In respect, too, of the justice of the cause of war, the Church within recent centuries has entirely vacated her position. It is noticeable that in the 37th article of the English Church, which is to the effect that a Christian at the command of the magistrate may wear weapons and serve in the wars, the word _justa_, which in the Latin form preceded the word _bella_ or wars, has been omitted.[271] The leaders of the Reformation decided on the whole in favour of the lawfulness of military service for a Christian, but with the distinct reservation that the cause of war should be just. Bullinger, who was Zwingli’s successor in the Reformed Church at Zurich, decided that though a Christian might take up arms at the command of the magistrate, it would be his duty to disobey the magistrate if he purposed to make war on the guiltless; and that only the death of those soldiers on the battle-field was glorious who fought for their religion or their country. Thomas Becon, chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, complained of the utter disregard of a just and patriotic motive for war in the code of military ethics then prevalent. Speaking of the fighters of his day, he thus characterised their position in the State: ‘The rapacity of wolves, the violence of lions, the fierceness of tigers is nothing in comparison of their furious and cruel tyranny; and yet do many of them this not for the safeguard of their country (for so it would be the more tolerable), but to satisfy their butcher-like affects, to boast another day of how many men they have been the death, and to bring home the more preys that they may live the fatter ever after for these spoils and stolen goods.’[272] From military service he maintained that all considerations of justice and humanity had been entirely banished, and their stead been taken by robbery and theft, ‘the insatiable spoiling of other men’s goods, and a whole sea of barbarous and beast-like manners.’ In this way the necessity of a just cause as a reason for taking part in actual warfare was reasserted at the time of the Reformation, and has only since then been allowed to drop out of sight altogether; so that now public opinion has no guide in the matter, and even less than it had in ancient Rome, the attitude of the Church towards the State on this point being rather that of Anaxarchus the philosopher to Alexander the Great, when, to console that conqueror for his murder of Clitus, he said to him: ‘Know you not that Jupiter is represented with Law and Justice at his side, to show that whatever is done by sovereign power is right?’