But, however much the frequency and ferocity of the wars waged by barbarian races as compared with those waged by civilised nations has been exaggerated, there is no doubt but that in warfare, more than in anything else, there is most in common between civilisation and savagery, and that the distinction between them most nearly disappears. In art and knowledge and religion the distinction between the two is so wide that the evolution of one from the other seems still to many minds incredible; but in war, and the thoughts which relate to it, the points of analogy cannot fail to strike the most indifferent. We see still in either condition, the same notions of the glory of fighting, the same belief in war as the only source of strength and honour, the same hope from it of personal advancement, the same readiness to seize any pretext for resorting to it, the same foolish sentiment that it is mean to live without it. Then only will the distinction between the two be final, complete, and real, when all fighting is relegated to barbarism, and regarded as unworthy of civilised humanity; when the enlightenment of opinion, which has freed us already from such curses as slavery, the torture-chamber, or duelling, shall demand instinctively the settlement of all causes of quarrel by peaceful arbitration, and leave to the lower races and the lower creation the old-fashioned resort to a trial of violence and might, to competition in fraud and ferocity. CHAPTER VII. WAR AND CHRISTIANITY. _Etsi adierant milites ad Joannem et formam observationis acceperant, si etiam centurio crediderat, omnem postea militem Dominus in Petro exarmando discinxit._--TERTULLIAN. The war question at the time of the Reformation--The remonstrances of Erasmus against the custom--Influence of Grotius on the side of war--The war question in the early Church--The Fathers against the lawfulness of war--Causes of the changed views of the Church--The clergy as active combatants for over one thousand years--Fighting Bishops--Bravery in war and ecclesiastical preferment--Pope Julius II. at the siege of Mirandola--The last fighting Bishop--Origin and meaning of the declaration of war--Superstition in the naming of weapons, ships, &c.--The custom of kissing the earth before a charge--Connection between religious and military ideas--The Church as a pacific agency--Her efforts to set limits to reprisals--The altered attitude of the modern Church--Early reformers only sanctioned just wars--Voltaire’s reproach against the Church--Canon Mozley’s sermon on war--The answer to his apology.