grade of being. To be really a living man, he must know 'what is' and must know that he knows it. The wider diffusion of that philosophy which alone is truly in conformity with the common sense of mankind—because it alone remains in the line of development of that rudimentary philsophy of common sense and alone justifies it -would eliminate the danger of hearing so frequently that, for example, So-and-so, an 'educated' man, goes to Mass, because if he stayed away it would be remarked and the results would be inconvenient. Reasonable service (rationabile obsequium) which Scholastic Philosophy eminently tends to produce is the contradictory of the deplorable 'formalism' called Religious Routine. But where shall we find Scholastie Philosophy? In St. Thomas.

V-WHY ST. THOMAS?

Again and again the successors of St. Peter have told us that we must follow St. Thomas; and it is expressly enjoined on us in Canon Law. My intention is not to go over all the reasons enumerated by the Sovereign Pontiffs for the adoption of St. Thomas as the official philosopher of the Holy Catholic Church. But merely taking as our starting-point the sentence objectum intellectus est ens (which, as I have said above, contains in germ the whole of Thomistic Philosophy), I wish to show in conclusion, briefly, how the other schools of Philosophy fail to reach the sublime majesty of the Thomistic school.

According to the Angelic Doctor, in the actual state of union of the soul with the body the Intelligence is dependent on the ministry of the senses and imagination for the reaching of its proper object, Being. The preliminary operations of the senses and imagination are extrinsic; the act of intellectual knowledge, the grasping of what is,' belongs in its entirety to the spiritual faculty of the Intelligence. The spiritual faculty of the Will intervenes in intellectual operations, choosing, directing, altering the line of thought to be followed,' etc.,' but the 1 Can. 589, § 1; 1366, § 2. Coffey, Epistomology, i. p. 52.

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Will follows the Intelligence and does not precede it.'1 The object is always grasped by the Intelligence and presented to the Will.

In the philosophy of Scotus, the Will is the supreme faculty, and with him it would not seem to be any longer question of grasping an order of Being that is and that cannot be other than it is. We see this in the fact that, according to Scotus, the limits of Nature and Grace do not depend on the intrinsic constitution of Being, but on God's good pleasure; and again in the fact that, in general, the precepts of the Second Table could be changed, if God so wished it. Thus a lie, for instance, would not be intrinsically bad.

In the philosophy of Suarez, the Imagination encroaches upon the Intelligence in the grasping of Being. It is because Suarez tried to represent, in too material a fashion, Being and immaterial Reality, that he concluded that the metaphysical solutions of St. Thomas could not be conceived. As there is an initial divergence for Suarez in the manner of conceiving potence and act, the principia quibus of Being, it is not to be wondered at that his metaphysics are in opposition to those of St. Thomas, so that 'out of the 24 Theses which contain the philosophical thought of St. Thomas, 23 have been contradicted, modified, or doubted by Suarez.' In an interesting article in the Revue Thomiste, 1921, by Father Joseph Le Rohellec, C.S.Sp., the origin of this divergence is attributed to the attempt to represent the Thomistic theses in too quantitative a fashion, in a word, to trying to imagine what can properly only be conceived.

As for non-Scholastic philosophers, the opposition between them and St. Thomas is still easier to grasp, if we remember our starting-point : 'the object of the Intelligence is Being.” For the sensist philosophers there is no higher faculty to which the senses minister; and so we cannot grasp Being : we do not seize 'what is'; we only feel.'

1 Thesis XXI of the 'Twenty-four Theses of St. Thomas.' 2 Barbedette, Histoire de la Philosophie, p. 358. The author refers to the Ciencia Tomista, May-June, 1917.

For Kant, finally, the senses no longer merely minister to the Intelligence in order that the latter may grasp the objective order, that exists independently of it and that measures the human intelligence; rather both senses and intellect participate in the construction of 'what is.' In the last resort, for Kant objective order becomes subjective construction.

We may well conclude with the striking words of Leo XIII: they both obviate misunderstanding and clench our thesis :

While, therefore, we hold that every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a willing and grateful mind, we exhort you in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas and to spread it far and wide for the defence and beauty of the Catholic Faith, for the good of society and for the advantages of all the sciences.

But lest the false for the true or the corrupt for the pure be drunk in, be ye watchful that the doctrine of Thomas be drawn from his own fountains, or at least from those rivulets which, derived from the very fount, have thus far flowed, according to the established agreement of learned men, pure and clear.

These words of the Holy Father were written some thirty years ago; it is very interesting to hear the opinion' of one of the greatest modern converts to Thomism, M. Jacques Maritain, himself a product of the Leonine renascence: 'One thing is certain, the Christian renascence which to-day is taking place among the élite and is being made ready in the world, shall be ephemeral and lifeless, unless it be, before all else, a Thomistic renascence.' '

1 Aeterni Patris.

DENIS FAHEY, C.S.SP.

• Antimoderne, ch. 3, ' De Quelques Conditions de la Renaissance Thomiste,'

p. 133.

3 This article was already written before Pope Pius XI's wonderful letter for the Sixth Centenary of the Canonization of St. Thomas reached the writer. I quote only one sentence, which aptly sums up what I have been trying to express: Just as of old,' writes the Holy Father, the Egyptians, who were suffering from the horrors of famine, were told to go to Joseph " to obtain bread, the sustenance of the body; so now we say to those who want the truth to go to Thomas" to obtain an abundant supply of that food of sound doctrine which nourishes souls for eternal life.' I have translated from the original text as published in the I. E. RECORD, September, 1923.

66

GRACE ABOUNDING

A CHAPTER OF IRELAND'S STORY-X

BY REV. E. J. QUIGLEY

Their religion is the passion and consolation of their lives. . . . All the higher and nobler life of the community lay beyond its pale (the Penal Code). Illegal combination was consecrated when it was essential to the performance of religious duty. Illegal violence was the natural protection against immoral laws. Eternal salvation, in the eyes of the majority of the Irish, could only be obtained by a course of conduct condemned by law.1

But, above all, it is the wounds of religious wars which are still living deep in Ireland. Religion enters into everything in Ireland."

T°

10 root out that religion which the cold, judicious and dispassionate Lecky tells us was (and is) the passion and consolation of the lives' of the Irish people was the objective of the army of Souperdom in Ireland. The Frenchman remarks truly that religion enters into every thing in Ireland. It saturated the soul of an Irishman, poor or rich, learned or unlettered. His Catholic training, his Catholic home, his Catholic or heathen surroundings, keep his faith living, lively, vivid. To crush his faith, to steal his faith, was an arduous and futile toil for tyrants, for robbers, and for ranters. But to achieve this impossible end they toiled and plotted with hellish zeal.

Others have written ably and at length of Ireland's long, long fight for her faith. Canon O'Rourke's The Battle for the Faith in Ireland' is a well-known and prized classic. In these poor essays, I am trying to show the ways and wiles of the aggressors in one line, in one period of sixty years, and I shall try to sum up and show the results of their works. We have seen how they worked for the first

1 Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. p. 315.

* Gustave de Beaumont's L'Irlande, Sociale, Politique et Religieuse. Dublin, Duffy.

thirty years of the campaign, and now we shall try to study them in their final efforts. Their first long fight was inglorious, in fact, ridiculous, and was on the wane everywhere when the great famine in Ireland came, 18461848. They saw their opportunity and rushed to seize it. How can I tell of the famine ? What pen can depict

it? Irish readers of this magazine have heard much of it, have read the appalling story, given with such detail by Canon O'Rourke in his finely documented work, The Great Famine in Ireland.1 It is a work of erudition and great painstaking effort, and it is the best record of the great calamity. Nearly all others have drawn from it; and Mr. A. M. Sullivan's narrative in New Ireland and Mr. T. P. O'Connor's chapter in The Parnell Movement are based and drawn from the cleric's labours. Irish readers will pardon me when I write what they have read often in other places. I write for those beyond our seas who have mourned and wept for Russia and Austria, that they may know that the lesser famines and the great famine devastated Ireland, and that even the dying, starving poor were lured and tempted by the soul-ghouls to save their bodies by renouncing their faith in Christ and His vicar, by scorning the Sacraments, by deserting the Church of Patrick and Brigid.

The famine arose from the total failure of the potato crop, the staple food of Ireland. By that failure the people were foodless, without money to buy food, cut off from foreign supplies. On the 27th July' (1846), writes Father Mathew, the temperance reformer, I passed from Cork to Dublin and this doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on 3rd August I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. . . In many places, the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens and farms, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless." " 'Blank stolid dismay, a sort of stupor

1 Dublin, Duffy.

• The Census of Ireland for the year 1851, Part V, Table of Deaths, p. 270,