Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

GROWTH OF THE POPULAR ELEMENT. 207
thoughts of their own about politics, about the conduct of
life, and even about theology; they began to be critics in
their own dull way ;
it is true they knew but a little, yet
they exercised this knowledge
as an instrument for the
acquisition of more. A free circulation of thought began,
and though
it was very feeble and very slow, it was the
origin of the movement which culminated in one direction
in the Teutonic Keformation, and in the other in the French
Eevolution. Both of these really have their springs in the
thirteenth century, when thought freed itself from the two
main grooves, the classical and ecclesiastical, in which for
centuries it had travelled, and went forth in vernacular
freedom to find what entertainment it
might
human homes and
hearts.
in humble
The XiQnae4Jiejat__rise of secular^life
in dignity and import
ance is the broadest fact of the thirteenth century. The
great saint of the middle of the century, St. Louis, is a
layman, a thorough layman, and that means much. The
Crusades had greatly stimulated the growth of the popular
mind, and the development of the popular estate ; commerce,
knowledge, and great purposes which the poorest and the
richest equally shared, had elevated the population of the
chief European kingdoms ;
and from that time men of the
people began to take, not an accidental, but a constant and
recognised part in the conduct of public
affairs. As secular
life
grew larger and took in a wider field, it would
inevitably assert its right to something of that sanctity
which till that time had been supposed to attach to the
religious life alone. Two centuries earlier a man so holy
as St. Louis would have been almost driven into a cloister;
in the thirteenth century he could feel that holiness had a
wide field of influence even in the most eminent places of
the world.
Questions of morals, of religion, had their interest
for secular men, and were dealt with apart from the mere