he mounting force in its swift and almost violent
ascent.

Pierre du Pallet, yclept Abelard, was born in 1079 and died in
1142, and his life precisely covers the period of the birth,
development and perfecting of that Gothic style of architecture
which is one of the great exemplars of the period. Actually, the
Norman development occupied the years from 1050 to 1125 while the
initiating and determining of Gothic consumed only fifteen years,
from Bury, begun in 1125, to Saint-Denis, the work of Abbot Suger,
the friend and partisan of Abelard, in 1140. It was the time of the
Crusades, of the founding and development of schools and
universities, of the invention or recovery of great arts, of the
growth of music, poetry and romance. It was the age of great kings
and knights and leaders of all kinds, but above all it was the
epoch of a new philosophy, refounded on the newly revealed corner
stones of Plato and Aristotle, but with a new content, a new
impulse and a new method inspired by Christianity.

All these things, philosophy, art, personality, character, were the
product of the time, which, in its definiteness and consistency,
stands apart from all other epochs in history. The social system
was that of feudalism, a scheme of reciprocal duties, privileges
and obligations as between man and man that has never been excelled
by any other system that society has developed as its own method of
operation. As Dr. De Wulf has said in his illuminating book
"Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages" (a volume that
should be read by any one who wishes rightly to understand the
spirit and quality of Mediaevalism), "the feudal sentiment _par
excellence_ ... is the sentiment of the value and dignity of the
individual man. The feudal man lived as a free man; he was master
in his own house; he sought his end in himself; he was--and this is
a scholastic expression,--_propter seipsum existens_: all feudal
obligations were founded upon respect for personality and the given
word."

Of course this admirable scheme of society with its guild system of
industry, its absence of usury in any form and its just sense of
comparative values, was shot through and through with religion both
in faith and practice. Catholicism was universally and implicitly
accepted. Monasticism had redeemed Europe from barbarism and Cluny
had freed the Church from the yoke of German imperialism. This
unity and immanence of religion gave a consistency to society