228 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



nor has it ever had a stronger affirmation or a nobler 

 utterance in the mouth of any Protestant than it re- 

 ceived from the great doctor angelicus of Roman the- 

 ology, St. Thomas Aquinas, or than it continues to 

 receive, and to receive increasingly, from the mem- 

 bers of his great school, unquestionably the most in- 

 fluential, and deservedly the most influential, in the 

 Roman church of our day. Nor can we justify the 

 blunder of assuming that the New Doctrine, with its 

 Method of Reason, belongs only to so-called Infidels 

 and the feeble handful of disapproved Liberals in the 

 United States and in dissenting England or else- 

 where. The New Doctrine might with far less error, 

 though still not with much accuracy, be said to be 

 dominant among the leading official teachers in the 

 two great established churches of Protestantism, — the 

 German and the Anglican ; while in the less impor- 

 tant but still intellectually influential Protestant or- 

 ganisations of Holland and Belgium the same is 

 true, and even more true. Later in the essay, I 

 shall give what seems to me the unanswerable proof 

 that the Method of Reason is not only not unchris- 

 tian, but is really the only method consistent with the 

 principles of Christ ; that, with its rise, Christianity, 

 in its full meaning, first became actual in the Christian 

 body, and that with its victorious supremacy the full 

 "mind that was in Christ" will for the first time have 

 come to expression in the mass of his followers. 



