I have said that the time was spontaneous, and in general that is true. The emergence of the serf as a practically free peasant came about quietly, of itself. Even the noisy communes troubled themselves little about the larger implications of their acts. But one man at least, Arnold of Brescia, a pupil (or at least a follower) of Abelard, brought the new learning to the support of the new municipalities. He broke with the Church, his success was short, and he soon went under; but such was his fame that after his execution his body was burned and the ashes thrown into the Tiber for fear that his bones might be cherished as relics, and certain heretics called themselves “Arnoldists” well into the next century. So the time went on, everywhere making all things new, roads, buildings, philosophies; happy like a young god in creating, and, like God, seeing that its works were good. Its cities were growing fast. Even in Central Europe it was clearing the forests until their extent was reduced almost to what it is to-day.[3] No new process to spin cloth, smelt steel, or make steam engines, had given it power over material nature. Its learned men were too deeply fascinated with looking into the meaning and end of our human life in God, to experiment in physics. Its material conquests were won by the leaping energy of its own vigorous will. In the second half of the century appear new elements of artistic and intellectual power, the Gothic and the rediscovered works of Aristotle. In France, the great, new, idea of nationality began dimly to emerge. With the fall of Jerusalem to the Moslem, for the first time since the last ninth-century raids of the heathen Vikings, Christendom feels a great calamity. The Gothic was altogether new, and was the creation of the new lay spirit of the time. It has been written a thousand times how the pointed arch solved structural difficulties, and gave to men intent upon height the opportunity of building still higher. Its broken line gave them also, as we shall see in a moment, a new expression of their own spirit. As yet, however, the change was only beginning, and buildings showed the broken arch mingled in fellowship with the round.