For most modern students and even scholars educated in secular universities the name of Aquinas is scarcely more than a type, the greatest of them, it is true, of the schoolmen who were so much occupied with distant, impractical and, to say the least, merely theoretic metaphysical problems, in the later Middle Ages. It is true that the renewed interest in Dante in recent years in English speaking countries, has brought about a revival of attention in Aquinas's work because to Dante, the Angelical Doctor, as he was already called, meant so much, and because the Divine Comedy has been declared often and often, by competent critics, to be the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas of Aquin in verse. Even this adventitious literary interest, however, has not served to lift the obscurity in which Aquinas is veiled for the great majority of scholarly people, whose education has been conducted according to modern methods and present-day ideas. As showing a hopeful tendency to recognize the greatness of these thinkers of the Middle Ages it is interesting to note that about five years ago one of St. Thomas's great works--the Summa Contra Gentiles--was placed on the list of subjects which a candidate may at his option offer in the final honor school of the _litterae humaniores_ at Oxford. There has come a definite appreciation of the fact that this old time philosopher represents a phase of intellectual development that must not be neglected, and that stands for such educational influence as may well be taken advantage of even in our day of information rather than mental discipline. For the purposes of this course Father Rickaby, S. J., has prepared an annotated translation of the great philosophic work under the title, {274} "Of God and His Creatures," which was published by Burns and Oates of London, 1905. This will enable those for whom the Latin of St. Thomas was a stumbling block, to read the thoughts of the great scholastic, in translation at least, and it is to be hoped that we shall hear no more of the trifling judgments which have so disgraced our English philosophical literature.