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CHAPTER TWO GOD WISHES! I T WAS a picturesque though dreadful time. From across the seas and over the mountains there had come into Asia Minor vast hordes of men driven by an ideal more potent than any incitement of ambition or lure of wealth. God, their God, had sent them forth from their homes. Years before, in the great Council at Clermont-en-Auvergne, where Urban the Second and Peter the Hermit had passed on the word, He had told them to go, to rescue from profanation His holy places, and the vast multitude of listeners, recognizing the validity of the message, and its perfect justification, had responded as one man. " God wishes it ! " had burst spontaneously from the thousands of throats at the close of the Pope's exhortation, and miraculously, that inspired utterance had passed, almost as though our modern radio had been anticipated in the days when the wonders of electricity were not yet dreamed of, to far distant lands. At the meeting places of the lowly, whether church or tavern, men were suddenly lifted out of themselves by a mysterious compelling call to higher things. So, too, in the palaces and castles of the mighty, drinking 8

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