returning to Pagan ideals: they are reverting merely to ideals which
were accepted throughout Europe for more than a thousand years. In the
more brutal features of war to which they have descended they are even
more emphatically reverting to the Middle Ages. The Romans did not
commit such outrages at the command of educated officers. Medieval
Christians did: the record of Papal warfare, down to the "Massacre of
Perugia" in 1859, is as deeply stained as any by these abominable
methods.

My further point, that the Christian Church or Churches made no serious
resistance to the prevailing brutality, is just as easy to establish. It
is a sheer travesty of argument to put forward the gentle exhortations
of a Francis of Assisi as characteristic of the Christian Church when
the Pope of the time, one of the most powerful and conscientious Popes
of all time, Innocent III, was threatening or directing the movements of
ferocious armies all over Europe. Most assuredly there were among the
numbers of fine characters who appeared in Christendom in the course of
a thousand years many who deeply resented the prevailing violence. But
when we speak of the Church, we speak of its official action and its
predominant sentiment. The official action of the Popes was, during all
that period, to make the same use as any terrestrial monarch of the
service of soldiers; they failed, from Gregory the Great to Pius X, to
recognise one of the supreme moral needs of Europe. The bishops of the
Church of England and the heads of the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches
did not prove to have any sounder moral inspiration in this respect. It
was left to despised bodies like the Friends, who were hardly recognised
as Christians, and to rare individuals to protest against the system
which has brought such appalling evil on Europe.

In the nineteenth century the moral sentiment of Europe began to advance