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And that, as a matter of fact, is his position. In his Summa Theologies Aquinas discusses this whole question with eminent fairness, and with great thoroughness. He first states the claims of those who, from the days of Chrysostom, had made excuses for lying with a good end in view, and then he meets those claims severally.
Struggling to understand himself, Man has built up and discarded superstitions, theologies and sciences. Early in this strange and fascinating history he divided himself into two parts a body and a mind. Working together with body, mind somehow was of different stuff and origin than body and had only a mysterious connection with it.
New Thought is either a theology with a philosophic basis or a philosophy with a theological bias. It is centrally and quite distinctly an attempt to give a religious content to the present trend of science and philosophy, a reaction against old theologies and perhaps a kind of nebula out of which future theologies will be organized.
Eastern Christianity has made most of the incarnation. The great Greek theologies were built around that.
Indeed, it may easily be that such high spirits accept awful traditions and cruel theologies, merely because they possess a transmuting touch which gives these things a secret and relative value not intrinsically theirs; because they find here something to satisfy an inward demand for immense expansions of thought, a desire for all sorts of proportioned and balanced extremes.
If not nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and significant life is its own justification; and in a last analysis philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring.
There can be wars in the interest of different theologies, and mixed wars of diplomacy and confessions of belief, wars to transfer the tradition of infallibility from a pope to a book, wars of Puritans against the divine right of kings in the Old World and the natural rights of Indians in the New, in all of which the name of God has been invoked for sanction, and Scripture has been quoted, and Psalms uplifted on the battle-field for encouragement.
No possible theory of inspiration should lead us to look for the submergences of the dykes of thought cast up by race and age and individuality. As a matter of fact, we find no uniformity in the theologies of the New Testament writers. Men have tried hard to make it appear that there was such a unity of thought.
The credulity of reporters alone concerning developments in surgery, for example, is incredible. There is enough rot published daily for a brief to be made out against the idolatry of science. Science also as a religion, as a faith to bind men together, as a substitute for the moribund old mythologies and theologies which kept them sundered, is commencing to be talked of in a more serious tone.
This is the fact which weighs so heavily with the thoughtful and discriminating minds of the day that all the apocalyptic theologies and religious philosophies which purport to reveal the unspeakable mystery known to exist, though hidden from our sight, end only in belittling it.
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