But what is it to return evil for evil?
When one man is injured by another and returns injury, he returns evil for evil and violates those precepts of the gospel which have been quoted. When one association of men is injured by another association and the injured returns an injury, evil is returned for evil and those precepts are violated. When one nation infringes on the rights of another and they in return infringe on the aggressor’s rights, they return evil for evil and violate those precepts. When one nation declares war against another and is repelled by war, evil is returned for evil and those precepts are violated. But these things are constantly practiced, without a blush or a question as to their propriety; and God is supplicated to aid in the business.
To what a state has sin reduced our world? Is not the church covered with darkness and the people with gross darkness? A man may now engage in war with his fellow-man and openly return evil for evil, and still remain in respectable standing in most of the churches, being at the same time highly applauded and caressed by the world lying in wickedness!
But if we are here to be directed and at last to be judged by the gospel, no man can return evil for evil, in war or otherwise, without aggravated guilt.
X. WAR IS CRIMINAL, AS IT IS ACTUALLY DOING EVIL THAT GOOD MAY COME; AND THIS IS THE BEST APOLOGY THAT CAN BE MADE FOR IT
That it is an evil to spread distress, desolation, and misery through a land and to stain it with the blood of men probably none will deny. War, with its attending horrors, is considered by all, even those who advocate and prosecute it, to be the greatest evil that ever befalls this wicked, bleeding, suffering world.
Though men go to war primarily to gratify their corrupt passions,—for they can never propose the attainment of any good by war which shall be commensurate with the natural and moral evils that will be occasioned by the acquisition,—yet the prospect of attaining some supposed good must be held out as a lure to the multitude and a means of self-justification.
Usually the object of war is pompously represented to be to preserve liberty, to produce honorable and lasting peace, and promote the happiness of mankind; to accomplish which, liberty, property, and honor—that honor which comes from men—must be defended, though war is the very thing that generally destroys liberty, property, and happiness, and prevents lasting peace. Such is the good proposed to be attained by the certain and overwhelming evil of war.
But no maxim is more corrupt, more false in its nature, or more ruinous in its results than that which tolerates doing evil that good may come. Nor can any defend this maxim without taking the part of infidels and atheists, to whom it appropriately belongs, and with whose principles and practice alone it is consistent.
The apostle Paul reprobates this maxim in the severest terms, and he considered it the greatest scandal of Christian character to be accused of approving it: “As we be slanderously reported,” says he, “and as some affirm that we say, Let us do evil that good may come; whose damnation is just.”