and prayed to be released from the burthen of an office for which he felt himself unworthy and unfit.[217] Strong as was the temptation to pacify Henry thus easily, Alexander felt that the Church could not allow such a sacrifice of her champion; and Thomas never again swerved from his determination to be satisfied with nothing short of complete surrender on the part of the king. For this one object he laboured, pleaded, argued, censured, during the next six years without ceasing; his own suffragans, the monastic orders, Pope, cardinals, the Empress Matilda, the king of France, none of them had a moment’s peace from his passionate endeavours to press them into a service which he seemed to expect them all to regard as a matter of life and death not merely for England but for all Christendom. Doubtless it was a sad waste of energy and a sad perversion of enthusiasm; yet the enthusiasm contrasts pathetically, almost heroically, with the spirit in which it was met. There was something noble, if there was also something exasperatingly unpractical, in a man who, absorbed in his devotion to one mistaken idea, never even saw that he and his cause were becoming the pretexts and the tools of half the political intrigues of Europe, and whom the experience of a lifetime failed to teach that all the world was not as single-hearted as himself. Intellectually, a mind thus constituted must needs provoke and deserve the impatient scorn of a cool clear brain such as Gilbert Foliot’s; but its very intellectual weakness was the source of its true strength. It is this dogged adherence to one fixed idea, this simplicity of aim, which appeals to the average crowd of mankind far more strongly than the larger and more statesmanlike temper of men like Foliot, or like Henry himself. Whether or no the cause be worthy--whether or no the zeal be according to knowledge--it is the zealot, not the philosopher, who becomes the popular hero and martyr. [216] Ep. cviii. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. v.), p. 207. [217] Will. Cant. (_ib._ vol. i.), p. 46; Alan Tewkesb. (_ib._ vol. ii.), pp. 342, 343; E. Grim (_ibid._), p. 403; Will. Fitz-Steph. (_ib._ vol. iii.), p. 76; _Thomas Saga_ (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 305–313. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 140), gives this scene as having occurred, “ut dicitur,” at the council of Tours.