Note 60 — Chapter IV · THE THIRD CRUSADE

Thus, as has often been the case, the extreme of misery produced the effects of the extreme of luxury. Pagans and Christians considering God as the author of temporal good and evil only, and observing that the virtuous suffered as much as the wicked, concluded that moral conduct was disregarded by heaven. Unbounded licentiousness followed. No laws of God limited the people: the laws of man were equally inefficacious, because the criminal thought that he might die before the day of trial, or if he should live to that time, those who would have been his accusers might have perished in the general calamity. Compare Thucydides’ account of the plague at Athens.