But for the rest, these sincere followers of Christ endeavored (however imperfectly) to lead the good life and to be as industrious as they were charitable and as kindly as they were honest. As soon, however, as their little communities had been united into a single powerful organization, the perfect balance of the old spiritual circle was rudely upset by the obligations and duties of the new international responsibilities. It was easy enough for small groups of half-starved carpenters and quarry workers to follow those principles of poverty and unselfishness upon which their faith was founded. But the heir to the imperial throne of Rome, the Pontifex Maximus of the western world, the richest landowner of the entire continent, could not live as simply as if he were a sub-deacon in a provincial town somewhere in Pomerania or Spain. Or, to use the circular language of this chapter, the diameter representing “worldliness” and the diameter representing “foreign policy” were lengthened to such an extent that the diameters representing “humility” and “poverty” and “self-negation” and the other elementary Christian virtues were being reduced to the point of extinction. It is a pleasant habit of our time to speak patronizingly of the benighted people of the Middle Ages, who, as we all know, lived in utter darkness. It is true they burned wax tapers in their churches and went to bed by the uncertain light of a sconce, they possessed few books, they were ignorant of many things which are now being taught in our grammar schools and in our better grade lunatic asylums. But knowledge and intelligence are two very different things and of the latter, these excellent burghers, who constructed the political and social structure in which we ourselves continue to live, had their full share. If a good deal of the time they seemed to stand apparently helpless before the many and terrible abuses in their Church, let us judge them mercifully. They had at least the courage of their convictions and they fought whatever they considered wrong with such sublime disregard for personal happiness and comfort that they frequently ended their lives on the scaffold. More than that we can ask of no one. It is true that during the first thousand years of our era, comparatively few people fell as victims to their ideas. Not, however, because the Church felt less strongly about heresy than she did at a later date, but because she was too much occupied with more important questions to have any time to waste upon comparatively harmless dissenters. In the first place, there remained many parts of Europe where Odin and the other heathen gods still ruled supreme. And in the second place, something very unpleasant had happened, which had wellnigh threatened the whole of Europe with destruction.