They make a sport of this, and will inflict it on friends and allies too, violating oaths, vows, and promises, by treachery or otherwise: “Deceit or courage—who asks which, against an enemy?” Treaties and the laws of war are broken for their advantage—“laws fall silent amid arms”—and “all laws, divine and human, are generally trampled underfoot.” The laws of God and humankind are trodden down. The sword alone settles everything. To satisfy their lust and spite, they care nothing what they attempt, say, or do: Loyalty and honesty are rare among men who follow the camp.

Nothing is more common than father fighting son, brother fighting brother, relation fighting relation, kingdom fighting kingdom, province fighting province, Christians fighting Christians, “by whom they have never been harmed even in thought”—people who have never offended them in thought, word, or deed. Limitless wealth is spent, towns burned, flourishing cities sacked and ruined; and, “what the mind shudders to recall,” fine countries are emptied of people and left desolate, their old inhabitants driven out, trade and commerce ruined, young women raped: maidens not yet joined in marriage, and youths whose locks have not yet been cut.

Chaste wives cry out with Andromache, “Soon I shall be forced to submit to the embraces of the man who killed Hector”: perhaps they will be forced to sleep with those who killed their husbands. To see rich and poor, sick and healthy, masters and servants, “all stricken by the same calamity,” destroyed or maimed, and so on; “and whatever a spirit delighting in crime and a perverted mind dare,” as Cyprian says; and every torment, misery, and outrage that hell itself, the devil, fury, and rage can devise for their own ruin and destruction! War is so abominable, as Gerbelius concludes: “War is so foul and detestable a thing, bringing human slaughter, devastation,” and so on. It is God’s scourge, the cause, effect, fruit, and punishment of sin; not “a pruning of humankind,” as Tertullian calls it, but “its ruin.”

Suppose Democritus had witnessed the recent civil wars in France, those abominable wars, wars hated by mothers, in which, Coligny says, a million people perished in less than ten years and twenty thousand churches were destroyed—indeed, the whole kingdom overturned, as Richard Dinoth adds. So many tens of thousands of ordinary people were butchered by the sword, famine, and war, “with such hatred on both sides that even barbarians were stunned by the dreadful slaughter”: such savage hatred that the world stood amazed.

Or suppose he had witnessed our own recent fields of Pharsalus, in Henry VI’s time, between the houses of Lancaster and York: one writer says a hundred thousand people were killed; another, that ten thousand families were wiped out. No one can help marvelling, says Commynes, at the barbarous brutality and savage madness practised between people of the same nation, language, and religion. “What madness is this, citizens?” “Why do the nations rage so furiously?” asks the prophet David, Psalm 2:1. But we may ask: why do Christians rage so furiously? Why do the young men want weapons, demand them, and seize them?

Such tyranny is unfit for non-Christians, still less for us: consider the Spaniards in the Americas, who in forty-two years killed twelve million people with appalling, elaborate tortures, if we may believe their own bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas. Nor would I be lying, he said, if I put the number at fifty million. I pass over the French massacres, the Sicilian Vespers, the Duke of Alba’s tyrannies, our Gunpowder Plot, and that fourth Fury, as one writer calls it, the Spanish Inquisition, which quite overshadows those ten persecutions: Impious Mars rages throughout the world.

Is this not “a world gone mad”, as he calls it—a mad world, “insane war”? Are these not madmen, as Scaliger concludes, “who, by a bitter death in battle, leave to posterity the memory of their madness as an everlasting witness”—who leave so many battles as lasting memorials of their madness to every succeeding age? Would this, do you think, have driven our Democritus to laughter? Or would it have made him change his tune, alter his tone, and weep with Heraclitus—or rather howl, roar, tear his hair in pity, and stand appalled; or, as the poets imagine of Niobe, become utterly numb with grief and turn to stone?

I have not yet said the worst, what is more absurd and mad: in their tumults, rebellions, civil and unjust wars—“what is foolishly undertaken, impiously conducted, and miserably ended.” Those are the wars I mean, for we should not condemn them all, as those deluded Anabaptists foolishly imagine. Our Christian military formations are every bit as necessary as the Roman battle line or the Greek phalanx. Soldiering is a most noble and honourable profession, given the state of the world, and we cannot do without it. Soldiers are our best walls and defences.