For the cause of this feeling we may perhaps choose between an almost instinctive reluctance to take human life, and some such superstition as explains the necessity for purification among the Basutos,--the idea, namely, of escaping the revenge of the slain by the medium of water.[313] The latter explanation would be in keeping with the not uncommon notion in savage life of the inability of a spirit to cross running water, and would help to account for the necessity there was for a Hebrew to flee, or for a Greek to make some expiation, even though only guilty of an act of unintentional homicide. And in this way it is possible that the sanctity of human life, which is one of the chief marks, and should be one of the chief objects, of civilisation, originated in the very same fear of a post-mortem vengeance, which leads some savage tribes to entreat pardon of the bear or elephant they have slain after a successful chase. But, account as we like for the origin of the feeling, its undoubted existence is the point of interest, for it is easy to see that under slightly more favourable conditions of history it might have ripened into a state of thought which would have held the soldier and the manslayer in equal abhorrence. Christianity in its primitive form certainly aimed at and very nearly effected the transition. In the Greek Church a Christian soldier was debarred from the Eucharist for three years if he had slain an enemy in battle; and the Christian Church of the first three centuries would have echoed the sentiment expressed by St. Cyprian in his letter to Donatus: ‘Homicide when committed by an individual is a crime, but a virtue when committed in a public war; yet in the latter case it derives its impunity, not from its abstract harmlessness, but solely from the scale of its enormity.’ The education of centuries has long since effaced the earlier scruple; but there are tens of thousands of Englishmen to whom the military profession is the last they would voluntarily adopt, and it would be rash to predict the impossibility of the revival of the older feeling, or the dimensions it may ultimately assume. The greatest poet of our time, who more than any other living man has helped to lead European opinion into new channels, may, perhaps, in the following lines have anticipated the verdict of the coming time, and divined an undercurrent of thought that is beginning to flow even now amongst us with no inconsiderable force of feeling:-- La phrase, cette altière et vile courtisane, Dore le meurtre en grand, fourbit la pertuisane, Protège les soudards contre le sens commun, Persuade les niais que tous sont faits pour un, Prouve que la tuerie est glorieuse et bonne, Déroute la logique et l’évidence, et donne Un sauf-conduit au crime à travers la raison.[314]