Finally, we must struggle to think ourselves back inside the skin, as it were, of the Christian of those days who was unaccustomed to open denial of the faith. Such a man or woman would be leading a rough and ready sort of life, without many of the physical comforts of to-day. But that life would be sustained by the belief that God was, that He acted by the Church, and that through the Sacramental ministry of the Church, man with all his grossness and meanness was, or might make himself, secure, and would at the end have the last laugh on all the devils. To read one after the other, or still better to see, as I did once, two such plays as “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” and then Wilde’s “Birthday of the Infanta,” may hint to us all that they had and that we have lost. In the old play the Universe is known and friendly; in the modern it is infinite, uncharted, and cruel. Imagine, then, the effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical basis of secular mediæval society. Here was an explosive mixture indeed. But no matter how we seek to realize the mind of our forefathers in Western Europe, we cannot help shuddering at their immediate and ferocious action. In Orleans, in 1022, when the Manicheans were first discovered in the French “Royal Domaine” the king promptly called a council of bishops to decide what should be done. Meanwhile there was such an explosion of popular fury against the heretics that it was feared that they would be lynched when they should be brought out of the church in which they were being tried. To prevent this, the king had the queen stand at the church door, but when she recognized among them a priest to whom she had been used to confess she jabbed at him so savagely with a stick that she put out his eye. The heretics were taken outside the walls, a great fire was lit, for the last time they were called upon to repent and turn from their errors, and when they refused they were burned to death. One chronicler says that they went to their death cheerfully, but that when they were actually in the flames the agony was too much for some who cried out that they repented, although too late to be rescued.