act, 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.

The first fruit of the new intellectualism was the philosophy of Dr.
John Calvin--if we can call it such,--Augustinian philosophy, misread,
distorted and made noxious by its reliance on the intellectual process
cut off from spiritual energy as the sufficient corrective of
philosophical thought. It is this false philosophy, allied with an
equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who
accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the
Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the
protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was
un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the
year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined
through the centuries that have followed the Reform