t Or, * in pace ' may refer to periods when no actual war was proceeding;, and when it was less dishonourable and dantrerous to leave the army. A Roman army in peace built bridtres and roads, and did general repairing work, besides police-duties.
light, as the Western Church would be anxious at this ]ierio(l to leiul its moral support to a general like Constanline.
Constautine himself acted afterwards upon a broad policy of toleration. He (Eus. Vita Coii.it. ii. 33) left it to Christian oflicers to decide whether they would be reinstated in the army from which tliey had been ejected on religious grounds by Licinius, or would accept an honourable discharge from tlie service. The clioice lay with themselves. He would not force any Christian to .serve against his will. This made it more ea.sy for the Church to form a conclusion, but it did not helj) matters. The question was still left to the individual, and we have few data for determining how far it was felt to be a question at all. Now that the .scruple about idolatry had fallen, the scruple about blood- shed became vital. This had always been recog- nized, even in army regulations ; the piacular sacrifice or lustration of the army at the close of a campaign was both Semitic (see Nu 31""-, after a ruthless massacre of prisoners) and Roman — though W. Warde Fowler {The Brliriious Experience of the Roman People, London, 1911, p. 217) cannot find any trace of it except in ' a statement of Fe.stus that the soldiers who followed the general's car in a triumiih wore laurel wreaths "ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem."' This scruple about the taint of bloodshed now apjiears in Chris- tian ecclesiastical rules. On the one hand, there must have been a feeling abroad in certain circles which led up to the attitude adopted in the later Canons of Hippolytus and Testament of our Lord, not earlier than the end of the 4th cent., which propound a stringent ecclesiastical discouragement of the army as a sphere for earnest Christians. The Testament is more sympathetic to teachers than to soldiers ; the latter are not only forbidden to shed blood and bidden to be content with their pay (cf. Lk 3"),* bu£, 'if they wish to be baptized in the Lord, they must give up military service absolutely ' (ii.). In the same way, the Tertullian- spirit dominates the Canons of Mippoh/tits (13, 14), which prohibit a soldier from wearing chaplet or crown, and exclude him from the sacrament till he has done severe and long penance for any blood he may have shed. But these extreme attempts did not represent the normal temper of the Church, as is plain from their later editions : in the Cations of Hippolytus the sentence of the 14th Canon (71-73) that 'no Christian is to go and become a soldier' is qualified (74 : 'nisi sit coactus a duce' ; cf. TU\l. iv. [1891] 82) afterwards by the insertion of the clause, ' unless he is obliged to do so ' ; that is, a Christian is allowed to join the army if he is called up by conscription, but he is not allowed to enlist voluntarily. The profession is discouraged for members of the Church, |>rincipally on the ground that it involves bloodshed. Similarly, in the later Coptic version of the Testamentum Domini, the cl.aim that a catechumen must leave the army before he can be baptized is omitted, although Christians are still prohibited from join- ing the legions of their own accord.
Over against these extreme views we may set not only the distinctly loyalist tone of Kusebius, but the extreme appeal of a writer like Firmicus Maternus, in the middle of tlie 4th cent., who urges the sons of Constantine to root out paganism forcibly. The weeds whicli he has in view particu- larly are Eastern cults like tho.se of Isis, i\Iithra, and Magna Mater, wliieh bad hitherto seemed to many Romans to possess the same origin and aim
• Tliis precedent of JoJin tlie Baptist has come up so re- peatedly in tiie course of our siirve.v that we may recall one of tlie ironies and prim coincidences of history, viz. the far'l that, when the turhiilent citizens of Florence turned to Christi.inity, they converted the temple of Mars into the Baptistery of Johii !
as Christianity itself. Firmicus Maternus regards them as tlie 16lh cent, reformers regarded the Mass. He advocates, for the lirst time in the history of the Church, a holy war ((/« Errore profanarum relifjionuin, 1611'.). Paganism re- quires a rough surgery, ' et, si conualuerit malum, et ignis adhibetur et ferrum.' ' O Constantius aiul Constans,' he cries, ' most sacred emperors, only a little more action and the devil will lie jirostrate, under tlie blow of your laws, the dread- ful plague of idolatry will vanish and peVish ; raise the standard (vexillum) of the Faith, you for whom the Deity has reserved this honour : rai.se the banner of the Law for men to reverence . . . may weal and bliss accrue to the state, because you have laiil low the enemies' armies amid heaps of slain victims. Rlessed are you also, for Gocl has made jou participators in His glory and His will ; and, out of kindness to the people, Christ has granted you with your own hands to destroy iilolatry and demolish the shrines of the profane. He conquers evil spirits with spiritual arms, you have conquered earthly evils, liaise the trophies of victory . . . j'ou have won the battle for man's salvation, Christ Himself lighting in the conflict' (20). Firmicus Maternus believes strongly in a liOrd of hosts. When a Roman army in the old days came back from victory over foreign foes, it had to march through the Porta triumjihalis, and Fowler (p. 217) suggests that this custom 'most likely had as its original meaning the sicjiaration of the host from the profane worhl in which it had been moving.' To Firmicus ISlaternus an army which had been putting down idolatry required no such purging from profane iniluences ; its task had been high and holy. Yet his contemporary Basil, who succeeded Eusebius in the bishopric of Coesarea, looked more askance at Christian soldiers. In the lirst of his 'canonical letters' to Amplii- lochius, the bishop of Iconium, he would exclude from communion for three full years all soldiers who retire when their term of service is over : ' Our fathers did not consider homicide in war to be homicide, presumably because they wished to make allowance for men who fought on behalf of chastity and true religion. Perh.aps it is well, however, to counsel that those whose hands are not clean should only * abstain from communion for three years' {Ep. clxxxviii. 13). He had already (ib. 8) discussed the dili'erence between intentional and unintentional homicide, and argued that all attacks on other people in battle are intentional, since soldiers hght to kill their enemies ; such .acts are ranked by Basil as murders, on the same plane of guilt as deaths caused by robbers and poisoners. This is the plea against war which we have already noticed (p. 662 f.). Basil seems to have con- sidered it possible for soldiers to avoid bloodshed, but this cannot have been a common experience, for most of the legionaries must have seen active .service in his day. He himscdf had correspondents in the army. One of his sliort letters (cvi.) is to a soldier-friend, evidently hi^h up in the service. ' I have learned,' says the bishop, ' to know one who proves that even in military service it is possible to maintain absolute love to God, and that one should distinguish a Christian not by his style of dress but by his temper of soul. It was a great delight to meet you, and I am now extremely glad whenever I recollect you.' Basil's ecclesi- astical opinion on war is coloured by his strict asceticism, like his objection to lending money on interest, and his restriction of the ordinary practice of discipline for the sacrament was never acted upon by the Church. It is signilicant that even