The stigma which Christianity had attached to war was thus gradually effaced. At the same time, the Church remained, on the whole, a pacific influence. War was rather condoned than consecrated, and, whatever might be the case with a few isolated prelates, the Church did nothing to increase or encourage it. The transition from the almost Quaker tenets of the primitive Church to the essentially military Christianity of the Crusades was chiefly due to another cause—to the terrors and to the example of Mohammedanism. This great religion, which so long rivalled the influence of Christianity, had indeed spread the deepest and most justifiable panic through Christendom. Without any of those aids to the imagination which pictures and images can furnish, without any elaborate sacerdotal organisation, preaching the purest Monotheism among ignorant and barbarous men, and inculcating, on the whole, an extremely high and noble system of morals, it spread with a rapidity and it acquired a hold over the minds of its votaries, which it is probable that no other religion has altogether equalled. It borrowed from Christianity that doctrine of salvation by belief, which is perhaps the most powerful impulse that can be applied to the characters of masses of men, and it elaborated so minutely the charms of its sensual heaven, and the terrors of its material hell, as to cause the alternative to appeal with unrivalled force to the gross imaginations of the people. It possessed a book which, however inferior to that of the opposing religion, has nevertheless been the consolation and the support of millions in many ages. It taught a fatalism which in its first age nerved its adherents with a matchless military courage, and which, though in later days it has often paralysed their active energies, has also rarely failed to support them under the pressure of inevitable calamity. But, above all, it discovered the great, the fatal secret of uniting indissolubly the passion of the soldier with the passion of the devotee. Making the conquest of the infidel the first of duties, and proposing heaven as the certain reward of the valiant soldier, it created a blended enthusiasm that soon overpowered the divided counsels and the voluptuous governments of the East, and, within a century of the death of Mohammed, his followers had almost extirpated Christianity from its original home, founded great monarchies in Asia and Africa, planted a noble, though transient and exotic, civilisation in Spain, menaced the capital of the Eastern empire, and, but for the issue of a single battle, they would probably have extended their sceptre over the energetic and progressive races of Central Europe. The wave was broken by Charles Martel, at the battle of Poitiers, and it is now useless to speculate what might have been the consequences had Mohammedanism unfurled its triumphant banner among those Teutonic tribes who have so often changed their creed, and on