In such a society, it would have been strange if the different forces which worked against the Church had not been active. No word remains to us from twelfth-century Languedoc so bold as that of Henry II of England, when in his rage against Becket he threatened to turn Moslem. And Henry was half “Aquitanian,” that is South-Western French, by blood. All the forces hostile to the Church were active in the South. It is the South that has left us Aucassin’s outburst:— “In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend that I love so much. For to Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. There go old priests, and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before altars, and in old crypts, and are clothed with old worn-out capes and old tattered rags, who are naked and footbare, and sore, who die of hunger and want and misery. These go to Paradise; with them I have nothing to do. But to Hell I am willing to go; for to Hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who die in tourneys and in glorious wars, and good men-at-arms and the well born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the fair courteous ladies which have two or three friends besides their lords also thereto. And the gold, and the silver go there, and the ermines and sables; and there go the harpers, and jongleurs, and the kings of the world. With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, with me.”[9] It is clear that the idea of “Heaven for climate and Hell for company” is not new. Nietzsche himself has nowhere put it better. And it is perhaps significant that of all that glittering company of servants of the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, first of all come churchmen—the “fine scholars.” Of course, all this sort of thing is not heresy. Logically it might just as well have ended in mere negation. These volatile southerners with their envy of the riches of the Church and their contempt, too often well deserved, for her ministers—so that instead of saying like most Christians “Rather than do so and so I would be a Jew,” they said, “I would rather be a priest”—might have gone on their way without troubling themselves about things not of this world. Nevertheless, they lived in an age which hardly took Nature and her secrets seriously, so absorbed were its thinkers in the nature of God and man and their relation to each other. The other world of the supernatural was as real and vivid to them as, in a different way, it was to the New England Puritans. Irrespective of their own temper, the currents of their time carried them away from secularism and mere denial.