undertaking crusades. Some said that wars, of whatever kind they might be, only served to promote the shedding of blood, and that there were quite enough of those that could not be avoided, and of those that people were obliged to make in self-defence; others said that it was tempting God to quit a land in which his will had caused us to be born, and in which his goodness heaped blessings upon us, to go into a country which God had given to other nations, and in which we were constantly abandoned by him to all the miseries of exile. It was further said, that it was not permissible to invade the territories of the Saracens, that there was no more reason for pursuing the Mussulmans than the Jews, that the wars made against them would never effect their conversion, and in short, that this war did not appear to be agreeable to God, since he permitted so many misfortunes to overwhelm the Crusaders. Humbert de Romanis, in his book, answers all these and many other objections; but these objections themselves were founded upon the spirit of the age, which could not be changed by reasoning. He in vain repeated that the Holy Land originally belonged to the Christians, and that they had the right to endeavour to reconquer it; that the vine of the Lord ought to be defended by the sword against those who wished to root it up; that if they extirpated the brambles from a barren soil, they were much more strongly bound to drive from a holy land a rude and barbarous nation. He in vain repeated what had been so often said before, that the misfortunes of the crusades did not happen because those crusades were displeasing to God, but because it was God’s will to punish the Crusaders, and try their constancy and faith. All this display of ecclesiastical erudition and argumentation persuaded nobody; not because people were more enlightened than they had been some years before, but because they entertained other thoughts: similar discourses would have succeeded admirably in the preceding century, when addressed to dominant passions; but they produced no effect when addressed to indifference.