The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1899. THE CHURCH AND THE SOLDIER.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 46, 16 November 1899, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1899. THE CHURCH AND THE SOLDIER.

fT is difficult for the lay mind, and probably nob easy for the military mind, to perceive what Lecky terms the * moral grandeur' of war. Whatever of moral grandeur there may be in war lies in its motives or in the heroic selfsacrifice of its votaries. Bub in the mere fact and art of wholesale man-butchering in the open-air shambles known as battle-fields the element of moral grandeur, as understood in Christian ethics, is to be sought for, if at all, with the search-light

and the microscope. Lecky's idea is a distinctively pagan onel To the imagination of ancient Greece and Rome the slaughter of enemies — prisoners of war included — was a cult. The soldier was, in their minds, the Jbighest type of human excellence. Arid among the Greeks it was a maxim that the most acceptable gifts that could be offered on the altars of the gods were the trophies won from an enemy in battle. When' a Roman general succeeded in hacking the soul out of the general of an enemy, the spoils taken by the victor from his fallen foe were dedicated by solemn rite and hung up in the temple of JupiTEfe FeUetrius. The pagan northern tribes- that at one time almost succeeded in erasing' Roffian civilisation from central Europe, believed that the gates of Walhalla stood ever wide 1 open to welcome the warrior who presented.himself stained and splashed with the blood of his vanquished enemies. Mohammedanism overlaid the fanaticism of the devotee with the passion of the soldier. It made the conquest of the ' infidel ' its first duty, and offered' its sensuous heaven' as a reward for the valiant fighter* When the pagan Irish warrior of old passed, away, his- body was consigned to perpendicular burial, so that even in death his sightless skeleton would stand ever upright and face the foe. And Lecky tells, on the authority of an old Irish manuscript, bow, after the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, a king of Ulster, on 1 his death-bed, charged his son never to join the Christians, who lay prostrate in death, but to be buried * standing upright like a man in battle, with his face turned for ever to the south, defying the men of Leinßter.'

Christianity came with higher ideas and nobler ideals. To the pagan world the ideal man was the conquering soldier. The Christian ideal was the swordless saint — the man who was in thought and word and work after God's own! heart. Such an ideal was possible only to a society that had learned the true end of man and read the grand Becret of the wherefore and the whither of human existence. The Church abolished the cruel gladiatorial combats and thereby saved tens of thousands of captives from the edge of the sword and the fangs and claws of lions and tigers. She could not abolish war, but she discouraged it ; she stripped it of its plumes and frills and gilding and set a stigma upott it. When the defence of public right called for war she rather condoned than consecrated it ; and, says Legky^ ' whatever might be the case with a few isolated prelates, the Church did nothing to increase or encourage it.' From the earliest days no weapons were permitted within the sacred walls of her churches ; no cleric was — or is to this hour — allowed to bear arms ; and for a time soldiers returning from even the most righteous war were not admitted to Holy Communion until after a period of penance and purification. The calling of the soldier was not, of course, regarded as sinful. Many early Christians joined the ranks of the pagan Roman army without sacrificing their Church membership, and the Theban Legion and the Thundering Legion are famed in story for their valourous defence of the interests of the Empire. In the days of the Emperor Constantine a council held at Aries condemned soldiers who, through religious motives, deserted their colours ; and (says Lecky) ' St. Augustine threw his great influence into the same scale/ But the calling was distinctly discouraged, partly through the new feeling as to the high 1 value and enormous possibilities of human life, partly through the moral — or rather immoral — atmosphere of camp and barrack life in those days, and partly, no doubt, to the unexpressed or half -expressed hope of the coming of a perpetual peace which would aid in the spread of God's kingdom upon earth.

Two chief occasions, however, arose in the history of the Church when, in the interests of civilisation and of .religion, she had to lean upon the military arm. One was in the days when the northern hordes had swooped down upon central and southern Europe, and there arose that conflict of races and paralysis of all government which followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The other occasion came when the Mohammedans had almost extirpated Christianity from its original home, swept the old civilisation out of a great part of Spain, and threatened to raise the crescent and trample the cross under foot over the whole of central and southern Europe. At a time when the. power of resistance to their fierce inroads was paralysed

by widespread panic, the voice of the Popes alone was raised Ito secure unity in the distracted councils of Christian States and to erect something like an effective barrier against the"' wave of Saracen invasion that flowed and kept ever flowing from the east. Through their efforts a limit was" at last set to the Saracen incursions, and with their blessing the Crusaders carried the war time and again into the enemy's country. Those were the times that witnessed the rise of those beau-ideals of the Chrfetian soldier— the kin'ghfcs of the Crusades and of the days of cliiyalry, such as live to us again in the pages of Scott 4 and in the Quaint old romances of Mdlle. de Scudeby. Some of the religious Orders which arose at those troubled periods blended the character of the ascetic with that of the warrior, and, says Lecky, ' when, at the hour of sunset, the soldier knelt down to pray before the cross, that cross was the handle of his sword.* Many of the Crusaders, it is true, fell far below the Church's conception of the ideal warrior. Bat, none the less, we find in that stormy period the noblest type of Christian soldier that ever struck a blow for faith or country. These were, however, exceptional and abnormal periods in the Church's history. She blessed riofi so muoh' the sword of the warrior as the sacred cause for which he fought, and the temporary clasping of her gloved hand with the mailed fist' of the soldier was not, as Leco" points out, an expedient that suited her pacific nature, but a policy forced upon her ' by the terrors and the example of Mohammedanism.*

The endless private wars of the middle age were to a considerable extent repressed by the influence of the Church. She found a leverage on the quarrelsome kings and kinglets and rival nobles of the time in the canonical ' Truce of God.' Underlie severest ecclesiastical penalties — including the fearful punishment of interdict — all violence waß prohibited from Wednesday evening of one week to Monday morning of the next. This Truce was enforced in France, Italy, England, and other countries chiefly in the eleventh and twelvth centuries. It was a mighty conquest over the rampant violence of the times. Its rigid enforcement in France in the early part of the eleventh century prepared the way for the introduction of the ' Peace of God ' in the year 1041. This, in turn, forbade, under the severest ecclesiastical penalties, all acts" of armed violence from Thursday to Sunday in each week ; from Advent through Christmas-tide tilL after the octayeof the Epiphany ; during Lent and the Easter-cycle until after the octave of Pentecost ; and on every feast day throughout the year. When duelling arose the Church also set her face as hard as flint against it. She put an end to the once universal practice of slaughtering or enslaving prisoners of war without consideration of age or sex ; her creation of a new and nobler soldierly ideal in the knighthood of the crusades and chivalry — by a fusion of military and religious feeling — softened in a thousand gentle ways the old-time asperities of campaigning ; and, in the persons of the Spanish theologians Francisco de Victoria and Ayala and other ecclesiastical writers, she laid the foundations of the modern code of international war-law which has extracted many a heart-breaking horror from the modern siege and field oif battle.