rary to the promise of Christ, no Christianity in Europe
for a thousand years; and he surrenders all the wonderful art of the
Middle Ages (as he ought) to entirely non-Christian forces. That,
however, does not concern me here. The slightest recollection of history
would warn the Protestant that the Reformation brought no improvement
whatever, as far as this reign of violence is concerned. The forces set
up by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation fought each other for
some decades with the comparatively peaceful weapons of mutual abuse and
heated argument. When it was perceived that these weapons were of no
avail, there was the customary appeal to the sword. In the historical
documents which tell the life of Pope Paul IV we see the Papacy and the
Jesuits urging the Catholic princes to lead out their armies. Heresy was
to be extinguished in blood; and, seeing how many millions in the north
had by that time embraced the heresy, there can have been no illusion as
to the magnitude of the oceans of blood that would be required to drown
it. So Europe entered upon the horrors of the Thirty Years' War
(1618-1648), which put back the civilisation of Germany for more than a
hundred years and utterly ruined some of the small principalities. The
population of Bohemia alone fell from three millions to less than a
million. Nearly every nation in Europe was involved, and the war was
conducted with all the brutality of the older medieval warfare.

The fact that political as well as religious ambitions were engaged in
the Thirty Years' War does not affect my argument. In so far as
religious sentiment was responsible--and it will hardly be questioned
that it had a large share in the Thirty Years' War--we find a fresh
consecration by Christianity itself of the use of the sword. But the
main point we have to consider is that the new spiritual authorities
were no more inclined than the old to declare that warfare was opposed
to Christian principles. The last three centuries have been as full of
aggressive war as the three centuries which preceded, but there was no
protest by Christian ministers either in Protestant England and
Scandinavia or in Catholic France and Austria. It was the period when
the modern Powers of Europe were building up their vast dominions, and
no one who is acquainted with the story can have any illusion as to the
application to that process of what are now described as clear Christian
principles.

This is preci