INTELLIGENCER. Vol. xlii. No. 25.

DUTY.

WAR AND THE CHURCH.

AN interesting and very able essay showing the

historic action of the Church in relation to war, published in the Gentlemen's Magazine (London), and written by J. A. Farrer, will be read with interest. We give some extracts which should stimulate to greater faithfulness to the Christian standard in this regard.-EDS.]

Whether military service was lawful for a Christian at all, was, at the time of the Reformation, one of the most keenly debated questions; and considering the force of opinion arrayed on the negative side, its ultimate decision in the affirmative is a matter of more wonder than it is generally thought to deserve. Sir Thomas More charges Luther and his disciples with carrying the doctrines of peace to the extreme limits of non-resistance; and the views on this subject of the Mennonites and Quakers were but what at one time seemed not unlikely to have been those of the Reformed Church generally.

By far the foremost champion, on the negative side, was Erasmus, who, being at Rome at the time when the League of Cambray, under the auspices of Julius II., was meditating war against the Republic of Venice, wrote a book to the Pope entitled Antipolemus, which, though never completed, probably exists in part in his tract known under the title of Dulce bellum inexpertis, and printed among his Adagia. In it he complained that "If there be anything in the affairs of mortals which it is the interest of men not only to attack, but which ought by every possible

means to be avoided, condemned and abolished, it is of all things war, than which nothing is more impious, more calamitous, more widely pernicious, more inveterate, more base, or, in sum, more unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian."

If Biblical texts are a justification of war, they are clearly a justification of slavery; whilst, on the other hand, the general spirit of the Christian religion, to say nothing of several positive passages, is at least equally opposed to one custom as to the other. If, then, the abolition of slavery is one of the services for which the world is mainly indebted to Christianity as an influence in history, its failure to abolish the other custom must in fairness be set against it; for it were as easy to defend slave-holding out of the language of the New Testament, as to defend military service, and more, indeed, is actually said there to inculcate the duty of peace than to inculcate the principles of social equality.

The different attitude of the Church towards these two customs in modern times, her vehement condemnation of the one, and her tolerance or encouragement of the other, appears all the more surprising when we remember that in the early centuries of our era her attitude was exactly the reverse, and that, whilst slavery was permitted, the unlawfulness of war was denounced with no uncertain or wavering voice.

When Tertullian wrote his treatise De Corona (201) concerning the right of Christian soldiers to wear laurel crowns, he used words on this subject which, even if at variance with some of his statements, made in his Apology thirty years earlier, may be taken to express his maturer judgment. "Shall the son of peace" (that is, a Christian), he asks "act in battle when it will not befit him even to go to law? Shall he administer bonds, and imprisonments, and tortures, and punishments, who may not avenge even his own injuries? The very transference of his enrolment from the army of light to that of darkness is sin." And again: "What if the soldiers did go to John and receive the rule of their service, and what if the Centurion did believe; the Lord by his disarming of Peter disarmed every soldier from that time forward." Tertullian made an exception in favor of soldiers whose conversion was subsequent to their enrolment (as was implied in discussing their duty with regard to the laurel-wreath), though insisting, even in their case, that they ought either to leave the service, as many did, or to refuse participation in its acts, which were inconsistent with their Christian profession. So that at that time, Christian opinion was

clearly not only averse to a military life being entered upon after baptism (of which there are no instances on record), but in favor of its being forsaken if the enrolment preceded the baptism. The Christians who served in the armies of Rome were not men who were converts or Christians at the time of enrolling, but men who remained with the colors after their conversion. If it is certain that some Christians remained in the army, it appears equally certain that no Christian at that time thought of entering it.

This seems the best solution of the much-debated question, to what extent Christians served at all in the early centuries. Irenæus speaks of the Christians in the second century as not knowing how to fight, and Justin Martyr, his contemporary, considered Isaiah's prophecy about the swords being turned into ploughshares as in part fulfilled, because his co-religionists, who in times past had killed one another, did not then know how to fight, even with their enemies. The charge made by Celsus against the Christians, that they refused to bear arms even in case of necessity, was admitted by Origen, but justified on the ground of the unlawfulness of war. This was the doctrine expressed or implied, by the following Fathers, in chronological order :-Justin Martyr, Tatian, Clemens of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, Archelaus, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome and Cyril; and Eusebius says that many Christians in the third century laid aside the military life rather than abjure their religion. Of 10,050 pagan inscriptions that have been collected, 545 were found to belong to pagan soldiers, while of 4,734 Christian inscriptions of the same period, only 27 were those of soldiers: from which it seems rather absurd to infer, as a French writer has inferred, not that there was a great disproportion of Christian to pagan soldiers in the imperial armies, but that most Christian soldiers, being soldiers of Christ, did not like to have it recorded on their epitaphs that they had been in the service of any man.

On the other hand, there were certainly always some Christians who remained in the ranks after their conversion, in spite of the military oath in the names of the pagan deities, and the quasi worship of the standards which constituted some part of the early Christian antipathy to war.

A love of peace and dislike of bloodshed were the principal causes of this early Christian attitude towards the military profession, and the idolatry and other pagan rites connected with it only acted as minor and secondary deterrents. Thus, in the Greek Church, St. Basil would have excluded from communion for three years any one who had shed an enemy's blood; and a similar feeling explains Theodosius' refusal to partake of the Eucharist after his great victory over Eugenius. The canons of the Church excluded from ordination all who had served in an army after baptism; and in the fifth century Innocent I. blamed the Spanish churches for their laxity in admitting such persons into holy orders.

The anti-military tendency of opinion in the early period of Christianity appears therefore indisputable, and Tertullian would probably have thought but lightly of the prophet who should have predicted that Christians would have ceased to keep slaves long be

fore they should have ceased to commit murder and robbery under the fiction of hostilities. But it proves the strength of the original impetus, that Ulphilas, the first apostle to the Goths, should purposely, in his translation of the Scriptures, have omitted the Books of Kings, as too stimulative of a love of war.

Praiseworthy were the efforts of the Church from the tenth century onwards to check that system of private war which was then the bane of Europe, as the system of public and international wars has been since. In the south of France several bishops met and agreed to exclude from the privileges of a Christian, in life and after death, all who violated their ordinances directed against that custom (990). In 1032, a bishop of Aquitaine declared himself the recipient of a message from heaven, ordering men to cease from fighting; and not only did a peace, called the Truce of God, result for seven years, but it was resolved that such peace should always prevail during the great festivals of the Church, and from every Thursday evening to Monday morning. And the regulation for one kingdom was speedily extended over Christendom, confirmed by several Popes, and enforced by excommunication. If such efforts were not altogether successful, and the wars of the barons continued till the royal power in every country was strong enough to suppress them, it must none the less be recognized that the Church fought if she fought in vain, against the barbarism of a military society, and with an ardour that is in striking contrast with her apathy in more recent history.

It must also be granted that the idea of what the Papacy might do for the peace of the world, as the supreme arbiter of disputes and mediator between contending powers, gained possession of men's minds, and entered into the definite policy of the Church about the twelfth century, in a manner that might suggest reflection for the nineteenth. The name of Gerohus de Reigersperg is connected with a plan for the pacification of the world, by which the Pope was to forbid war to all Christian princes, to settle all disputes between them, and to enforce his decisions by the greatest powers that have ever yet been devised for human authority—namely, by excommunication and deposition. And the Popes attempted something of this sort. For instance, Innocent III. refused to consider the destruction of places and the slaughter of Christians as a matter of no concern to him; and Honorius III. forbade an attack upon Denmark, on the ground that that kingdom lay under the special protection of the Papacy. The clergy, moreover, were even in the most warlike times of history the chief agents in negotiations for peace, and in the attempt to set limits to military reprisals.

In these respects it must be plain to every one that the attitude and power of the Church have entirely changed. She has stood apart more and more, as time has gone on, from her great opportunities as a promoter of peace. Her influence, it is notorious, no longer counts for anything, where it once was so powerful, in the field of negotiation and reconcilement. She lifts no voice to denounce the evils of war, nor to plead for greater restraint in the exercise of reprisals and the abuse of victory. She lends no aid to teach the duty of forbearance and friendship