e allotted to it in the wide purview of St.
Thomas, Melchior Canus, and Suares remodelled the _Summa_ without
adding anything essential to it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the Sorbonne composed for use in the schools handy treatises
which are for the most part revised and reduced copies of the _Summa_.
At each page one can detect the same texts cut out and separated from
the comments which explain them; the same syllogisms, triumphant,
but devoid of any solid foundation; the same defects of historical
criticism, arising from the confusion of dates and places.

Theology may be divided into dogmatics and ethics. Dogmatic theology,
in addition to the Prolegomena comprising the discussions relating
to the sources of divine authority, is divided into fifteen treatises
upon all the dogmas of Christianity. At the basis is the treatise
_De la vraie Religion_, which seeks to demonstrate the supernatural
character of the Christian religion, that is to say of Revealed Writ
and of the Church. Then all the dogmas are proved by Holy Writ, by the
Councils, by the Fathers, and by the theologians. It cannot be denied
that there is a very frank rationalism at the root of all this. If
scholasticism is the descendant in the first generation of St. Thomas
Aquinas, it is descended in the second from Abelard. In such a system
reason holds the first place, reason proves the revelation, the
divinity of Scripture and the authority of the Church. This done, the
door is open to every kind of deduction. The only instance in which
St. Sulpice has been moved to anger since the extinction of Jansenism
was when M. de Lamennais declared that the starting-point should be
faith, and not reason. And what is to be the test in the last resort
of the claims of faith if not reason!

Moral theology consists of a dozen treatises comprising the whole body
of philosophical ethics and of law, completed by the revelation and
decisions of the Church. All this forms a sort of encyclopaedia very
closely connected. It is an edifice, the stones of which are attached
to one another by iron clamps, but the base is extremely weak. This
base is the treatise _De la vraie Religion_, which treatise does not
hold together. For not only does it fail to show that the Christian
religion is more especially divine and revealed than the others, but
it does not even prove that in the field of reality which comes within
the reach of our observation there has occurred a s