But whatever the atrocities perpetrated in the name of right belief and of God in the later Middle Ages (and, although Protestant writers with their own special axes to grind may have been inclined to exaggerate, these were many and horrible) and however often abused the machinery of ecclesiastical government and justice, it is, as always, important to bear in mind the medieval propensity for lingering, obsessively and sometimes almost lovingly, on what was wrong with this impermanent world here below. “For”, as Jean de Venette had said, “the life of man is perishable and transitory and the wickedness of man abounds in the world, woe is me! and increaseth”--a view of mankind and of human life that is reflected in the great majority of medieval documents that have come down to us. Accounts of miscarriages or abuses of ecclesiastical justice are inevitably, therefore, numerous--but no more so than contemporary complaints against the various secular law courts of today. And there can in fact be no doubt that in its basic approach to the question of punishment, by which it sought to purge rather than to wreak vengeance on the offender, the Church took a very much more humanitarian line than the secular authorities, on the development of whose systems of justice it thus exerted a mitigating and generally civilizing influence.