Chesterton on Aquinas

“Indeed, I think there are fewer people now alive who understand argument than there were twenty or thirty years ago; and St Thomas might have preferred the society of the atheists of the early nineteenth century, to that of the blank sceptics of the early twentieth. Anyhow, one of the real disadvantages of the great and glorious sport, that is called argument, is its ordinate length. If you argue honestly, as St Thomas always did, you will find that the subject sometimes seems as if it would never end…. Being himself resolved to argue, to honestly, to answer everybody, to deal with everything, he produced books enough to sink a ship or stock a library.”

—G. K. Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1943), p. 100.