In Memoriam

The dead Cardinal of Malines has stood so publicly and undauntedly for all the principles to which BLACKFRIARS is dedicated that his death should not find us silent. Yet to be silent would be easier than to speak fittingly of so great a mind and soul.

For us, children of the thought of Aquinas, there is a special pride in remembering that our teacher was also the teacher of the great prelate from whose lips not Belgium only, but the civilised world learned lessons in years of intellectual upheaval.

When Leo XIII asked the thinkers of the civilised world to go back to Aquinas there were some, even amongst the children of the Church, who heard the Pope’s invitation with dismay. To them it was as if the Commander-in-Chief of a modern army should ask his soldiers to exchange their service rifles and machine guns for bows and arrows. Incidentally we might remark that a modern war waged with bows and arrows would probably not equal the Great War in loss of men, or in deciding the main issue of truth and justice. But the bow and arrow attitude towards the papal revival of St. Thomas left the Abbé Désiré Mercier unmoved. Already his sound Belgian brain had been abroad in the fields of English and German philosophy. He could appreciate the dogged quest of ultimate truth which lifted the lives of Kant and Spencer to the heroic. There are pages of sympathetic criticism of these fruitless thinkers which accredit this Lion of Flanders, a kinsman of the Dumb Ox of Aquino.