Considering, therefore, that no human institution yet devised or actually in existence has had or has a moral influence or facilities for exercising it at all equal to that enjoyed by the Church, it is all the more to be regretted that she has never taken any real interest in the abolition of a custom which is at the root of half the crime and misery with which she has to contend. Whatever hopes might at one time have been reasonably entertained of the Reformed Church as an anti-military agency, the cause of peace soon sank into a sort of heresy, or what was worse, an unfashionable tenet, associated, condemned, and contemned with other articles of religious dissent. ‘Those who condemn the profession or art of soldiery,’ said Sir James Turner, ‘smell rank of anabaptism and quakery.’[273] It would be difficult to find in the whole range of history any such example of wasted moral force. As Erasmus had cause to deplore it in the sixteenth century, so had Voltaire in the eighteenth. The latter complained that he did not remember a single page against war in the whole of Bourdaloue’s sermons, and he even suggested that the real explanation might be a literal want of courage on the part of the clergy. The passage is worth quoting from the original, both for its characteristic energy of expression and for its clear insight into the real character of the custom of war:--‘Pour les autres moralistes à gages que l’on nomme prédicateurs, ils n’ont jamais seulement osé prêcher contre la guerre.... Ils se gardent bien de décrier la guerre, qui réunit tout ce que la perfidie a de plus lâche dans les manifestes, tout ce que l’infâme friponnerie a de plus bas dans les fournitures des armées, tout ce que le brigandage a d’affreux dans le pillage, le viol, le larcin, l’homicide, la dévastation, la destruction. Au contraire, ces bons prêtres bénissent en cérémonie les étendards de meurtre; et leurs confrères chantent pour de l’argent des chansons juives, quand la terre a été inondée de sang.’[274]