Reflecting on these facts, we readily give assent to the charitable judgment of the historian Von Holst in commenting on the acts of the Terrorists in the French Revolution, that “wrongdoing to others lies not so much in the will as in the understanding.” The greatest crime of history was committed by men who knew not what they did.[704] It was a theological doctrine which is to-day rejected by the reason and conscience of a large section of the Church itself, that caused the loss for centuries of the virtue of toleration, which in the ethical systems of the classical world had been assigned a prominent place among the virtues, and which, could it have found a place in the standard of goodness of the Church, would have saved Christendom the horrors of the Albigensian crusades, the pious cruelties of the Inquisition, and the mutual persecutions of Catholics and Protestants throughout the age of the Reformation. [Sidenote: Political morality: Machiavellian ethics] The matter of dominant importance in the sphere of political morality during the Renaissance was the creation of a code of morals for princes. This was a system formulated by the Italian philosopher Machiavelli, who wrote under the secularizing influences of the classical revival and of the paganized courts of the Italian princes of his time.[705] It was a code which the ruling class, for whom it was designed, eagerly adopted, for the reason that it harmonized with their desires, ambitions, and practices, and sanctioned as not only morally permissible, but even as obligatory and meritorious, policies and acts which, without such sanction, might have awakened in some at least inconvenient and hampering scruples of conscience. This princely ideal, notwithstanding that the conduct of the prince who acted in accordance with it was generally condoned, was not one which, like the ascetic or the knightly ideal, awakened moral enthusiasm. It was a standard of conduct never approved by the best conscience of Christendom. On the contrary, the work in which Machiavelli embodied this ideal for princes was, on its first appearance, fiercely assailed as grossly immoral, and ever since has called forth the severest condemnation of moralists. The fundamental principle of Machiavelli’s system is that the moral code binding on the subject is not binding on the ruler; or rather that ethics has nothing to do with politics.[706] With the prince the end justifies the means. He is at liberty to lie, defraud, steal, and kill, in fine, to employ all and every form of deception, injustice, cruelty, and unrighteousness in dealing with his enemies and with other princes or states.