Those other lands were Christian, and they boiled with bigotry. The rulers themselves were more or less tolerant, for they depended upon Jews as their financiers. But the lower classes had no use for them, and butchered them whenever a righteous excuse could be found. And righteous excuses were not wanting. If a plague broke out, of course the Jews had poisoned the wells. If a war was lost, of course the Jews had aided the enemy. If a boy mysteriously disappeared, of course the Jews had murdered him to procure blood for their Passover drink.
The doctrines which the Jews had been spreading throughout the land for years could not but have helped to undermine the Church's power.
Protestantism includes every type of religious thought and organization from 'high church' Anglicanism to high-principled Quakerism, from ecstatic Methodism to relentlessly intellectual Unitarism. Only slowly, and with many pangs is even Protestantism shaking off the religion about Christ.
Christianity has always looked on sex as in some way indecent and sinful; and for that reason Christians cannot possibly associate a truly religious nature 'with an unsuppressed libido. But that is more than a prejudice.'
When it was seen that many of the wicked seemed quite untroubled by evil conscience ... then the idea of future suffering was advanced.
