From the masters the head of the school in St. Jacques Street was chosen by the General of the Order, and naturally the choice fell on Thomas. Usually the place was held for a year only, and its occupant then transferred to some other field of labor. Thomas held it for four years, lecturing, preaching at least every Lent in the adjacent church, and exercising the discipline of the order over its students. The number who heard his lectures must have been great. The school at Paris, unlike that at Koeln, being a branch of the university, its lectures were open to all comers, and the renown of the Italian who had been more than a match for the ablest of the secular doctors would draw hearers. And those who came once, if they had any love for the play of pure intelligence and the fearless handling of great questions, would come again. Thomas, with all his orthodoxy, was a pretty thorough rationalist. He had full faith in the capacity of the human understanding to deal fruitfully and safely with the deepest mysteries. If his conclusions always are with the Church, it is not because he has shrunk from attending to, and even suggesting, what might be said against the doctrine under consideration. It is because he has satisfied himself that the balance of logical argument, after all objections have been weighed, is on the side of orthodoxy. In this respect his writings represent the highest point reached by the rationalistic tendency in the Middle Ages, just as Abelard represents its initiation. We find Duns Scotus, his great Franciscan rival, shrinking from his rationalism, and removing some of the mysteries of theology out of the field of logical discussion. Of course, his most devoted hearers were the young men of the order. Of these some ninety were sent up every year from the schools in the provinces outside France; and in addition to these picked men, who came for the master’s degree, Paris had the training of all the students of Northern France. Some of the former were from Spain, where the order was engaged in combatting the Mohammedan doctors. Their needs drew Thomas’s attention to the subject of his first systematic work, the _Summa contra Gentiles_. Thomas puts himself upon the level of one who has no Christian convictions, but argues simply from principles of philosophic truth and of natural religion accepted by both parties. Besides these and other literary labors he attended the annual General Chapters of his order at Valenciennes in 1259, where he and Albrecht drew up the new order of studies for the young Dominicans.