If further evidence be needed that the very sense of justice had become largely extinguished, it is found in the prevalence of judicial perjury, allowed, and even prompted, by legalized custom. Before the combat both parties were required to partake of the sacrament, in which act one of the contestants, being guilty, was forced to commit sacrilege. Witnesses were sworn upon the relics of the saints; but, notwithstanding these things were believed to have in them a limitless power to help or hurt those who touched their sacred incasements, the people seem to have credited the righteousness of the dead as little as the impartiality of the living, and the guilty were accustomed to perjure themselves without dread of consequences. The soul of good Robert of France was so afflicted by the universal consciencelessness in this respect that he devised an expedient for averting the wrath of the saints, who might justly avenge the slight put upon their bones. He ordered that the relics should be secretly removed from the casket that was supposed to contain them, so that the would-be perjurer might not actually commit the crime he intended. If this act illustrated the mercy, it also displayed the lack of true moral sentiment in him who, in contrast with his fellows, was known as the “good king.” Such stifling of the sense of justice was quite naturally attended by the suppression of the gentler emotions of kindness and humanity. This was an age of almost incredible cruelty. Natural affection, of course, survived in the love of parents and children, husbands and wives. There were delightful friendships which illumined the social gloom like threads of gold in some dark fabric. Men and women lived and died for one another, as they will always do while a lineament of the divine remains in the human. But, beyond the fascination of the individual and the obligations of kinship, the sentiment of love seemed unknown to the masses. The founders of the great benevolent orders, men like Dominic and Francis of Assisi, oppressed by this deadness to the essential Christian spirit, were in the near future to unbind the hearts of men that they might come forth to more generous life; but that day had not yet come. Men apparently had lost the sympathetic imagination by which the pains and grief of the unfortunate are transferred to the hearts of others. Dean Stanley remarks of even the thirteenth century that “the age had no sense of obligation to the poor and middle class.” It was still needful that rulers should repeat the dying counsel of Charlemagne to his sons, “not to deprive widows and orphans of their remaining estates.”