There was also brought against Christianity the charge that it discouraged military service and looked askance upon the profession of arms. The accusation is true within certain limits. Christianity was and is a gospel of peace. Ideally, therefore, it is always antagonistic to war as a general principle, and there is always a considerable section of Christian opinion which is opposed, irrespective of the justice of the quarrel, to an appeal to arms. That section of Christian opinion was naturally at its strongest when the Roman Empire was pagan, and when it was practically impossible for a Christian to be a soldier without finding himself compelled to worship, at the altars of Rome, the Roman Emperor and the Roman gods. _Omnis militia est religio_, Seneca had said most truly. There was a permanent altar fixed before the _prætorium_ of every camp. That being the case, one can understand that the army was regarded with abhorrence by every Christian at a time when Christianity was a proscribed, or barely tolerated, religion, and hence the violent denunciations of the army and military service to be found in some of the early Fathers. Hence too the number of Christian soldier martyrs, who had been converted while serving in the ranks. But the whole case was changed when the Roman Emperor was a Christian, and the army took its oath to a champion and no longer to an enemy of the Church. The bishops at once changed front—they could not help themselves—and at the Council of Arles we have seen the Gallican bishops passing a canon anathematising any Christian who flung down his arms in time of peace. There were still extremists, as there are to-day, who denounced war with indiscriminate censure; there must have been a much larger number who acquiesced in standing armies as a necessary evil, but themselves carefully kept aloof from service; the majority, as to-day, would recognise that the security of a State rests ultimately upon force, and would pray that their cause might be just whenever that force had to be put into operation. It is not Tertullian with his dangerous doctrine that politics have no interest for the Christian (_nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica_), that the Christian has no country but the world, and that Christ had bidden the nations disarm when he bade Peter put up his sword—it is not Tertullian who is the typical representative of the Church in its relations with the State and mundane affairs, but the broad-minded Augustine who, when nervous Christians appealed to him to say whether a Christian could serve God as a soldier, said that a man might do his duty to his God and his Emperor as well in a camp as elsewhere.