[Sidenote: The genius of Christianity opposed to the war spirit] If at the advent of Christianity one reflecting upon the genius of the new religion and the teachings of its Founder had ventured to forecast the influence of the new faith upon the different departments of morality, he would almost certainly have predicted that this influence would be felt most decisively upon the ethics of war. The attitude assumed by the early Christians toward the military life would have justified this forecast, for Christianity brought into the world the new principle of nonresistance.[672] This teaching made the primitive Christian community almost a Quaker body; but barely three centuries had passed before this religion which had entered the world as a gospel of peace and good will had become a martial creed and its emblem been made a battle standard. [Sidenote: Causes which fostered the war spirit in the Church: (_a_) the heritage of the war ethics of the ancient world of culture] The causes that produced this amazing transformation in the Christian Church were various and so interrelated as to make it difficult to determine just what influence was exercised by each. Yet it is possible to note the character of the different agencies at work, and to form at least some general idea of the way in which the transformation was wrought. First, there was the inheritance from the past. War had always been one of the leading occupations of men. It had scarcely ever occurred to any one to question its legitimacy. It was looked upon as a part of the constitution of things. The ideas, feelings, habits, engendered by its practice through uncounted millenniums of history had become ingrained in every tissue and fiber of man’s being. Set in the midst of the world, the Church yielded to the influence of this baneful pagan heritage. It incorporated with its own moral code, wholly alien to the essential spirit of Christianity as these elements were, the war ethics of the pre-Christian world, and thus made this pagan international morality a permanent part of Christian ethics.[673] It will be instructive for us to follow somewhat closely this reaction upon the ethics of the Church, first of the war code of the civilized world of the south, and then later of the war spirit of the barbarian world of the north.