THE PERIOD OF CHANGE. The thirteenth century has often been called the wonderful century of the mediaeval world. It was wonderful largely in that the forces struggling against mediaevalism to evolve the modern spirit here first find clear expression. It was a century of rapid and unmistakable progress in almost every line. By its close great changes were under way which were destined ultimately to shake off the incubus of mediaevalism and to transform Europe. In many respects, though, the fourteenth was a still more wonderful century. The evolution of the universities which we have just traced was one of the most important of these thirteenth-century manifestations. Lacking in intellectual material, but impelled by the new impulses beginning to work in the world, the scholars of the time went earnestly to work, by speculative methods, to organize the dogmatic theology of the Church into a system of thinking. The result was Scholasticism. From one point of view the result was barren; from another it was full of promise for the future. Though the workers lacked materials, were overshadowed by the mediaeval spirit of authority, and kept their efforts clearly within limits approved by the Church, the "heroic industry" and the "in tense application" displayed in effecting the organization, and the logical subtlety developed in discussing the results, promised much for the future. The rise of university instruction, and the work of the Scholastics in organizing the knowledge of the time, were both a resultant of new influences already at work and a prediction of larger consequences to follow. In a later age, and with men more emancipated from church control, the same spirit was destined to burst forth in an effort to discover and reconstruct the historic past. During the thirteenth century, too, the new Estate, which had come into existence alongside of the clergy and the nobility, began to assume large importance. The arts-and-crafts guilds were attaining a large development, and out of this new burgher class the great general public of modern times has in time evolved. Trade and industry were increasing in all lands, and merchants and successful artisans were becoming influential through their newly obtained wealth and rights. The erection of stately churches and town halls, often beautifully carved and highly ornamented, was taking place. Great cathedrals, those "symphonies in stone," of which Notre Dame (Figure 53) is a good example, were rising or being further expanded and decorated at many places in western Europe. Mystery and miracle plays had begun to be performed and to attract great attention. In the fourteenth century religious pageants were added. "All art was still religion," but an art was unmistakably arising amid cathedral-building and the setting- forth of the Christian mysteries, and before long this was to flower in modern forms of expression in painting, sculpture, and the drama.