Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/87

Rh it must contain no proposition that violates any evident mental law. Hence strenuous efforts are made to ward off the criticism of the Rationalist, and in some cases, as in treating the central point of the Trinitarian dogma or the sacramental presence of Christ in the sacred biscuit, the reasoning becomes curiously subtle and interesting.

Much space, also, is occupied with the conflicts of rival schools of theologians. Thomists (followers of St. Thomas) and Scotists (followers of the Franciscan, Duns Scotus) quarrel religiously on every point of theology that the Church has not defined. The Scotists (Franciscans) are against everybody in everything, for Scotus was the keenest critic that ever kept within the bounds of the Church—a kind of Abelard restrained by profound religious veneration. The Dominicans follow St. Thomas servilely. So do the Jesuits at present, entering, no doubt, into the spirit of their vow of special obedience to the Pope; for Leo XIII. has declared in favour of St. Thomas, and Thomism has spread through the Church like dilettante socialism or a veneration for St. Joachim. The result of the divisions is, that important questions of actual interest are imperfectly grasped by theologians until they find that the world has moved a step, and they then ungracefully follow it: their time is mainly occupied with the thrilling problems of, whether the influence of grace on the soul is physical or moral; whether Christ would still have