In the benign reign of Messiah the earth will be filled with the
abundance of peace; there will be nothing to hurt or destroy; every one
will sit quietly under his own vine and fig tree, having nothing to
molest or make him afraid. But in times of war, mankind are usually full
of anxiety, their hearts failing them for fear, looking for those things
which are coming upon our wicked world.
One of the most delightful scenes on earth is a happy family where all
the members dwell together in love, being influenced by the blessed
precepts of the gospel of peace. But how soon does the sound of war
disturb and distress the happy circle! If it is only the distant thunder
of the cannon that salutes the ear, the mother starts from her repose,
and all the children gather round her with looks full of anxiety to know
the cause. Few women can so command their feelings as to hide the cause;
and let it be said to the honor of the female sex that they have
generally tender feelings, which cannot easily be disguised at the
distress of their fellow-beings. Perhaps a mother's heart is now wrung
with anguish in the prospect that either the partner of her life or the
sons of her care and sorrow, or both, are about to be called into the
bloody field of battle. Perhaps the decrepit parent views his darling
son leaving his peaceful abode to enter the ensanguined field, never
more to return. How soon are these joyful little circles turned into
mourning and sorrow!
Who can describe the distress of a happy village suddenly encompassed by
two contending armies--perhaps so early and suddenly that its
inhabitants are aroused from their peaceful slumbers by the confused
noise of the warriors more ferocious than the beasts that prowl in the
forest? Were it not for the tumult of the battle, shrieks of distress
from innocent women and children might be heard from almost every abode.
Children run to the arms of their distracted mothers, who are as unable
to find a refuge for themselves as for their offspring. If they fly to
the streets they are in the midst of death: hundreds of cannon are
vomiting destruction in every quarter; the hoofs of horses trampling
down everything in their way; bullets, stones, bricks, and splinters
flying in every direction; houses pierced with cannon shot and shells
which carry desolation in their course; without, multitudes of men
rushing with deadly weapons upon each other with all the rage of tigers,
plunging each other into eternity, until the streets are literally
drenched with the blood of men. To increase the distress, the village is
taken and retaken several times at the point of the bayonet. If the
inhabitants fly to their cellars to escape the fury of the storm, their
buildings may soon be wrapt in flames over their heads.
And for what, it may be asked, is all this inhuman sacrifice made?
Probably to gain the empty bubble called honor,--a standard of right and
wrong without form or dimensions. Let no one say that the writer's
imagination is heated while it is not in the power of his feeble pen to
half describe the horror and distress of the scenes which are by no
means uncommon in a state of war.
If such are some of the effects of war, then it must be a very inhuman
employment, and wrong for Christians to engage in it.
V. WAR IS INHUMAN, AS IT INVOLVES MEN IN FATIGUE, FAMINE, AND ALL THE
PAINS OF MUTILATED BODIES
To describe the fatigues and hardships of a soldier's life would require
the experience of a soldier, so that only some of their common
sufferings can be touched upon by a person who is a stranger to the
miseries of a camp.
A great majority of those who enter the ranks of an army are persons
unaccustomed to great privations and severe fatigues; hence the great
proportion of mortality among fresh recruits. Their habits and strength
are unable to endure the hard fare, rapid and constant marches generally
imposed upon them in active service.
The young soldier commonly exchanges a wholesome table, a comfortable
dwelling, an easy bed, for bad food, the field for his house, the cold
earth for his bed, and the heavens over him for his covering. He must
stand at his post day and night, summer and winter; face the scorching
sun, the chilling tempest, and be exposed to all the storms of the
season, without any comfortable repose; perhaps during most of the time
with a scanty allowance of the coarsest food, and often destitute of
any, except the miserable supply he may have chance to plunder,--not
enough to satisfy but only to keep alive the craving demands of nature;
often compelled to march and countermarch several days and nights in
succession, without a moment to prepare his provisions to nourish him
and glad to get a little raw to sustain his life. Frequently this
hardship is endured in the cold and inclement season, while his tattered
clothing is only the remains of his summer dress. Barefooted and half
naked, fatigued and chilled, he becomes a prey to disease, and is often
left to perish without a human being to administer to him the least
comfort. If he is carried to a hospital, he is there surrounded by the
pestilential breath of hundreds of his poor fellow-sufferers, where the
best comforts that can be afforded are but scanty and dismal.
But all this is comparatively trifling to the sufferings of the wounded
on the field of battle. There thousands of mangled bodies lie on the
cold ground hours, and sometimes days, without a friendly hand to bind
up a wound; not a voice is heard except the dying groans of their
fellow-sufferers around them. No one can describe the horrors of the
scene: here lies one with a fractured skull, there another with a
severed limb, and a third with a lacerated body; some fainting with the
loss of blood, others distracted, and others again crying for help.
If such are some of the faint outlines of the fatigues and sufferings of
soldiers, then their occupation must be an inhuman employment, for they
are instrumental in bringing the same calamities on others which they
suffer themselves; and of course it is unfriendly to the spirit of the
gospel, and wrong for Christians to engage in it.
VI. WAR IS INHUMAN, AS IT DESTROYS THE YOUTH AND CUTS OFF THE HOPE OF
GRAY HAIRS
Mankind are speedily hastening into eternity, and it might be supposed
sufficiently fast without the aid of all the ingenuity and strength of
man to hurry them forward; yet it is a melancholy truth that a great
proportion of the wealth, talents, and labors of men are actually
employed in inventing and using means for the premature destruction of
their fellow-beings.
One generation passes away, and another follows in quick succession. The
young are always the stay and hope of the aged; parents labor and toil
for their children to supply their wants and to educate them to be
happy, respectable, and useful, and then depend upon them to be their
stay and comfort in their declining years. Alas, how many expectations
of fond parents are blasted! Their sons are taken away from them and
hurried into the field of slaughter.
In times of war the youth--the flower, strength, and beauty of the
country--are called from their sober, honest, and useful employments, to
the field of battle; and if they do not lose their lives or limbs, they
generally lose their habits of morality and industry. Alas! few ever
return again to the bosom of their friends. Though from their mistaken
and fascinating views of a soldier's life and honor they may be
delighted in enlisting, and merry in their departure from their peaceful
homes, yet their joy is soon turned into pain and sorrow. Unthinking
youth, like the horse, rushes thoughtlessly into the battle. Repentance
is then too late; to shrink back is death, and to go forward is only a
faint hope of life. Here on the dreadful field are thousands and
hundreds of thousands driven together to slaughter each other by a few
ambitious men, perhaps none of whom are present. A large proportion are
probably the youth of their country, the delight and comfort of their
parents. All these opposing numbers are most likely persons who never
knew or heard of each other, having no personal ill-will, most of whom
would in any other circumstances not only not injure each other but be
ready to aid in any kind office; yet by the act of war they are ranged
against each other in all the hellish rage of revenge and slaughter.
No pen, much less that of the writer's, can describe the inhumanity and
horrors of a battle. All is confusion and dismay, dust and smoke
arising, horses running, trumpets blasting, cannon roaring, bullets
whistling, and the shrieks of the wounded and dying vibrating from every
quarter. Column after column of men charge upon each other in furious
onset, with the awful crash of bayonets and sabers, with eyes flashing
and visages frightfully distorted with rage, rushing upon each other
with the violence of brutish monsters; and when these are literally cut
to pieces others march in quick succession, only to share the same cruel
and bloody tragedy. Hundreds are parrying the blows; hundreds more are
thrusting their bayonets into the bowels of their fellow-mortals, and
many, while extricating them, have their own heads cleft asunder by
swords and sabers; and all are hurried together before the tribunal of
their Judge, with hearts full of rage and hands dyed in the blood of
their brethren.
O horrid and debasing scene! my heart melts at the contemplation, and I
forbear to dwell upon the inhuman employment.
VII. WAR IS INHUMAN, AS IT MULTIPLIES WIDOWS AND ORPHANS, AND CLOTHES
THE LAND IN MOURNING
The widow and fatherless are special objects of divine compassion, and
Christianity binds men under the strongest obligation to be kind and
merciful towards them, as their situation is peculiarly tender and
afflicting.
"A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widow, is God in his
holy habitation." "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father
is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction."
To be active in any measure which has a natural tendency to wantonly
multiply widows and orphans in a land is the height of inhumanity as
well as daring impiety.
I will venture to say that no one circumstance in our world has so
greatly multiplied widows and fatherless children as that of war. What
has humanity ever gained by war to counterbalance simply the afflictions
of the widow and fatherless? I verily believe nothing comparatively. I
am well aware that a very popular plea for war is to defend, as it is
styled, "our firesides, our wives and children"; but this generally is
only a specious address to the feelings, to rouse up a martial spirit
which makes thousands of women and children wretched where one is made
happy. I am sensible that those will sneer at my opinion who regard more
the honor that comes from men than they do the consolation of the widow
and the fatherless.
In times of war thousands of virtuous women are deprived of their
husbands and ten thousands of helpless children of their fathers. The
little tender children may now gather round their disconsolate mothers,
anxiously inquiring about their fathers, remembering their kind visages,
recollecting how they used fondly to dandle them on their knees and
affectionately instruct them; but now they are torn from their embraces
by the cruelty of war, and they have no fathers left them but their
Father in heaven.
It is probably no exaggeration to suppose that in Europe there are now
two hundred thousand widows and a million fatherless children occasioned
by war. What a mass of affliction! humanity bleeds at the thought! These
children must now roam about without a father to provide for, protect,
or instruct them. They now become an easy prey to all kinds of vice;
many probably will be trained up for ignominious death, and most of them
fit only for a soldier's life, to slaughter and to be slaughtered,
unless some humane hand kindly takes them under its protection.
And here I cannot help admiring the spirit of Christianity. It is owing
to the blessed spirit and temper of the gospel of peace that many of the
evils of war are so much ameliorated at the present day as well as the
inhuman slavery of men.
The numerous asylums that now exist for the relief of the needy, the
widow, and the fatherless are some of the precious fruits of
Christianity; and if this spirit were universal the bow would soon be
broken to pieces, the spear cut asunder, and the chariots of war burnt
with fire, and wars would cease to the ends of the earth.
And is it not the duty of all who name the name of Christ to do all in
their power to counteract this destroying evil?
War not only multiplies widows and orphans but clothes the land in
mourning. In times of war multitudes of people are clothed with ensigns
of mourning. Here are gray-headed parents shrouded in blackness, weeping
for the loss of darling sons; there are widows covered with veils
mourning the loss of husbands, and refusing to be comforted; children
crying because their fathers are no more. Cities and villages are
covered in darkness and desolation; weeping and mourning arise from
almost every abode.
And it may be asked, What inhuman hand is the cause of all this sorrow?
Perhaps some rash man, in the impetuosity of his spirit, has taken some
unjust, high ground, and is too proud to retrace a step, and had rather
see millions wretched than to nobly confess that he had been in the
wrong.
Surely Christians cannot be active in such measures without incurring
the displeasure of God, who styles himself the father of the fatherless
and the judge and avenger of the widow.
Thus I have shown that war is inhuman and therefore wholly inconsistent
with Christianity, by proving that it tends to destroy humane
dispositions; that it hardens the hearts and blunts the tender feelings
of men; that it involves the abuse of God's animal creation; that it
oppresses the poor; that it spreads terror and distress among mankind;
that it subjects soldiers to cruel privations and sufferings; that it
destroys the youth and cuts off the hope of the aged; and that it
multiplies widows and orphans and occasions mourning and sorrow.
The fact that war is inhuman is indeed one of those obvious truths which
it is difficult to render more plain by argument; those who know in what
war consists cannot help knowing that it is inhuman.
What Mr. Windham said with reference to the inhumanity of slavery may be
said of the inhumanity of war. In one of his speeches in the House of
Commons against the slave trade he stated his difficulty in arguing
against such a trade to be of that kind which is felt in arguing in
favor of a self-evident proposition. "If it were denied that two and two
made four, it would not be a very easy task," he said, "to find
arguments to support the affirmative side of the question. Precisely
similar was his embarrassment in having to prove that the slave trade
was unjust and inhuman."
Whoever admits that the slave trade is inhuman must admit that war is
inhuman in a greater variety of ways and on a much larger scale.
The inhumanity of the slave trade was the great and, finally, triumphant
argument by which it was proved to be inconsistent with Christianity.
The advocates of slavery, like the advocates of war, resorted to the Old
Testament for support; but it appeared that slavery, as it appears that
war, was permitted and approved of for reasons and on principles
peculiar to the ancient economy. This is apparent as well from the
difference between the general design of the old and new dispensations
as from the whole genius and spirit of the gospel. Hence those who
opposed the slave trade argued from the general nature and spirit of
Christianity as the strongest ground which could be taken. If slavery
was inconsistent with this, it ought not to be tolerated; but slavery is
inhuman and is therefore inconsistent with Christianity. Exactly the
same is true of war, nor can anything short of an express revelation
from God, commanding war or slavery, render either of them justifiable.
It deserves to be distinctly considered that the gospel contains little
or nothing directly by way of precept against slavery; but slavery is
inconsistent with its general requirements and inculcations and is
therefore wrong. But war, besides being inconsistent with the genius and
spirit of the gospel, is prohibited by those precepts which forbid
retaliation and revenge and those which require forgiveness and good
will.
It is plain, then, that he who does not advocate and defend the slave
trade, to be consistent, must grant that war is incompatible with
Christianity, and that it is a violation of the gospel to countenance
it.