THE ADVOCATE OF PEACE. MARCH AND APRIL, 1860. WAR A LIBEL UPON CHRISTIANITY. The existence of such a custom as war among nations calling themselves Christians, is a standing libel on the gospel they prcfess. What an utter and glaring contradiction of its spirit, its principles and its aims! Yet how long has it continued! The war-degeneracy of the Church, begun early in the third century, consummated in the fourth by her union with the state under Constantine, and thenceforward extending over the whole of her subsequent history, has grossly belied the pacific character of our religion, and shorn it of no small part of its primitive beauty, loveliness and glory. When the chosen choir of heaven chanted over the manger of Bethlehem their song of peace and good-will; when our Saviour, not only through life, but even in death itself, taught and exemplified the peaceful principles of his gospel; when his Apostles in like manner carried the same principles from city to city, from kingdom to kingdom; when his disciples, without exception, followed his example of never returning curse for curse, blow for blow, but meekly bowed their heads to the axe or the gibbet of their persecutors; so long as the whole Church thus stood forth before the world in the stainless panoply of peace, just so long did Christianity commend itself to the consciences of men, and make rapid progress towards the spiritual conquest of the world. The war-degeneracy of the Church was her grand heresy, and did more than anything else to paganize her character, and pave the way for that flood of evils which overspread Christendom during the middle ages. Never was there a grosser or more fatal perversion; and ever since she has for the most part belied the peaceful principles of her gospel, and provoked the wrath or the scorn of mankind. Truth extorts this humiliating confession. The history of the nominal Church, the only one known at the time, was written for centuries in blood. How often did the professed followers of the Prince of Peace meet to slaughter one another! How many millions perished by their hands in the Crusades, in wars with the Mohammedans, in the religious wars among themselves consequent on the Reformation! How often did the highest dignitaries of the Church lead forth armies to battle! How common, for more than a thousand years, for Christains to pray the God of Peace to aid them in butchering one another, and then to return solemn thanks for the slaughter of thousands and scores of thousands of their own brethren! When Magdeburg was a smoking heap of ruins, and thirty thousand of her citizens, men, women, and children, lay rotting in her streets, or roasted in the ashes of their own dwellings, the victorious general ordered a Te Deum to be publicly chanted in gratitude to their common God! So has it been for some fifteen centuries; nor can the most nefarious war even now be waged, but the Church, in the Old World, if not in the New, must be made, by her prayers and praises, a party in this work of hell. The Archbishop of England still composes, for use in all her sanctuaries, a solemn form of thanksgiving to God for such savage butcheries as were perpetrated, in the middle of the nineteenth century, upon the Chinese and the Afghans! Tell us not, such cases are exceptions for which the Church has little or no, responsibility. Exceptions! Alas! peace is the exception; war, the rule. The evil, too, is more or less in her own bosom. Does she not allow her members, without rebuke, to live by this trade of blood? Has she for ages excluded the warrior from her communion? Has she once, for the last fifteen hundred years, borne her united testimony before the world. against this custom as inconsistent with the gospel? Nay, has she not fawned on the warrior, and consecrated his banners, and followed him with her prayers for success, and crowned him on his return with laurels? Are not her most venerable temples to this day filled with the trophies of war? Did not Col. Gardiner one of her favorite sons, die on the field of battle, and Doddridge himself, one of her brightest luminaries, write his eulogy without a single rebuke upon his profession of blood? Nor is it many: years since no man in the British Empire could take out a com. mission, as an officer in the army or navy, for the wholesale butchery of his fellow-men, without a certificate of his being a member of the Church of Christ; and not a note of alarm, scarce a whisper of rebuke or displeasure, was heard from the presses or pulpits of Christendom. Alas! do not Christians even now join men of the world in idolizing the demi-gods of war, train some of their own children to this work of death, and teach the rest to admire war and the warrior? No wonder, then, at the consequent reproaches upon Christianity. Mark the bitter, withering sarcasms of infidelity: "Ye bungling soul-physicians!" exclaims Voltaire, "to bellow for an hour or more against a few flea-bites, and not say a word about that horrible distemper which tears us to pieces! Burn your books, ye moralizing philosophers! Of what avail is humanity, benevolence, meekness, temperance, piety, when half a pound of lead shatters my body; when I expire, at the age of twenty, under pains unspeakable; when my eyes, at their last opening, see my native town all in a blaze, and the last sounds I hear are the shrieks and groans of women and children expiring amidst the ruins?" Nor is Judaism less severe in her taunts. When a celebrated advocate of foreign missions was announced to preach at Falmouth, England, a Jew posted on the door of the Church this notice: "Our Messiah, when he comes, will establish a system of mercy, peace and kindness upon earth; while among you Christians, only disputes, animosities and cruelties mark your progress through the world. Possibly your religion sanctions these things; ours does not. With us, the goodness and beneficence alone of the Mosaic laws constitute their grand authority, and proclaim aloud their emanation from a God of love. We want no better, we expect no better, till Messiah shall indeed come. Then will 'every man sit under his own vine and fig-tree; nation shall no longer lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and a little child shall lead them.' Has this golden era of peace and love ever yet been witnessed? Speak, Christians, speak candidly; has it been once seen through the last eighteen hundred years?" PRACTICAL POINTS IN THE PEACE CAUSE. Consider its feasibility. Efforts, made by Christians as they might and should be, would be sure to banish war ere long from Christendom, and eventually from the face of the whole earth. There is no impossibility in the case. War is just as curable as any other evil, and requires for its extinction only the means of God's appointment. There is no more need of this custom than there is of duelling or the slave-trade. It exists solely because men in their folly still choose it; its continuance depends entirely on their choice; and whenever you can change that choice, and make the mass of mankind resolve that war shall cease, it must of necessity come to an end forever. Such a change is clearly possible; already is it actually taking place under the influence of this cause; and nations will one day find it just as easy for them to settle their difficulties without war, as the members of a church now do theirs without duels. A variety of substitutes might be adopted far more effectual than the sword for all purposes of protection and redress. 2. But you tell us perhaps, 'make men Christians, and then wars will cease.' What sort of Christians? Surely not such as have for the last fifteen hundred years been butchering one another. Convert men to the whole gospel, to its pacific as well as its other truths, to a kind of Christianity that shall forbid them to fight in any case; then, but only then, will the spread of our religion insure the abolition of this custom as a matter of course. Chris tianity has for ages been steadily gaining ground in Christendom, and yet in the last century have her standing warriors increased some six hundred per cent., from half a million to more than three millions. Can such a Christianity put an end to war? 3. It is not enough, then, merely to support and to propagate any form of Christianity which neglects to apply the only part of the gospel that can ever abolish this custom. For such a result, we rely of course upon the gospel, but only on the gospel rightly applied. Such an application is indispensable. What is the gos. pel? Merely a collection of principles which can produce no result without an application, any more than medicine can cure a sick man who does not take it. How does the gospel convert the sinner? Only by its truths addressed to his soul. How will it ever abolish Paganism? Solely by being sent and applied to Paganism. How can it reclaim the blasphemer or the Sabbath |