ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.
[To THE • Erwron Or TRU "SPIV:MANOR:1 SIR,—May I point out that the writer of the interesting article on St. Thomas Aquinas in last week's Spectator has inadvertently represented the argument of my own article in the Dublin Review as precisely the opposite of what it is ? He speaks of my hoping "by means of dialectics to revivify Roman Catholicism." My contention is, on the contrary (p. 24), that the dialectical method was "essentially rationalistic," and I invoke the "earlier and higher philosophy of the Fathers," which recognised that the grounds of religious conviction must be largely personal and spiritual.
I speak of St. Thomas as a model to us now, inasmuch as he accepted what was good in the characteristic thought of his own time, and assimilated its learning with Christianity, in place of opposing a whole system on account of its defects. To do this now is not to use and Christianise (as St. Thomas did) the dialectical method of the thirteenth century, but to act in the same way towards the inductive method and the philosophy of religions experience which characterise twentieth. century thought.—I am, Sir, &c.,
THE "DUBLIN" REVIEWER.
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