But in the Middle Ages this was altogether different. Then, the Church was something visible and tangible, a highly active organization which breathed and existed, which shaped man’s destiny in many more ways than the State would ever dream of doing. Very likely those first Popes who accepted pieces of land from grateful princes and renounced the ancient ideal of poverty did not foresee the consequences to which such a policy was bound to lead. In the beginning it had seemed harmless enough and quite appropriate that faithful followers of Christ should bestow upon the successor of the apostle Peter a share of their own worldly goods. Besides, there was the overhead of a complicated administration which reached all the way from John o’Groat’s to Trebizond and from Carthage to Upsala. Think of all the thousands of secretaries and clerks and scribes, not to mention the hundreds of heads of the different departments, that had to be housed and clothed and fed. Think of the amount spent upon a courier service across an entire continent; the traveling expenses of diplomatic agents now going to London, then returning from Novgorod; the sums necessary to keep the papal courtiers in the style that was expected of people who foregathered with worldly princes on a footing of complete equality. All the same, looking back upon what the Church came to stand for and contemplating what it might have been under slightly more favorable circumstances, this development seems a great pity. For Rome rapidly grew into a gigantic super-state with a slight religious tinge and the pope became an international autocrat who held all the nations of western Europe in a bondage compared to which the rule of the old emperors had been mild and generous. And then, when complete success seemed within certain reach, something happened which proved fatal to the ambition for world dominion. The true spirit of the Master once more began to stir among the masses and that is one of the most uncomfortable things that can happen to any religious organization. Heretics were nothing new. There had been dissenters as soon as there had been a single rule of faith from which people could possibly dissent and disputes, which had divided Europe and Africa and western Asia into hostile camps for centuries at a time, were almost as old as the Church herself. But these sanguinary quarrels between Donatists and Sabellianists and Monophysites and Manichaeans and Nestorians hardly come within the scope of this book. As a rule, one party was quite as narrow-minded as the other and there was little to choose between the intolerance of a follower of Arius and the intolerance of a follower of Athanasius.