Had one spoken to them of tolerance, they would have rejected the idea as an ignoble confession of Moral weakness. Perhaps they were intolerant, but in that case they were proud of the fact and with good right. For there, out in the cold dampness of early morning, stood Danny Deever, clad in a saffron colored shirt and in a pair of pantaloons adorned with little devils, and he was going, going slowly but surely, to be hanged in the Market Place. While they themselves, as soon as the show was over, would return to a comfortable home and a plentiful meal of bacon and beans. Was not that in itself proof enough that they were acting and thinking correctly? Otherwise would they be among the spectators? Would not the rôles be reversed? A feeble argument, I confess, but a very common one and hard to answer when people feel sincerely convinced that their own ideas are the ideas of God and are unable to understand how they could possibly be mistaken. There remains as a third category the intolerance caused by self-interest. This, of course, is really a variety of jealousy and as common as the measles. When Jesus came to Jerusalem, there to teach that the favor of Almighty God could not be bought by the killing of a dozen oxen or goats, all those who made a living from the ceremonial sacrifices in the temple decried him as a dangerous revolutionist and caused him to be executed before he could do any lasting damage to their main source of income. When Saint Paul, a few years later, came to Ephesus and there preached a new creed which threatened to interfere with the prosperity of the jewelers who derived great profit from the sale of little images of the local Goddess Diana, the Guild of the Goldsmiths almost lynched the unwelcome intruder. And ever since there has been open warfare between those who depend for their livelihood upon some established form of worship and those whose ideas threaten to take the crowd away from one temple in favor of another. When we attempt to discuss the intolerance of the Middle Ages, we must constantly remember that we have to deal with a very complicated problem. Only upon very rare occasions do we find ourselves confronted with only one manifestation of these three separate forms of intolerance. Most frequently we can discover traces of all three varieties in the cases of persecution which are brought to our attention. That an organization, enjoying great wealth, administering thousands of square miles of land and owning hundreds of thousands of serfs, should have turned the full vigor of its anger against a group of peasants who had undertaken to reëstablish a simple and unpretentious Kingdom-of-Heaven-on-Earth was entirely natural. And in that case, the extermination of heretics became a matter of economic necessity and belonged to class C, the intolerance of self-interest.