Tributes quite as laudatory are not lacking from modern secular writers and while there have been many derogatory remarks, these have always come from men who either knew Aquinas only at second hand, or who confess that they had been unable to read him understandingly. The praise all comes from men who have spent years in the study of his writings. A recent writer in the Dublin _Review_ (January, 1906) sums up his appreciation of one of St. Thomas's works, his masterly book in philosophy, as follows: "The _Summa contra Gentiles_ is an historical monument of the first importance for the history of philosophy. In the variety of its contents, it is a perfect encyclopedia of the learning of the day. By it we can fix the high-water mark of Thirteenth Century thought, for it contains the lectures of a doctor second to none in the great school of thought then flourishing--the University of Paris. It is by the study of such books that one enters into the mental life of the period at which they were written; not by the hasty perusal of histories of philosophy. No student of the Contra Gentiles is likely to acquiesce in the statement that the Middle Ages were a time when mankind seemed to have lost the power of thinking for themselves. Medieval people thought for themselves, thoughts curiously different from ours and profitable to study." Here is a similar high tribute for Aquinas's great work on Theology from his modern biographer, Father Vaughan: "The 'Summa Theologica' is a mighty synthesis, thrown into technical and scientific form, of the Catholic traditions of East and West, of the infallible dicta of the Sacred Page, and of the most enlightened conclusions of human reason, gathered from the soaring intuitions of the Academy, and the rigid severity of the Lyceum. "Its author was a man endowed with the characteristic notes of the three great Fathers of Greek Philosophy: he possessed {282} the intellectual honesty and precision of Socrates, the analytical keenness of Aristotle, and that yearning after wisdom and light which was the distinguishing mark of 'Plato the divine,' and which has ever been one of the essential conditions of the highest intuitions of religion."