Note 702 — Chapter XVI · RENAISSANCE ETHICS: REVIVAL OF NATURALISM IN MORALS
Reading edition
Besides the doctrine of the criminality of misbelief, Lecky finds a secondary cause of Christian persecution in the medieval teaching respecting hell. That vision of the awful and eternal torments prepared for misbelievers, he says, “chilled and deadened the sympathies and predisposed men to inflict suffering” (Rationalism in Europe, new ed. (1890), vol. i, p. 347).