Mercier's character and making him a world-hero came from his training
in scholastic philosophy and from his having assimilated the spirit of
the thirteenth century.

That period indeed not only trained its people to a high spiritual ideal
but gave them golden opportunities to express themselves and to put
forth, under the inspiration of religion, the best that was in them.
The medium was the guild system which, working from a self-protecting
alliance of traders, extended itself to every existing form of industry
and commerce and gave "the workman a position of self-respect and
independence such as he had never held before and has failed to achieve
since" (Cram).

A remarkable thing about the guild system was that it established and
maintained what we, today, call technical schools for the training of
apprentices. But more remarkable was the spirit which animated the
system. _Operare est orare_ was its principle. As a result of that
teaching that labor is practical prayer, that the worker should labor
not simply for a wage, but for perfection, men with untiring energy
straining for finer and better work came to make the best things their
minds could conceive, their taste could plan, their hands could fashion.
Bell-making in Dante's day attained such perfection that the form and
composition of bells have ever since been imitated. Workers of precious
metals produced such wonderful chalices that succeeding generations have
never equalled the ancient model. The masonry of medievalism has secrets
of construction lost to our age. Mechanical engineering solved without
the use of steel girders problems in the structural work of cathedrals,
palaces, fortresses and bridges that causes open-eyed astonishment in
the twentieth century. Wood carving as seen in many medieval chairs,
tables, and choir equipment is of design so exquisite and of finish of