Nevertheless, one should deal mercifully with such sinful words, for, after all, is not the world very evil and the temptation to rail at God extremely great? It is true that things are not as they were in the year A.D. 1000, when even the wisest felt very sure the Last Day was at hand. Eclipses, comets and famines had then seemed foreshadowing this. People crowded the churches in agony, expecting to hear the Seven Trumpets announce Antichrist. Repeatedly since then, when the years have been calamitous, monks and old wives have stirred multitudes by vehement predictions that the plagues of the Apocalypse and the other preliminaries to the millennium are not to be delayed. As late as A.D. 1200 the monk Rigord, at the abbey of St. Denis, wrote: "The world is ill; it grows so old that it relapses into infancy. Common report has it that Antichrist has been born at Babylon and that the Day of Judgement is nigh." [Sidenote: A Fearful Excommunication] Fears like this restrain even reckless seigneurs and sodden peasants from proceeding to inconceivable crimes. The agonies of the damned will be so dreadful! The preachers understand very well that it is of little use to try to restrain the wicked by talking of "the love and mercy of God." If King Philip had only used love and mercy upon his vassals he would be now a king without a kingdom. It is the dread of the eternal burning which apparently keeps a large part of all Christendom tolerably obedient to the more essential mandates of morality and of the Church. When a great criminal deliberately defies the Church there is a ceremony which makes even the righteous inquire as to their own salvation. A few months ago a certain impious baron robbed a parish church of a chalice. Instantly at Pontdebois the bishop took action. The great bell of the cathedral tolled as for a funeral; and such it was, though of the soul, far more precious than merely the body. The bishop appeared in the chancel with all his clergy. Each cleric held a lighted candle. The building was hung with black tapestry. Amid a terrible hush the bishop announced the name of the offending knight to the crowded nave, then proclaimed in loud voice: "Let him be cursed in the city and cursed in the field; cursed in his granery, his harvest, and his children; as Dathan and Abiram were swallowed up by the gaping earth, so may hell swallow him; and even as to-day we quench these torches in our hands, so may the light of his life be quenched for all eternity, unless he do repent!" Whereat all the priests dashed their torches to the pavement and trampled them out. One could almost see that sacrilegious baron writhing in the flames of Gehenna.