Let it always be borne in mind by those who are advocating war, that they are contending for a corruption which their forefathers abhorred; and that they are making Jesus Christ the sanctioner of crimes, which his purest followers offered up their lives because they would not commit.
An argument has sometimes been advanced in favor of war from the Divine communications to the Jews under the administration of Moses. It has been said that as wars were allowed and enjoined to that people, they cannot be inconsistent with the will of God.
We have no intention to dispute, that, under the Mosaic dispensation, some wars were allowed, or that they were enjoined upon the Jews as an imperative duty. But those who refer, in justification of our present practice, to the authority by which the Jews prosecuted their wars, must be expected to produce the same authority for our own. Wars were commanded to the Jews, but are they commanded to us? War, in the abstract, was never commanded. And, surely those specific wars which were enjoined upon the Jews for an express purpose, are neither authority nor example for us, who have received no such injunction, and can plead no such purpose.
It will, perhaps, be said that the commands to prosecute wars, even to extermination, are so positive and so often repeated, that it is not probable, if they were inconsistent with the will of Heaven, they would have been thus peremptorily enjoined. We answer, that they were not inconsistent with the will of heaven then. But even then, the prophets foresaw that they were not accordant with the universal will of God, since they predicted that when that will should be fulfilled, war should be eradicated from the world. And by what dispensation was this will to be fulfilled? By that of the “Rod out of the stem of Jesse.”
But what do those who refer to the dispensation of Moses maintain? Do they say that the injunctions to the Jews are binding upon them? If they say this, we have at least reason to ask them for greater consistency of obedience. That these injunctions, in point of fact, do not bind them, they give sufficient proof, by the neglect of the greater portion of them, enforced as those injunctions were, by the same authority as that which commanded war. They have, therefore, so far as their argument is concerned, annulled the injunctions by their own rejection of them. And out of ten precepts to reject nine and retain one, is a gratuitous and idle mode of argument.
If I be told that we still acknowledge the obligation of many of these precepts, I answer that we acknowledge the duties which they enjoin, but not because of the authority which enjoined them. We obey the injunctions, not because they were delivered under the law, but because they are enforced by Christianity. The command, “Thou shalt not kill,” has never been abolished; but Christians do not prohibit murder because it was denounced in the Decalogue, they would have prohibited it if the Decalogue had never existed.
But farther: Some of the commands under the law, Christianity requires us to disobey. “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, etc., all the men of the city shall stone him with stones that he die.48 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, entice thee secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ thou shalt not pity him or conceal him, but thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death.”49 Now we know that Christianity will not sanction an obedience of these commands; and if we did obey them, our own laws would treat us as murderers. If the precepts under the dispensation of Moses are binding because they were promulgated by Heaven, they are binding in all their commands and all their prohibitions. But some of these precepts we habitually disregard, and some it were criminal to obey; and with what reason then do we refer to them in our defence?
And why was the law superseded? Because it “made nothing perfect.”—“The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” The manner in which the author of “truth” prefaced some of his most important precepts, is much to our present purpose. “It hath been said by them of old time, an eye for an eye,” etc. He then introduces his own precept with the contradistinguishing preface—“But I say unto you.” This, therefore, appears to be a specific abrogation of the authority of the legal injunctions, and an introduction of another system; and this is all that our present purpose requires. The truth is, that the law was abolished because of its imperfections; yet we take hold of one of these imperfections in justification of our present practice. Is it because we feel that we cannot defend it by our own religion?
We therefore dismiss the dispensation of Moses from any participation in the argument. Whatever it allowed, or whatever it prohibited, in relation to war, we do not inquire. We ask only what Christianity allows and prohibits, and by this we determine the question.—It is the more necessary to point out the inapplicability of these arguments from the Old Testament, because there are some persons of desultory modes of thinking, who find that war is allowed in “the Bible,” and who forget to inquire into the present authority of the permission.
There are some persons who suppose themselves sufficiently justified in their approbation of war, by the example of men of piety of our own times. The argument, as an argument, is of little concern; but everything is important that makes us acquiescent in war. Here are men, say they, who make the knowledge of their duties the great object of their
