ing a double character--it is popular and it
is laic. It comes out from the heart of the people, and it looks athwart
many uncertainties at nothing less than wresting the sacred things from
the hands of the clergy.

The conservatives of our time who turn to the thirteenth century as to
the golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is
especially the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall
soon see that the two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it
is enough for the moment to point out that the Church had never been
more powerful nor more threatened.

There was a genuine attempt at a religious revolution, which, if it had
succeeded, would have ended in a universal priesthood, in the
proclamation of the rights of the individual conscience.

The effort failed, and though later on the Revolution made us all kings,
neither the thirteenth century nor the Reformation was able to make us
all priests. Herein, no doubt, lies the essential contradiction of our
lives and that which periodically puts our national institutions in
peril. Politically emancipated, we are not morally or religiously
free.[2]

The thirteenth century with juvenile ardor undertook this revolution,
which has not yet reached its end. In the north of Europe it became
incarnate in cathedrals, in the south, in saints.

The cathedrals were the lay churches of the thirteenth century. Built by
the people for the people, they were originally the true common house of
our old cities. Museums, granaries, chambers of commerce, halls of
justice, depositories of archives, and even labor exchanges, they were
all these at once.

That art of the Middle Ages which Victor Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc have
taught us to understand and love was the visible expression of the
enthusiasm of a people who were achieving communal liberty. Very far
from being the gift of the Church, it was in its beginning an
unconscious protest against the hieratic, impassive, esoteric art of the
religious orders. We find only laymen in the long list of master-workmen
and painters who have left us the innumerable Gothic monuments which
stud the soil of Europe. Those artists of genius who, like those of
Greece, knew how to speak to the populace without being common, were for
the most part humble workmen; they found their inspiration not in the
formulas of the masters of monastic art, but in constant communion with
the very soul of the nation. Therefore