tells us. In the Louvre hangs Benozzo Gozzoli's picture of the _doctor angelicus_ sitting in luminous repose amid pope, doctors, saints, and the sages of antiquity, and the inscription runs: "_Vere hic est lumen ecclesiæ_." And in Milan hangs Piero della Francesca's profound study of the saint. "I place Plato high," wrote a sound French thinker, "but as I see Aquinas he is as superior to Plato, and even more, than is our knowledge of the physical world to that of the Greeks.... He embraces St. Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato."