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36 it achieved. Europe was steadily educated and encouraged, century after century, in the shedding of blood.

The Protestant is at times disposed to dismiss the whole sordid story with the remark that this Roman Church was not Christianity at all. He contrives to overlook the serious difficulty that, if the Roman Church did not represent Christianity from the sixth century to the sixteenth, there was, contrary to the promise of Christ, no Christianity in Europe for a thousand years; and he surrenders all the wonderful art of the Middle Ages (as he ought) to entirely non-Christian forces. That, however, does not concern me here. The slightest recollection of history would warn the Protestant that the Reformation brought no improvement whatever, as far as this reign of violence is concerned. The forces set up by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation fought each other for some decades with the comparatively peaceful weapons of mutual abuse and heated argument. When it was perceived that these weapons were of no avail, there was the customary appeal to the sword. In the historical documents which tell the life of Pope Paul IV we see the Papacy and the Jesuits urging the Catholic princes to lead out their armies. Heresy was to be extinguished in blood; and, seeing how many millions in the north had by that time embraced the heresy, there can have been no illusion as to the magnitude of the oceans of blood that would be required to drown it. So Europe entered upon the horrors of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which put back the civilisation of Germany for more than a hundred years and utterly ruined some of the small principalities. The population of Bohemia alone fell from three millions to less than a million. Nearly every nation in Europe was