An Inquiry Into the Accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity

persuade ourselves to do this, we should certainly pass life with greater consistency of conduct, and as I firmly believe in greater enjoyment and greater peace. The world has had many examples of such fidelity and confidence. Who have been the Christian martyrs of all ages, but men who maintained their fidelity to Christianity through whatever consequences? They were faithful to the Christian creed; we ought to be faithful to the Christian morality; without morality the profession of a creed is vain. Nay, we have seen that there have been martyrs to the duties of morality, and to these very duties of peacefulness. The duties remain the same, but where is our obedience?

I hope, for the sake of his understanding and his heart, that the reader will not say I reason on the supposition that the world was what it is not; and that although these duties may be binding upon us when the world shall become purer, yet that we must now accommodate ourselves to the state of things as they are. This is to say that in a land of assassins, assassination would be right. If no one begins to reform his practice, until others have begun before him, reformation will never be begun. If apostles, or martyrs, or reformers had “accommodated themselves to the existing state of things,” where had now been Christianity? The business of reformation belongs to him who sees that reformation is required. The world has no other human means of amendment. If you believe that war is not allowed by Christianity, it is your business to oppose it; and if fear or distrust should raise questions on the consequences, apply the words of our Saviour⁠—“What is that to thee?⁠—Follow thou me.”

Our great misfortune in the examination of the duties of Christianity, is, that we do not contemplate them with sufficient simplicity. We do not estimate them without some addition or abatement of our own; there is almost always some intervening medium. A sort of half-transparent glass is hung before each individual, which possesses endless shades of color and degrees of opacity, and which presents objects with endless varieties of distortion. This glass is colored by our education and our passions. The business of moral culture is to render it transparent. The perfection of the perceptive part of moral culture is to remove it from before us.⁠—Simple obedience without reference to consequences, is our great duty. I know that philosophers have taught us otherwise: I know that we have been referred, for the determination of our duties, to calculations of expediency and of the future consequences of our actions:⁠—but I believe that in whatever degree this philosophy directs us to forbear an unconditional obedience to the rules of our religion, it will be found, that when Christianity shall advance in her purity and her power, she will sweep it from the earth with the besom of destruction.

The positions, then, which we have endeavored to establish, are these:⁠—

1. That the general character of Christianity is wholly incongruous with war, and that its general duties are incompatible with it.

2. That some of the express precepts and declarations of Jesus Christ virtually forbid it.

3. That his practice is not reconcilable with the supposition of its lawfulness.

4. That the precepts and practice of the apostles correspond with those of our Lord.

5. That the primitive Christians believed that Christ had forbidden war; and that some of them suffered death in affirmance of this belief.

6. That God has declared in prophecy, that it is his will that war should eventually be eradicated from the earth; and this eradication will be effected by Christianity, by the influence of its present principles.

7. That those who have refused to engage in war, in consequence of their belief of its inconsistency with Christianity, have found that Providence has protected them.

Now we think that the establishment of any considerable number of these positions is sufficient for our argument. The establishment of the whole forms a body of evidence, to which I am not able to believe that an inquirer, to whom the subject was new, would be able to withhold his assent. But since such an inquirer cannot be found, I would invite the reader to lay prepossession aside, to suppose himself to have now first heard of battles and slaughter, and dispassionately to examine whether the evidence in favor of peace be not very great, and whether the objections to it do bear any proportion to the evidence itself. But whatever may be the determination upon this question, surely it is reasonable to try the experiment whether security cannot be maintained without slaughter. Whatever be the reasons for war, it is certain that it produces enormous mischief. Even waiving the obligations of Christianity, we have to choose between evils that are certain and evils that are doubtful; between the actual endurance of a great calamity, and the possibility of a less. It certainly cannot be proved that peace would not be the best policy; and since we know that the present system is bad, it were reasonable and wise to try whether the other is not better. In reality, I can scarcely conceive the possibility of greater evil than that which mankind now endure; an evil, moral and physical, of far wider extent, and far greater intensity, than our familiarity with it allows us to suppose. If a system of peace be not productive of less evil than the system of war, its consequences must indeed be enormously bad; and that it would produce such consequences, we have no warrant for believing either from reason or from practice⁠—either from the principles of the moral government of God, or from the experience of mankind. Whenever a people shall pursue, steadily and uniformly, the pacific morality of the Gospel, and shall do this from the pure motive of obedience, there is no reason to fear for the consequences: there is no reason to fear that they would experience any evils such as we now endure, or that they would not find that Christianity