[672] This teaching is one which does not show itself as a generally recognized principle in the pre-Christian centuries, as does the principle of love, or self-devotion to the common good, or universal benevolence. “Christianity at its inception did not take over this moral principle, ready-made, from any of the older cults or cultures from which the Christian movement was in a position to draw. It is not found, at least in appreciable force, in the received Judaism; nor can it be derived from the classical (Greco-Roman) cultures, which had none of it” (Thorstein B. Veblen, “Christian Morals and the Competitive System,” The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1910).
[673] “Christian mores in the Western Empire were formed by syncretism of Jewish and pagan mores. Christian mores therefore contain war, slavery, concubinage, demonism, and base amusements, together with some abstract ascetic doctrines with which these things are inconsistent.”—Sumner, Folkways (1907), p. 116.
[674] For opinions of early Christian writers and the attitude of the Church on the soldier’s profession and the rightfulness of war, see Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, tr. Whewell, pp. 49 ff.
[675] Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. ii, p. 205.
[676] See above, p. 277.
[677] Throughout the medieval ages and down almost to our own day these Old Testament records, misread, were used to justify many of the cruelties of war, and other atrocities:
Plunder and pillage were supported by reference to the divinely approved “spoiling of the Egyptians” by the Israelites. The right to massacre unresisting enemies was based upon the command of the Almighty to the Jews in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy. The indiscriminate slaughter of whole populations was justified by a reference to the divine command to slaughter the nations round about Israel. Torture and mutilation of enemies was sanctioned by the conduct of Samuel against Agag, of King David against the Philistines, of the men of Judah against Adonibezek. Even the slaughter of babes in arms was supported by a passage from the Psalms, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” Treachery and assassination were supported by a reference to the divinely approved Phinehas, Ehud, Judith, and Jael; and murdering the ministers of unapproved religions, by Elijah’s slaughter of the priests of Baal.—Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 85 f.
[678] Lecky believes this to have been the main cause of the transformation in the Church. “The transition,” he says, “from the almost Quaker tenets of the primitive Church to the essentially military Christianity of the Crusades was due chiefly ... to the terror and the example of Mohammedanism” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 252). But, as we have seen, the transition was already nearly complete before the rise of Islam.
[679] In a portrayal of the character of the Scandinavians, the Church historian Schaff observes: “Their only enthusiasm was the feeling of duty; but the direction which had been given to this feeling was so absolutely opposed to that pointed out by the Christian morality, that no reconciliation was possible” (History of the Christian Church, vol. iv, p. 110). Yet in the important domain of ethics which we are here examining this is exactly what did happen.
[680] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 253.