In these days when our wise generation, weighed down with wealth and
its handmaid vices on the one hand, and exhilarated by some tiny
steps it has managed to make on the threshold of physical knowledge
of various kinds on the other, would seem to be bent on ignoring its
Creator and God altogether—or at least of utterly denying that he
has revealed, or is revealing himself, unless it be through the laws
of nature—one of the commonest demurrers to Christianity has been,
that it is no faith for fighters, for the men who have had to do the
roughest and hardest work for the world. I fear that some sections of
Christians have been too ready to allow this demurrer, and fall back
on the Quaker doctrines; admitting thereby that such “Gospel of the
kingdom of heaven” as they can for their part heartily believe in,
and live up to, is after all only a poor cash-gospel, and cannot bear
the dust and dirt, the glare and horror of battle-fields. Those of us
who hold that man was sent into this earth for the express purpose of
fighting—of uncompromising and unending fighting with body, intellect,
spirit, against whomsoever and whatsoever causeth or maketh a lie, and
therefore, alas! too often against his brother-man—would, of course,
have to give up Christianity if this were true; nay, if they did not
believe that precisely the contrary of this is true, that Christ can
call them as plainly in the drum beating to battle, as in the bell
calling to prayer, can and will be as surely with them in the shock of
angry hosts as in the gathering before the altar. But without entering
further into the great controversy here, I would ask readers fairly
and calmly to consider whether all the greatest fighting that has been
done in the world has not been done by men who believed, and showed by
their lives that they believed, they had a direct call from God to do
it, and that He was present with them in their work. And further (as I
cheerfully own that this test would tell as much in favor of Mahommet
as of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, John Brown) whether, on the whole,
Christian nations have not proved stronger in battle than any others?
I would not press the point unfairly, or overlook such facts as the
rooting out of the British by the West Saxons when the latter were
Pagans; all I maintain is, that faith in the constant presence of God
in and around them has been the support of those who have shown the
strongest hearts, the least love of ease and life, the least fear of
death and pain.