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 otherwise unobtainable, and poured its vitality into every form of human thought and action.
It was Catholicism and the spirit of feudalism that preserved men from the dangers inherent in the immense individualism of the time.
With this powerful and penetrating cooerdinating force men were safe to go about as far as they liked in the line of individuality, whereas today, for example, the unifying force of a common and vital religion being absent and nothing having been offered to take its place, the result of a similar tendency is egotism and anarchy.
These things happened in the end in the case of Mediaevalism when the power and the influence of religion once began to weaken, and the Renaissance and Reformation dissolved the fabric of a unified society.

Thereafter it became necessary to bring some order out of the spiritual, intellectual and physical chaos through the application of arbitrary force, and so came absolutism in government, the tyranny of the new intellectualism, the Catholic Inquisition and the Puritan Theocracy.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the balance is justly preserved, though it was but an unstable equilibrium, and therefore during the time of Abelard we find the widest diversity of speculation and freedom of thought which continue unhampered for more than a hundred years.