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

notorious to be insisted upon, that thousands who had filled their stations in life with propriety, and been virtuous from principle, have lost, by a military life, both the practice and the regard of morality; and when they have become habituated to the vices of war, have laughed at their honest and plodding brethren who are still spiritless enough for virtue, or stupid enough for piety. The vices which once had shocked them become the subject, not of acquiescence, but of exultation. “Almost all the professions,” says Dr. Knox, “have some characteristic manners which the professors seem to adopt with little examination, as necessary and as honorable distinctions. It happens, unfortunately, that profligacy, libertinism, and infidelity are thought, by weaker minds, almost as necessary a part of a soldier’s uniform, as his shoulder-knot. To hesitate at an oath, to decline intoxication, to profess a regard for religion, would be almost as ignominious as to refuse a challenge.”79

It is, however, not necessary to insist upon the immoral influence of war upon the military character, since no one probably will dispute it. Nor is it difficult to discover how the immorality is occasioned. It is obvious that those who are continually engaged in a practice “in which almost all the vices are incorporated,” and who promote this practice with individual eagerness, cannot, without the intervention of a miracle, be otherwise than collectively depraved.

If the soldier engages in the destruction of his species he should at least engage in it with reluctance, and abandon it with joy. The slaughter of his fellow men should be dreadful in execution and in thought. But what is his aversion or reluctance? He feels none⁠—it is not even a subject of seriousness to him. He butchers his fellow candidates for heaven, as a woodman fells a coppice; with as little reluctance and as little regret.

Those who will compute the tendency of this familiarity with human destruction, cannot doubt whether it will be pernicious to the moral character. What is the hope, that he who is familiar with murder, who has himself often perpetrated it, and who exults in the perpetration, will retain undepraved the principles of virtue? His moral feelings are blunted: his moral vision is obscured. We say his moral vision is obscured; for we do not think it possible that he should retain even the perception of Christian purity. The soldier, again, who plunders the citizen of another nation without remorse or reflection, and bears away the spoil with triumph, will inevitably lose something of his principles of probity. These principles are shaken; an inroad is made upon their integrity, and it is an inroad that makes after inroads the more easy. Mankind do not generally resist the influence of habit. If we rob and shoot those who are “enemies” today, we are in some degree prepared to shoot and rob those who are not enemies tomorrow. The strength of the restraining moral principle is impaired. Law may, indeed, still restrain us from violence; but the power and efficiency of principle is diminished. And this alienation of the mind from the practice, the love, and the perception of Christian purity therefore, of necessity extends its influence to the other circumstances of life; and it is hence, in part, that the general profligacy of armies arises. That which we have not practised in war we are little likely to practice in peace; and there is no hope we shall possess the goodness which we neither love nor perceive.

Another means by which war becomes pernicious to the moral character of the soldier, is the incapacity which the profession occasions for the sober pursuits of life. “The profession of a soldier,” says Dr. Paley, “almost always unfits men for the business of regular occupations.” On the question, whether it be better that of three inhabitants of a village, one should be a soldier and two husbandmen, or that all should occasionally become both, he says that from the latter arrangement the country receives three raw militia men and three idle and profligate peasants. War cannot be continual. Soldiers must sometimes become citizens: and citizens who are unfit for stated business will be idle; and they who are idle will scarcely be virtuous. A political project, therefore, such as a war, which will eventually pour fifty or a hundred thousand of such men upon the community, must of necessity be an enormous evil to a state. It were an infelicitous defence to say, that soldiers do not become idle until the war is closed or they leave the army.⁠—To keep men out of idleness by employing them in cutting other men’s limbs and bodies, is at least an extraordinary economy; and the profligacy still remains; for unhappily if war keeps soldiers busy, it does not keep them good.

By a peculiar and unhappy coincidence, the moral evil attendant upon the profession is perpetuated by the after system of half-pay. We have no concern with this system on political or pecuniary considerations; but it will be obvious that those who return from war, with the principles and habits of war, are little likely to improve either by a life without necessary occupation or express object. By this system, there are thousands of men, in the prime or in the bloom of life, who live without such object or occupation. This would be an evil if it happened to any set of men, but upon men who have been soldiers the evil is peculiarly intense. He whose sense of moral obligation has been impaired by the circumstances of his former life, and whose former life has induced habits of disinclination to regular pursuits, is the man who, above all others, it is unfortunate for the interests of purity should be supported on “half-pay.” If war have occasioned “unfitness for regular occupations,” he will not pursue them; if it have familiarized him with profligacy, he will be little restrained by virtue. And the consequences of consigning men under such circumstances