From its very beginning the Dominican Order has always manifested its vitality by giving effect to new ways of spiritual and apostolic life. It was not by the well-trodden path of enclosure, stability and retirement from the world that St. Dominic chose to lead his friars. His experience with the Albigensians had shown him that to meet the needs of the time other means must be found. Those means he had the vision and the courage to adopt. What struck his contemporaries about St. Thomas seems to have been his novelty, an imputation of which he might well be proud for it was his courage in bringing forth old truths in a new form that gave to the Church his synthesis of Aristotelianism and Platonism. It is not surprising, then, to learn that in the 20th century, as in the 13th, the Order of Preachers finds new ways, especially suited to the conditions of the time, of fulfilling its vocation of contemplata, aliis tradere.