It is not, of course, suggested that such is the normal or frequent course of believing Christians; but it has been so often enough to make the "libertine" theory of unbelief untenable. Indeed, the singular diversity between profession and practice among Christians has in all periods called out declarations by the more fervid believers that their average fellow-Christians are "practical atheists." More judicial minds may be set asking instead how far men really "believe" who do not act on their opinions. As one high authority has put it, in the Middle Ages the normal opposition of theory and practice "was peculiarly abrupt. Men's impulses were more violent, and their conduct more reckless, than is often witnessed in modern society; while the absence of a criticizing and measuring spirit made them surrender their minds more unreservedly than they would do now to a complete and imposing theory.... Resistance to God's Vicar might be, and indeed was admitted to be, a deadly sin, but it was one which nobody hesitated to commit." [52] And so with other sins, the sinner having somewhere in the rear of his consciousness the reflection that his sins could be absolved. And, apart from such half-purposive forms of licence among Christians, there have been countless cases of purposive licence. In all ages there have been antinomian Christians, [53] whether of the sort that simply rest on the "seventy times seven" of the Gospel, or of the more articulately logical kind who dwell on the doctrine of faith versus works. For the rest, as the considerate theologian will readily see, insistence on the possibility of a sinister motive for the unbeliever brings up the equal possibility of a sinister motive on the part of the convert to Christianity, ancient or modern. At every turn, then, the charge of perversity of the will recoils on the advocate of belief; so that it would be the course of common prudence to abandon it, even were it not in itself, as a rule, so plainly an expression of irritated bias.