A great portion of the second volume is taken up with the exposition in detail of these thoughts and ideas. We do not think that any one who has thoroughly seized the author’s point of view will be sorry that so much space is given to the lives and characters of men who are not the immediate subject of the book. The truth is, that the full _significance_ of S. Thomas of Aquin has been very much overlooked in modern times. The non‐Catholic theory has always been that he was a voluminous “scholastic,” more acute than most of his sort, perhaps, but mediæval, hair‐splitting, and unprofitable. The Catholic theory has done him greater justice; but even the Catholic schools have too much forgotten S. Thomas. There is an interesting passage in one of Lacordaire’s letters, in which he tells the Abbé Drioux, who has done so much for S. Thomas in France, how he read the Angelical every day, and yet how long it had been before he had come to know him! And then he speaks with some depreciation of that “Positive” theology which has pretended to take the place of the scholastic form and discipline. The great preacher was familiar with the spiritual wants of the world in their widest aspect, and he no sooner came to know S. Thomas of Aquin than he saw that he was face to face with the mind that has said more truth about God and man, and said it better, than any one man who has ever lived; and he has said it so well, because he has not said it out of his own consciousness, but first saturated himself with the living truth of the immortal fathers, and then reproduced in his own way what God had thus himself imparted to the world.