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Greed & Folly. For all his excellence in telling the story, Historian Runciman finishes with a startling piece of moralizing hindsight: "The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at ... the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost."
This may be true. Yet it remains significant that a 20th century historian, viewing the Age of Faith, ultimately sees in it mainly "intolerance." Reading this verdict—delivered in history's bloodiest century, in which tolerance of evil has done at least as much harm as intolerance of good—the reader is bound to wonder just who is being self-righteous.