WHAT IS WAR
What is war? I believe that half the people that talk about war have not the slightest idea what it is. In a short sentence it may be summed up to be the combination and concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes, and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable.
If you go into war now, you will have more banners to decorate your cathedrals and churches. Englishmen will fight now as well as they ever did; and there is ample power to back them, if the country can be but sufficiently excited and deluded. You may raise up great generals. You may have another Wellington, and another Nelson, too; for this country can grow men capable of every enterprise. Then there may be titles, and pensions, and marble monuments to eternize the men who have thus become great;—but what becomes of you, and your country, and your children?
You profess to be a Christian nation. You make it your boast even—though boasting is somewhat out of place in such questions—you make it your boast that you are a Christian people, and that you draw your rule of doctrine and practice, as from a well pure and undefiled, from the lively oracles of God, and from the direct revelation of the Omnipotent. You have even conceived the magnificent project of illuminating the whole earth, even to its remotest and darkest recesses, by the dissemination of the volume of the New Testament, in whose every page are written for ever the words of peace. Within the limits of this island alone, every Sabbath-day, twenty thousand, yes, far more than twenty thousand temples are thrown open, in which devout men and women assemble to worship Him who is the "Prince of Peace."
Is this a reality? or is your Christianity a romance, and your profession a dream? No; I am sure that your Christianity is not a romance, and I am equally sure that your profession is not a dream. It is because I believe this that I appeal to you with confidence, and that I have hope and faith in the future. I believe that we shall see, and at no very distant time, sound economic principles spreading much more widely amongst the people; a sense of justice growing up in a soil which hitherto has been deemed unfruitful; and—which will be better than all—the churches of the United Kingdom, the churches of Britain, awaking as it were from their slumbers, and girding up their loins to more glorious work, when they shall not only accept and believe in the prophecy, but labour earnestly for its fulfilment, that there shall come a time—a blessed time—a time which shall last for ever—when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
John Bright