That so much of the formative period of his life was spent in a controversy, in which he was the applauded spokesman of a party whose cause he regarded as the cause of God, could not but affect his intellectual character. Professor Maurice thinks the delay in obtaining the master’s degree worked in the same direction. The master in those days was expected to pronounce decisions; those who had not attained that rank were occupied in disputations only. “Thus our author was a trained arguer,” and “the old habits remained with him when his decisions were most accepted as authorities. From first to last he was thinking of all that could be said on both sides of the question he was discussing.” I believe that he was conscious of the narrowing and dwarfing tendency of this habit of mind, even though he did not detect the source of the evil. We read of his seeking to prepare himself for his work by humble devotion. But to the last line of his last work the controversial habit and attitude of mind clings to him. It is only in his catechetical expositions, written before he left Koeln for Paris, that you find a different atmosphere, and escape the heretic-crushing Aristotelian dialectic of the scholastic disputant.
Even in his few hymns, which constitute his title to rank among the sacred poets, he is the great scholastic doctor, with his eye on the heresies which may distract the believer. He writes with the full panoply under his singing robes. All his hymns are concerned with the greatest of the Christian sacraments. It was in 1215, a year before the confirmation of the Dominican Order, and twelve years before Thomas was born, that the fourth Lateran Council made the transubstantiation of the elements into the body and blood of Christ an article of faith. But a Belgian ecstatic, Juliana of Liege, had a vision which called for a special annual festival in honor of the mystery. Urban IV. complied with this request in 1261, by requiring that the Thursday next after Trinity Sunday should be observed as Corpus Christi Day. This involved the preparation of an additional services for the Missal and Breviary, with suitable prayers and hymns, and the work was laid upon Thomas. For the Missal he wrote the sequence