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.