The compilation of " geography books " by uninstructed writers led to the pernicious habit, which is not yet wholly overcome, of reducing the general or " physical " part to a few pages of concentrated information, and expanding the particular or " political " part by including unrevised travellers' stories and uncritical descriptions of the various countries of the world.
The more extreme climates of arid regions on the margins of the tropics, by the unpredictable succession of droughts and floods, confound the prevision of uninstructed people, and make prudence and industry qualities too uncertain in their results to be worth cultivating.
But these views were not those of the uninstructed pagans who filled the churches and needed a rite which brought them, as their old sacrifices had done, into physical contact and union with their god.
But the common people did not discriminate, and believed that when they bought an Indulgence they were purchasing pardon from sin; and Luther placed himself in the position of the ordinary Christian uninstructed in the niceties of theological distinctions.