It would be unjust towards theology to say that it has never seen the incompatibility of Free Will with divine omniscience. This has not escaped its notice, but it has attempted by the use of familiar formulæ to get out of the difficulty. In his book _De libero Arbitrio_ Saint Augustine stoutly maintains that the human Will is free, but he tries to rescue the attributes of the deity by reserving to it the right or the power to intervene by its mercy in the actions of the Will, if in its freedom it comes to a decision which endangers the salvation of the soul. Saint Thomas Aquinas takes good care not to differ in opinion from the Bishop of Hippo. The reformers, Calvin, Luther and Bishop Jansen, too, were better logicians than the patristic writers, and unhesitatingly denied the freedom of the Will, but they did not notice that they made God responsible for all the misdeeds of man, lacking freedom and acting with God's foreknowledge and at His behest. The Council of Trent scorned all these contradictions and unintelligible points, and declared with infallible authority that man's Will is free and that at the same time God is omniscient. The Catholic Church at the time was in some countries still in a position to meet Reason, if it raised objections, with an unanswerable argument: the stake. That is the peculiarity of theological as distinguished from scientific thought, the purest form of which is mathematics. The former never follows a train of thought to its strictly logical conclusion, but only follows a certain distance, to a point where it loses itself in an impenetrable black fog, or in a cloud of glory which dazzles the beholder. Mathematical thought, on the contrary, develops the train of thought to the bitter end, to its ultimate conclusions. These are necessarily absurd if the premises are erroneous, and their absurdity is so clear that it convincingly proves the mistake in the point of departure. Such a scrupulous confutation of self is to be expected as little from mystic visions as from arrogant dogmatism. The former obey the laws of dreams, in which the association of ideas, unfettered by logic, holds sway and strings together the most incompatible ideas to form an apparently connected series; the latter demands the privilege of being independent of the judgment of Reason, and of being tried by Faith, a judge who always decides in its favour.