In such a world, primed by a great caste of priests, intolerance had its ideal habitat. Aversion to innovating thought is as natural to man as egoism; and an innovating religion is no sooner established than it finds equilibrium in denouncing innovation. Thus, even apart from clerical action, and apart too from the ethnic animosity to Mohammedanism, the medieval laity, knowing nothing of the long intellectual and sectarian struggles which have forced tolerance on modern polity, were spontaneous persecutors of heresy save where it appealed primarily to their anti-clerical economic interests, or carried them away by mere contagion of physical excitement. The Flagellants, for instance, seem positively to have hypnotized many by their procedure, as did the partly kindred and partly contrary sect of Dancers, who flourished in Flanders and Germany late in the fourteenth century. It is thus credible that some were cured by incantations, which were hypnotic with a difference. But all such eccentrics were normally liable to cruel ill-treatment from their conforming fellows; and it is clear that in the fourteenth century the mystical and communistic heresies of Beghards and Beguins, male and female, were promptly persecuted by the general laity. The religion which categorically taught men to love their enemies never seems to have prepared them to endure in their neighbours a difference of doctrine. It is probable, too, that during the Dark Ages thousands of helpless souls were put to death as sorcerers by mobs without process of law, apart from those executed under the old laws against magic or divination, and the Teutonic codes of the same order. In a similar spirit, Christian mobs in all countries and ages had chronically wreaked a half-religious, half-economic hatred on the Jews, of whom enormous numbers died by massacre. Here the motive was not wholly religious, since their unfortunate specialization in usury--albeit forced upon them by Christian exclusiveness--had set up ill-will against the Jews in the period of the pagan empire, and even among the Moors, who had given them religious toleration. But Christian animus certainly counted for much, and carried the passion to lengths rarely reached in antiquity. Thus the common run of Christian life was grossly intolerant. It was left to the Church as such, however, to frame for the suppression of free thought in religion a machinery never paralleled in human history. § 2. The Inquisition