rationalism, was woven into her theology itself, and made to do duty in her defence, and that wondrous spectacle was exhibited, so common in the history of the church, when the dark and threatening thunder‐cloud, which seemed about to send out its lightning‐bolts, only distils in fertilizing rain.” Speaking of S. Dominic, Prior Vaughan, in his _Life of S. Thomas of Aquin_, says: “He felt that a single man was but a drop in the ocean in the midst of such a vast and organized corruption. Man may be met by man, but a system only can oppose a system. A religious institution, combining the poverty of the first disciples of Christ with eloquence and learning, would alone stand a chance of success in working a regeneration.” He tells us further on that Albertus Magnus, the master of S. Thomas, saw that “Aristotle must be christianized, and that faith itself must be thrown into the form of a vast _scientific_ organism, through the application of christianized philosophy to the _dogmata_ of revealed religion.” The state of men’s minds is thus pithily described by the same author: “For, especially at this period, theory speedily resolved itself into practice; what to‐day was a speculation of the schools, to‐morrow became a fact; men lived quickly, thought quickly, and acted quickly in the days of William of Champeaux and Abelard.” Still, in summing up the character of those strange, contradictory times, so eminently “ages of faith” when contrasted with our day, yet ages of jarring contention when compared with the previous centuries, Prior Vaughan gives us the brighter side of the picture also: “Men were not startled in those days by the unusual deeds and privileges of chosen men. They took God’s word for granted. They believed what they saw; they did not pry and test and examine their souls. They got nearer the truth than we do. Their minds were not corroded by false science.” And in a footnote he adds, speaking of the great difference between heresy in the middle ages and heresy now: “In this (the reverence for authority) is seated the great distinction between the darkness of those days and the darkness of the present. Then, men fell away in detail, they denied this or that truth, or fanatically set up as teachers of novel doctrines, or were cruel, or superstitious, or fond of dress, or of excitement, or self‐display. But they held to the master‐ principle of order and of salvation, they did not reject the authority of the teaching church, or presume to call in question the directive power and controlling office of the sovereign pontiff.”