The following was evidently intended to appear in the article on _War_:
'Most of what has been written on this subject (the cruelty of war), in
connection with the apparently fierce ethics of the Old Testament, is
(with submission to sentimentalists) false and profoundly unphilosophic.
It is of the same feeble character as the flashy modern moralizations
upon War. The true justifications of war lie far below the depths of any
soundings taken upon the charts of effeminate earth-born ethics. And
ethics of God, the Scriptural ethics, search into depths that are older
and less measurable, contemplate interests that are more mysterious and
entangled with perils more awful than merely human philosophy has
resources for appreciating. It is not at all impossible that a crisis
has sometimes arisen for the human race, in which its capital interest
may be said to have ridden at single anchor. Upon the issue of a single
struggle between the powers of light and darkness--upon a motion, a
bias, an impulse given this way or that--all may have been staked. Out
of Judaism came Christianity, and the mere possibility of Christianity.
From elder stages of the Hebrew race, hidden in thick darkness to us,
descended the only pure glimpse allowed to man of God's nature.
Traditionally, but through many generations, and fighting at every
stage with storms or with perils more than ever were revealed to _us_,
this idea of God, this holy seed of truth, like some secret jewel
passing onwards through armies of robbers, made its way downward to an
age in which it became the matrix of Christianity. The solitary acorn
had reached in safety the particular soil in which it was first capable
of expanding into a forest. The narrow, but at the same time austere,
truth of Judaism, furnished the basis which by magic, as it were, burst
suddenly and expanded into a vast superstructure, no longer fitted for
the apprehension of one single unamiable race, but offering shelter and
repose to the whole family of man. These things are most remarkable
about this memorable trans-migration of one faith into another, of an
imperfect into a perfect religion, viz., that the early stage had but a
slight resemblance to the latter, nor could have prefigured it to a
human sagacity more than a larva could prefigure a chrysalis; and,
secondly, that whereas the product, viz., Christianity, never has been
nor will be in any danger of ruin, the germ, viz., the Judaic idea of
God, the great radiation through which the Deity kept open His
communication with man, apparently must more than once have approached
an awful struggle for life. This solitary taper of truth, struggling
across a howling wilderness of darkness, had it been ever totally
extinguished, could probably never have been reillumined. It may seem an
easy thing for a mere human philosophy to recover, and steadily to
maintain a pure Hebrew conception of God; but so far is this from being
true, that we believe it possible to expose in the closest Pagan
approximation to this Hebrew type some adulterous elements such as would
have ensured its relapse into idolatrous impurity.'