to history, and at least the moral
education of Europe would have proceeded less slowly, and war would have
been abolished centuries ago, if there had been any serious, collective,
and authoritative enforcement of Christian principles. There was not,
and to this silence of the clergy during those long ages of their power
we owe the maintenance in Europe to-day of the regime of violence. They
were so far from enjoying moral inspiration in this respect that they
were amongst the first to bless the banners and swell the coffers of an
aggressive monarch, and they gave the military system a final
consecration by employing it repeatedly in the interests of the Church.

All that one can plead in mitigation of this deep historical censure of
the medieval Church is that the frontiers of Christendom were for
centuries threatened by the Turk and the Saracen. The old need of
protecting civilisation by arms had almost disappeared. Few and feeble
peoples remained outside the range of Christian civilisation after the
tenth century. Armies were maintained only in the interest of criminal
ambition or for the settlement of disputes which ought to have been
submitted to judges. The menace of the Turk, with his hostile religion,
was, of course, a just ground for armaments, but a few nations generally
bore the whole brunt of his onset. Whatever religious feeling may make
of the great Crusades, which drew to the east armies from all parts of
Europe, secular history must dismiss them as appalling blunders. The few
advantages they brought to European culture cannot seriously be weighed
against the terrible sacrifice of lives and the even more terrible
consecration of militarism. In a word, the menace of the Turk could
have been met admirably by such an arrangement as we are advocating in
Europe to-day: the maintenance of a small force by each nation for
common action, under the direction of a supreme legal tribunal, against
nations which would not obey the common law of peace. But we need not
seriously discuss the influence of the Turk on the system. The last
phases of the struggle, when the selfish nations and the ambitious
Papacy spent their time in idle mutual recrimination and left the
Hungarians and Poles to do all the work, justify us in dismissing that
element. Kings and republics maintained armies for purely selfish
purposes, for brutal aggression and defence against aggressors; and not
a prelate in Europe had any moral repugnance to th