been unavailing. The power of the Popes was beyond that of any other hierarchy known 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
