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 precisely the plaint of modern Germany. We seek, they say, to do
merely what England and France--it were indiscreet to mention
Austria--did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were
vigorous peoples with an impulse to expand and to extend their
civilisation over backward lands. They appealed solely to the right of
the sword, and all the Christian authorities in Europe--the bishops of
William and of Anne, the bishops of Louis XIV, the bishops of Peter the
Great--had not a single syllable to say against the right of the sword.
The various branches of the Christian Church were at that time
singularly unanimous in accommodating their principles to imperialist
and aggressive warfare. Now that you have obtained all that you
need--the aggrieved Teuton says--now that I in turn would expand and
colonise, you discover that this imperialist aggression is supremely