numbers of Christian soldiers. The extension of the persecution to the civil population seemed necessary if this doctrine was to be exterminated in the army, and a systematic effort was made to stamp out a religion which seemed to be mischievous to the State.1 With the Peace of the Church the duty of the Christian soldier was set in an entirely new light; the conditions of military discipline ceased to raise the question of principle as to loyalty to Christ, and St. Augustine discusses the spirit in which wars are conducted 2 while he denounces wars of territorial aggression as robbery on a large scale. But this he treats rather as a question for kings and rulers, than for the private individual; in his eyes the main duty of the soldier was obedience; and hence there came to be a more complete reconciliation between the current consciousness of Christian duty and military discipline. St. Augustine dismisses the opinion that the shedding of blood was necessarily un-Christian as Manichæan," and insists that it is right to fight in a good cause and to maintain and extend the best earthly civilisation. The soldier's calling was a life of self-sacrifice and discipline; it had affinities with asceticism and was a vocation in which a man might be doing his duty to God." II. THE CONSECRATION OF WAR 6 St. Augustine not only summed up the experience of three preceding centuries of Christian life, but he had a vision of Christian Civilisation, which dominated the whole of the Middle Ages, and continued to exercise an 1 Eusebius, H. E., x, 8. (Migne, xx, 895.) 2 Epist., CXXXVIII, 14. (Migne, xxxIII, 531.) 8 Civ. Dei, IV, 6. 4 Contra Faust., XXII, 75. (Migne, XLII, 448.) 5 Ibid., XXII, 74. (Migne, XLII, 447.) Civ. Dei, iv, 15, and xv, 4. (Migne, XLI, 124 and 440.) 7 Epist., CLXXXIX, 4, 6. (Migne, xxxIII, 855, 856; also XL, 1054.) extraordinary influence on the Christian conception of duty till the close of the seventeenth century. He framed the thought of a City of God, in which the Spiritual should control and direct all the activities of the civil state, and thus employ them to give effect to God's Will upon earth. In the first ages men had viewed the heathen Empire, with all its marvellous organisation, as the foundation of civil order; but St. Augustine looked for a really Christian polity, in which secular authority, with all its powers and opportunities, should be consciously governed by spiritual aims. The use of force by the State, either within by the magistrate, or without in war with the enemies of the Christian polity, became consecrated; to engage in war for such purposes was regarded not only as allowable, but as a Christian duty. This view of a Christian polity living and working in actual conditions of place and time gave a new conception to the work of missions. The spread of the gospel was not thought of, as it had been in the first ages and is again to-day, as the conversion of individuals, but as the diffusion of Christian institutions which would mould and form Christian habits of life. Appeals were made to barbarian potentates, so that their tribes might accept the Christian faith; it was the easiest means for establishing peace on the borders, and security in the centres of Christian life. Religious belief and political aims were intimately blended in the wars of Charles the Great, and the forcible conversions of the Saxons; and the same motives were conjoined in the enthusiasm of the Crusaders for rescuing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidels. There was no sense of incongruity in the use of such violent means for the expansion of the Christian polity. The consecration of warfare as the means for the spread of the Christian polity is also clearly brought out in the institution of the military orders.1 They were the outcome of a desire to devote the bravery of soldiers and the discipline of an army to the cause of Christ. The story of the Knights Templars shows how earnestly the founders of the order were desirous of dedicating themselves to the service of God in the fashion in which they felt they could serve him best; and the ceremonies of initiation and the rule of the order 2 preserved the consciousness of this ideal, however much members of the order may have lost the spiritual side. It is, at all events, clear that they helped to introduce a higher standard into secular life. The religious desire to carry on war in a Christian fashion, restraining lust and passion and honouring a brave foe, was one of the sources of Chivalry; and there is a contrast between the barbarism of the heathen invaders, or the anarchy of the Dark Ages, and warfare as conducted by the Crusaders. While the Church in the Middle Ages regarded War as a thing that might be consecrated by being used for the highest purposes, there were also constant protests against unconsecrated war - the maintenance of private feuds and the cruelties exercised towards the peaceful inhabitants. The reign of Stephen offers the best illustration from English history of what was involved in letting feudal anarchy have free play. "When the traitors perceived that he was a mild man ‘and a soft and a good, and that he did not enforce "justice, they did all wonder. They had done homage "to him and sworn oaths, but they no faith kept; all became forsworn and broke their allegiance... for "they filled the land with castles. They greatly op"pressed the wretched people by making them work "at these castles, and when the castles were finished 66 66 1 St. Bernard, De laude nova Militia. (Migne, CLXXXII, 921.) Addison, Knights Templars, 14. 66 66 "they filled them with devils and evil men. Then they "took those whom they suspected to have any goods, "by night and by day seizing both men and women, "and they put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable, for never were any martyrs tormented as these were.' "1 The advent of a strong king helped to bring this anarchy to an end in England; but in the north of France it was checked by the steady action of the Church in bringing spiritual censures to bear, thus enforcing respect for promises, and securing a respite from this militarism. The right of private warfare was limited by maintaining the truce of God; while attempts were made in one Council after another to secure the churches, the clergy and the religious, the cemeteries, children, women, pilgrims and labourers, as well as the instruments for manual work in the enjoyment of constant peace.2 So long as the ordeal of battle was a recognised form of judicial procedure it was obviously impossible to put down war altogether, but it was practicable to advocate other methods of judicial procedure, and to limit the damage inflicted by war. The Church was successful in the task she set herself, because she concentrated her attention on the passions that gave rise to private war; and because spiritual censures and the deprivation of spiritual privileges were very effective weapons for enforcing her authority. Experience of the blessings of peace helped men to realise that the interests of the community — especially of the Crown and of the labouring and commercial classes were promoted by the cessation of war; but the action of the Church was directed towards religious aims, and was conducted by spiritual means. 1 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 1137. 2 Semichon, La Paix et la Trêve de Dieu, 1, 36. The Papacy, as the head of Latin Christendom, had exercised an enormous influence in reducing the barbarity of war, but the authority of Rome, as an international arbiter, was undermined when it came to be generally felt throughout Western Europe that the government of the Church had become secularised; the Church, as a temporal power, was keenly concerned in Italian politics and could not be accepted as a disinterested arbiter, while in large areas the censures of the Roman Church had ceased to obtain respect, or to restrain those who were eager to pursue their personal interests by any means in their power. The revolt against the authority of the Pope almost necessarily resulted in an outbreak of embittered struggles: to the Catholic powers it appeared a religious duty to stamp out the rebellion against the Spiritual Head of Christendom; to the people of Great Britain, the Lutherans and the Huguenots, it appeared a religious duty to maintain a struggle against a secularised Christianity which was endeavouring to suppress the free growth of national life. In Christendom, as severed by the Reformation, War was more directly associated with Religion than it had ever been on European soil before. At the disruption of Christendom, there seemed to all parties to be a clear call to employ War for spiritual purposes. The Reformers of the sixteenth century were still true to St. Augustine's hope of establishing an earthly polity in which Christian ideals should be the supreme guide in all the relations of life. Luther and Cranmer relied on Christian Princes to use their power to maintain traditional Christian institutions, and thus to create a national Christianity which should be free from the abuses that had destroyed its spiritual influence. Calvin and his followers endeavoured to substitute a new and scriptural Christian polity, but also thought that it was not merely allowable, but a duty for the Christian man to fight in |