If St. Thomas had not been born a Catholic, his philosophy would have brought him to Catholicism. If he had not been—or if he were not—by temperament a humanist, Thomism and the Faith were sufficient to make him one. These three, which meet and fuse in the human soul, are so intimately linked together that it ris impossible perfectly to possess any one of them without possessing the others. All three find common expression in the enfranchisement of the personality. Humanism in the full and real.sense is more than the incomplete humanism of the ancients; more than the atrophied humanism of the Renaissance. For in humanism there are two elements. There is the worship, the love, of beauty, wherever beauty is to be found. There is the realization of the personality in whatever sphere that realization is possible. And both Greece and the Renaissance failed in fullness in these things. If there be any realm of reality, any part of the university of being, whose beauty finds no echo in the heart of a man; if there be anything of life and its fullness to which his personality will not respond, that man is, in that degree, no humanist. In the same degree he will be, logically, no follower of the philosophy of St. Thomas or of the religion of Christ.

It need hardly be said that such a conception is in no conflict with the Christian idea of what is called detachment or of mortification.