Christian or ordinary human principles to the worst feature of the life
of Europe, are terrible offsets to the little good it achieved. Europe
was steadily educated and encouraged, century after century, in the
shedding of blood.

The Protestant is at times disposed to dismiss the whole sordid story
with the remark that this Roman Church was not Christianity at all. He
contrives to overlook the serious difficulty that, if the Roman Church
did not represent Christianity from the sixth century to the sixteenth,
there was, contrary 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 In the historical
documents which tell the life of Pope Paul IV we see the Papacy and the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.