Sometimes religious sanctions have inspired and promoted zeal for social enterprise. The Crusades stand out as classic instances, but in the name of religion men have done more than build cathedrals and go on pilgrimages. In the Middle Ages, bridges and roads were constructed, alms were given, pictures were painted, books illuminated, encyclopaedias made, education conducted, all under the auspices and inspiration of the Church. The mediaeval universities started as church schools. In our own day, the expansion of the churches in the direction of welfare work and social reform, the use of the church as a community center, are examples of this development. Men have found justification by good works as well as faith. INTOLERANCE AND INQUISITION. The influence of religious tradition over the minds of its followers has had, among many noble and beautiful consequences, the dark fruits of intolerance, persecution, inquisition, and torture. Part of the bitter narrow-mindedness which has characterized the history of ecclesiastical institutions is not to be attributed specifically to religion. It is rather to be explained by the general uneasiness which the gregarious human creature feels at any deviation from the accustomed. In addition men have felt frequently that any divergence from the divinely ordained would bring destruction upon the whole group. In the Christian tradition there was an additional reason for intolerance: the heretic was willfully losing his own soul, and it was only humane to compel him to come "into the fold, to rescue him from the pains he would otherwise suffer in Hell." The profound conviction that those who did not believe in its doctrines would be damned eternally, and that God punishes theological error as if it were the most heinous of crimes, led naturally to persecution. It was a duty to impose on men the only true doctrine, seeing that their own eternal interests were at stake, and to hinder errors from spreading. Heretics were more than ordinary criminals, and the pains that man could inflict on them were as nothing to the tortures awaiting them in hell.[1] [Footnote 1: Bury: _History of Freedom of Thought_, pp. 52-53.]