cclesiastical reform extended everywhere. Hereupon rich and powerful
laymen, filled with ardor for their faith or fear for their eternal
welfare, went seeking after solitude, and devoted themselves to prayer in
the monasteries they had founded or enriched with their wealth; whole
families were dispersed amongst various religious houses; and all the
severities of penance hardly sufficed to quiet imaginations scared at the
perils of living in the world or at the vices of their age. And, at the
same time, in addition to this outburst of piety, ignorance was decried
and stigmatized as the source of the prevailing evils; the function of
teaching was included amongst the duties of the religious estate; and
every newly-founded or reformed monastery became a school in which pupils
of all conditions were gratuitously instructed in the sciences known by
the name of liberal arts. Bold spirits began to use the rights of
individual thought in opposition to the authority of established
doctrines; and others, without dreaming of opposing, strove at any rate
to understand, which is the way to produce discussion. Activity and
freedom of thought were receiving development at the same time that
fervent faith and fervent piety were.

This great moral movement of humanity in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries arose from events very different in different parts of the
beautiful country which was not yet, but was from that time forward
tending to become, France. Amongst these events, which cannot be here
recounted in detail, we will fix upon two, which were the most striking,
and the most productive of important consequences in the whole history of
the epoch, the quarrel of Abelard with St. Bernard and the crusade
against the Albigensians. We shall there see how Northern France and
Southern France differed one from the other before the bloody crisis
which was to unite them in one single name and one common destiny.

In France properly so called at that time, north of the Rhone and the
Loire, the church had herself accomplished the chief part of the reforms
which had become necessary. It was there that the most active and most
eloquent of the reforming monks had appeared, had preached, and had
founded or regenerated a great number of monasteries. It was there that,
at first amongst the clergy, and then, through their example, amongst the
laity, Christian discipline and morals had resumed some sway. There,
too, the Christian faith and