and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most dynamic form, expressed through static propositions of almost mathematical exactness.  The peoples of the East rejected the intellectual-mathematical method and solution and sought a way out through the mysterious operation of the inner sense that manifests itself in the form of emotion.  With the revelation of Christianity came also, and of course, enlightenment, which was not definite and closed at some given moment, but progressive and cumulative.  At once, speaking philosophically, the intellectual method of the West and the intuitive method of the East came together and fused in a new thing, each element limiting, and at the same time fortifying the other, while the opposed obscurities of the past were irradiated by the revealing and creative spirit of Christ.  So came the beginnings of that definitive Christian philosophy which was to proceed from Syria, Anatolia and Constantinople, through Alexandria to St. Augustine, and was to find its fullest expression during the Middle Ages and by means of Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas.

It is an interesting fact, though apart from my present consideration, that this philosophical fusion was paralleled in the same places and at the same time, by an aesthetic fusion that brought into existence the first great and consistent art of Christianity.  This question is admirably dealt with in Lisle March Phillipps’ “Form and Colour.”

This great Christian philosophy which lay behind all the civilization of the Middle Ages, was positive, comprehensive and new.  It demonstrated divine purpose working consciously through all things with a result in perfect coherency; it gave history a new meaning as revealing reality and as a thing forever present and never past, and above all it elucidated the nature of both matter and spirit and made clear their operation through the doctrine of sacramentalism.

In the century that saw the consummation of this great philosophical system—­as well as that of the civilization which was its expositor in material form—­there came a separation and a divergence.  The balanced unity was broken, and on the one hand the tendency was increasingly towards the exaggerated mysticism that had characterized the Eastern moiety of the synthesis, on the other towards an exaggerated intellectualism the seeds of which are inherent even in St. Thomas himself.  The new mysticism withdrew further and further from the common life, finding refuge in hidden sanctuaries in Spain, Italy, the Rhineland; the old intellectualism became more and more dominant in the minds of man and the affairs of the world, and with the Renaissance it became supreme, as did the other qualities of paganism in art as well as in every other field of human activity.