This spirit was the precise opposite to that grimness in the religious feeling of a century before. To the men of the early twelfth century, for instance to Abelard, the claims of religion were inexorably stern. They could no more be reconciled with any sort of human affection, than could the unyielding round arch adjust itself to vault the irregular compartments of nave and ambulatory. In human feeling, as in architecture, the result was ugly distortion, and it was precisely this distorted feeling that produced Manicheanism. Clearly, if God was good and loving and the world utterly vile, then God had not made the world. The Devil had made it, and was by that act co-equal, if not for the time being, superior, in power to God Himself. Not so, said St. Francis, the earth is the Lord’s, and it is beautiful. Only pride, both pride of possessions and pride of intellect, stands in the way of happiness. So he joyously married his “Lady Poverty,” and once refused to let a hesitating novice possess so much as a breviary. Under the busy brushes of Giotto and the other painters of the Franciscan legend, the Holy Family, without ceasing to be a symbol of the faith, became also the emblem of innocent and happy domestic life. St. Francis did not begin the humanizing of religion. The change had already begun before the middle of the twelfth century with the cult of the Virgin. There is a legend that once, when St. Bernard was praying to her, and had come to the words, “Show that thou art the mother,” Our Lady appeared to him and from her breast dropped on his lips three drops of the milk that had nourished the Saviour. That is already far from the atmosphere of Abelard and Heloise. Already, in St. Bernard’s time, the north-French architects were beginning to break up the unyielding Norman and Lombard round arches into the pointed form, and the same period was evidently trying to resolve the distortion of religion and human love. St. Francis enormously enlarged and deepened the new current of religious thought. The climax was reached after his death in the story of the Miracle of Bolsena. Here, in 1263, a priest without faith in the Real Presence of our Lord in the Host, saw the wafer which he himself had just consecrated covered with drops of blood. About half a century before, in neighbouring Orvieto, a zealous Catholic magistrate had been murdered by the Manichees. Now the Church insisted that God gave His very self to be the food of all men, even to the poor, the serf, and the humble. St. Dominic was of a different temper, and attacked the problem in a different way. Dante calls him— “... the holy athlete, Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”