Father D’arcy, in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas, has pointed out that, although the tnought and writings of the saint continued after the Renaissance to be potent influences on the Continent, in England they fell into almost total neglect. ‘E ew among the lovers of the New Learning imitated the example of Erasmus and excepted Aquinas from their censure of the Scholastics. The majority were of the mind of Bacon .... The tradition of medieval thought and culture lingered on in Oxford .... but was seldom, if ever, renovated by an adequate knowledge of the writings of St. Thomas/ And m another passage, ‘No one, save a Catholic, thought of studying his system from the point of view of pure philosophy.’

This is indubitably a fact; and one that renders all the more interesting those individuals who ran counter to so strong a current of national thought and feeling. For there are brilliant, though sometimes unsuspected, exceptions to this general rule of neglect. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas continued to influence the few if not the many; and of these none is more worthy of note than Thomas Traherne, that most attractive seventeenth century devotional writer, who has been rediscovered by our own age, and who is being proclaimed as one of the greatest mystics England has produced, perhaps the greatest Nature-mystic the world has ever seen. This Traherne, whose limpid poetry and surpassingly lovely prose are attracting more and more readers to-day, owes much of his power to the beauty and wholeness of the personality his writings reveal; and from this point of view it is interesting to discover how deeply he was influenced by the spirit and thought of Aquinas.