Excerpt from Moral Aspects of the European War: A Lecture Delivered Under the Auspices of the Nucleu De Propaganda Pro-Alliados at the Academia De Estudos Livres on the 13th May, 1917 True, the good seed of the Gospel has not yet expelled evil from the world. But in the human animal it has at least' softened those instincts of rapine, the proximate or remoter source of all social conflagrations. War itself, the organic fatality of societies, from the time when Christ's word poured balm upon the soul of the warrior, has become less atrocious in its methods. In that long period of ten centuries known as the Middle Ages, When a northern barbarian came on the scene, flooding the lands of the sun in the hope of restraining the advance of the graeco-roman civilisation, a gleam of hope filtered into the dungeons of the captives, a ray of pity flashed against the swords of the invaders. Faith, honour, adherence to the plighted word, respect for innocent and defenceless life, protection for the unjustly persecuted: all these notions of justice and dignity, which Roman law had formulated and Christ's apostles had acclaimed, found their way into a code tacitly accepted by all civilised peoples, even by those who, like the Mussulman, were themselves outside the pale of the Church. Such was the code of chivalry, which for centuries stood as the safeguard of millionsof oppressed, the refuge of the weak, a shield against the tyranny of the, strong, and a mitigation of the violence of armed savagery in war. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.