ery age have; and we can see no reason why we should not. They did indeed suffer; but this did not prove them wrong.

'But, if men will not in India or in Kansas follow the gospel, what shall we do ?! As Christians, there is nothing more that we can do. We are asked to say what the gospel prescribes in the case; and if men refuse to do what it requires, that must end the matter. The responsibility henceforth is theirs, not ours, or the gospel's.

'But, while in a community, or under rulers, that set aside the gospel as a rule of duty in such cases, what shall we do, as Christians? We ought, as far as possible, to put the people and the government right; and if unsuccessful, there is nothing left for us but duly to protest against the wrong, and suffer, as best we can, our share of the evils that may follow. In no case are we at liberty to act in opposition to our views of what the gospel requires. If the majority, or the powers that be, act wrong, neither we nor our principles can be responsible for the result.

'But so few adopt your views, of what avail can be such a meagre minority? They can lift their voice for the right; and, however feeble, it may and must in time be felt. Christianity itself was in its origin just such a protest against the world's errors and sins; and, had the first disciples acted on the principle of this excuse, it would have perished in its cradle.

'But shall we not sustain the government?" Certainly, where it is right; but in no case where it is wrong. 'Shall we, then, oppose it whenever we think it wrong? Of course, we ought; not, however, by violence, but only by proper moral and political means. To use all such means in setting and keeping government right, is a high Christian duty. Christians in England ought to do this in regard to India, and we with respect to Kansas. But shall we never support our rulers in measures that we disapprove?' No; not in any that we deem morally wrong. The government, then, may be disgraced.' It ought to be, if in the wrong; and its only course of either safety or honor, is to retrace its steps, and put itself clearly in the right. Wrong-doers, in office as well as in private life, ought to repent, and bring forth fruits meet for repentance.

'But, if our rulers enslave Kansas, and outrage all our views of liberty and right, shall we not resist them?' Yes, to the utmost extent of your power; but only by such means as the gospel prescribes or allows. 'What means? May we fight? Our forefathers did; and shall not we urder much greater provocations ?' Our revolutionary sires were, many of them, very excellent men, and conscientiously followed the best light they had; but Christians should bear in mind, that theirs is the gospel of Christ, not a gospel according to Washington; a gospel not of war, but of peace. The New-Testament nowhere prescribes war or fighting as a Christian way of securing popular rights, or any other object; and if the friends of freedom and right in Kansas had from the first relied solely on peaceful, moral and political means, with no threat or thought of violence, the result desired by all good men, would have been more surely, if not more speedily won.

The question of India turns very much, if not entirely, on England's right to rule there. If she has such a right, then she may and must enforce it against banded rebels as well as all other wrong-doers; and such enforcement would be not so much an act of war, as of justice, by restraining and punishing wrong. If she has in truth no such right, only the claim of the pirate or brigand, then has her whole career there been one gigantic, wholesale villainy, that might well call to heaven for vengeance. 'But suppose her penitent for the wrongs done to India, and anxious to atone for ages of extortion, oppression and outrage, what should she do? Shall she let go her hold, however wrongfully acquired, on a hundred million of people?' We see not how she well could, if she would; and certainly she cannot at once, without pouring a deluge of evils all over India. We trust, then, that England will still retain her sway there, but have wisdom and grace to hold it for God, and for the temporal and eternal welfare of that vast empire. In no other way can she ever atone for a century of wrong and outrage perpetrated in her name, and fulfil the beneficent, farreaching designs of providence in allowing her to rule so many unevangelized millions.

CAPTAIN VICARS:

OR, THE INSENSIBILITY OF CHRISTIANS TO THE MORAL EVIL OF WAR. The mass of Christians have very little conception of the real inconsistency that exists between war and the religion they profess. They hate war, yet deem it proper, if not imperatively incumbent, in certain cases to draw the sword. There is afloat in their minds a vague idea that the custom is somehow wrong; but they have no settled, well-defined conviction of its utter incompatibility with the gospel. It is not, in their view, intrinsically wicked, a practice forbidden equally with theft, falsehood, or idolatry. They would avoid it, if they could without too much sacrifice or hazard; but, if requisite for life, liberty, or any great interest, they deem it quite right, even under the gospel. They would, if they could, escape an alternative so deplorable; but they regard it as a necessary evil, and suppose Christians may, in some cases must as a duty, engage in it, as a divinely sanctioned means of securing certain ends of paramount, if not indispensable importance. It is confessedly a terrible necessity; but, while denouncing it in the abstract, they justify and applaud it in the conerete. They are no friends of war, but loath its vices, abominate its crimes, and shudder at its atrocities and horrors; yet all these, as necessary, integral parts of the custom, they sanction as compatible with their religion as followers of the Prince of Peace. The moral wrong of the practice as a sin against God, as a contradiction of the peaceful gospel they profess, does not touch their conscience. They reason about it very much as they would if they were mere men of the world, just as pagan philosophers have aiways done, and as nearly all Christian writers on the law of nations still

do. Their Christianity has only a general, often hardly a perceptible, influence in modifying their modes of thought and feeling on the subject. They make, in truth, no real, effective application of the gospel to the case. They see in war no necessary, essential wrong, and hence feel no remorse in sustaining the war-system, in prosecuting a given war, or in devoting their children or themselves to the profession of arms as a business of life.

Here we find the grand moral bulwark of the war-system. It is in this easy sort of logic, these loose, worldly modes of reasoning, this general lack of any well-defined Christian conscience on the subject, that we account for the common insensibility of Christians to the great moral wrong of war, and the occasional occurrence of such anomalies as Christian Warriors. If the gospel had been preserved in all its primitive purity, as Christ preached it, and Paul wrote it, we should have been as really startled at the idea of a Christian soldier as that of a Christian duelist, a Christian pirate, or a Christian idolater. It would have been scouted as an absurdity, a contradiction in terms, a libel on our religion of peace, not to be

borne for a moment.

Shall we, then, say that no warrior can be a Christian? By no means; for in nearly every period of the Church we find what physicians call "sporadic cases," acknowledged exceptions to the general rule, of real, sometimes eminent piety in the military profession, Such was Col. Ga: diner even in an age memorable for its wars; and during the forty years of general peace consequent on the fall of Napoleon, we should of course expect to see such cases greatly multiplied. During this period the war-spirit was for the most part in repose, with little to rouse its fangs, or stir its venom ; and hence warriors, favored more or less with the means of grace in their peaceful barracks, became, in numbers far greater than ever before, true Christians, really new creatures in Christ Jesus, and gave in some cases very marked evidence of genuine piety. Such were Vicars in the Crimea, Havelock in India, and many others, we trust, in the British army and navy; cases proving, not the compatibility of war with the gospel, but merely the possibility of warriors being prepared for heaven in intervals of peace. They became Christians, not on the battle-field, nor amid the malign influences of the camp, the march or the siege, but in peaceful times, and under such means of grace as are seldom, if ever, found in actual war. All this goes to explain how Christians as a body have become insensible to the moral wrong of war. These Christian warriors are only intensified specimens of the way in which the mass of Christians reason on the subject. Their habits of mind are nearly all cast in a war-mold. They are as unconscious of wrong in pursuing their profession of blood, as a conscientious Mormon or Hindoo in practising polygamy. They talk of doing their duty, and verily think they are doing it; nor do we suppose they have any more scruples of conscience in killing men on a battle-field, than a butcher has in slaughtering an ox, a bevy of policemen in keeping the peace, or a sheriff in taking a criminal to prison. They have no suspicion of its being wrong. It is their trade, their profession; and the very deeda

that would stir a cauldron of undying remorse in the murderer's bosom, are viewed by the warrior as praiseworthy exploits!

Take the case of young Vicars. The son of a pious officer, born and bred in a camp, with the prejudices of his education deep-rooted in favor of the military profession, with the pulpit and the press, the school and the fire-side, government and society, all conspiring to make him regard it as perfectly proper and eminently honorable, we should surely expect an ingenuous, susceptible youth, under such influences, to become quite insensible to the incompatibility of his vocation as a warrior with his duties as a Christian. In truth he seems hardly to have thought of the inconsistency; and, when he did, it was chiefly to show how entirely his habits of mind had been cast in the war-mold, and how thoroughly his conscience as a Christian had been drugged into harmony with his profession of blood. As a warrior he deemed it his duty to do what, as a Christian, he would no sooner have done than he would have turned pagan or pirate. His conscience seems to have been well-nigh impervious to remorse for the violence crimes and atrocities of war, and intent as a soldier solely on doing what his superiors required of him, without enquiring whether it was right or wrong, but presuming it must of course be right.

This insensibility to the moral wrong of war, may be found, patent or latent, on almost every page of Vicars' biography. The writer tells us with much satisfaction, "he was an ardent lover of his profession, and from first to last was devoted to its duties." "I have once more returned," says he in a letter, "to the routine of a soldier's life; but do not suppose that, finding a soldier's cross too irksome, I would exchange it for one less weighty. Never! The Lord God has called me to eternal life in the army, and as a soldier I will die. Had I loved Jesus when I was seventeen, I certainly should not have been a soldier; but as it is, death alone shall ever make me leave my colors." His biographer says, "while the weak in faith seek a sphere more sheltered from temptation, he determined"—it was clearly not the result of any serious calculation, but merely of accident or habit" upon the wiser and nobler course of standing firm to the colors under which he was enrolled. When called to God's service, he found his mission-field in the camp and hospital; and he pursued the duties of his profession with distinguished ardor and constancy, maintaining as a Christian a high reputation for bravery among the bravest of his companions in arms, and winning on his first battle-field the blood-stained laurels so soon to be changed for the crown of glory that fadeth not away."

The same habits of reasoning pervade the whole biography. When speaking of the "wish of military distinction," &c., he says, "though ready and willing to do my duty as a soldier, the carnage of the battle-field has no attractions for me;"- what a caveat for a Christian, just as if it could have any!"-"I trust my motives are more in accordance with the mind of Christ." He supposed he verily had "the mind of Christ," when writing, we all hope soon to have an opportunity of thrashing these savages. "Thank God! I am very well and in high spirits, only hoping that

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once.

Lord Raglan will soon let us try our hands on the Russians. ... There is great talk now about our going ahead to storm. I trust they will not delay much longer. We are expecting every day to meet the enemy in open field, or storm the fortress. I wish they could go at it at Whatever the number of the Russians may be, with God's help, we are sure to beat them. They surprised us at Inkermann, but yet we repulsed them with great slaughter; the British bayonet settled the business; it was a regular hand-to-hand encounter. The night before last, one of my beautiful dreams was dispelled by a shaking of my tent; and in answer to who is there?' I received in reply, 'please, sir, a staff-officer has just ridden into the camp to bid us be ready at a moment's notice; the Russians are moving on our right flank.' 'All right,' I said, and commending myself to my heavenly Father, fell fast asleep again, knowing I was all ready for a moment's notice."

Such was the spirit of Vicars; a conscientious fighter to the last! "One stern duty more, O soldier and Christian," says his biographer, alluding to his death in a skirmish with the enemy. "With a coolness of judgment which seems to have called forth admiration from all quarters, he ordered his men to lie down until the Russians came within twenty paces. Then with his first war-shout, 'Now, 97th, on your pins, and charge!' himself foremost in the conflict, he led on his gallant men to victory, charging two thousand with a force of barely two hundred. A bayonet wound in his breast only fired his courage the more; and again his voice rose high,— 'Men of the 97th, follow me!' as he leaped the parapet he had so well defended, and charged the enemy down the ravine. One moment a struggling moon-beam fell upon his flashing sword, as he waived it through the air, with his last cheer for his men, 'This way, 97th!' The next, the strong arm which had been uplifted, hung powerless by his side, and he fell amidst his enemies. But friends followed fast, and in their arms bore him back amid the shouts of a victory so dearly bought." Several changes of commendation are rung on these few facts. "He was killed while gallantly cheering on his men. He rushed bravely into the middle of the enemy, knocked down two, and was in the act of striking a third, when one shot him through his right arm, close to the shoulder, dividing the principal artery, from which he soon bled to death." "He fell, as he wished to fall, at the head of his men, leading them on to victory

It was

....

"I

a glorious and a decisive victory-Inkermann on a small scale." can't tell you how much his men loved him. Many a vow of vengeance was uttered, and no doubt will be kept, when they get the chance."

Here, then, is one of the finest specimens of the so called Christian warrior; nor do we envy the man who can be insensible to the manifold excellences of his character. It is impossible for any reader of his life to rise from its perusal, and doubt for a moment that he was a true ChristianThe proofs of a sincere, ardent, devoted piety are scattered in rich profusion over nearly all its pages. Such fruits of repentance and faith, such renunciation of the world, such consecration to the service of God, such fond