Note 125 — Chapter VII · DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS
Reading edition
“It was an easier thing to consecrate the fighting instinct than to curb it.... [The crusader] might butcher all day till he waded ankle deep in blood and then at nightfall kneel sobbing for very joy at the altar of the Sepulchre—for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord? One can readily understand the popularity of the Crusades when one reflects that they permitted men to get to the other world by fighting hard on earth and allowed them to gain the fruits of asceticism by the way of hedonism.” (Article on “Crusades,” by Ernest Barker, in eleventh edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.)