[87] Gibb, loc. cit. p. 90.
[88] Augsburg Confession, i. 16. Second Helvetic Confession, xxx. 4.
[89] Farrer, Military Manners and Customs, p. 208.
Nor did the old opinion that war is a providential institution and a judgment of God die with the Middle Ages. Lord Bacon looks upon wars as “the highest trials of right; when princes and states that acknowledge no superior upon earth shall put themselves upon the justice of God, for the deciding of their controversies by such success as it shall please Him to give on either side.”[90] Réal de Curban says that a war is seldom successful unless it be just, hence the victor may presume that God is on his side.[91] According to Jeremy Taylor, “kings are in the place of God, who strikes whole nations, and towns, and villages; and war is the rod of God in the hands of princes.”[92] And it is not only looked upon as an instrument of divine justice, but it is also said, generally, “to work out the noble purposes of God.”[93] Its tendency, as a theological writer assures us, is “to rectify and exalt the popular conception of God,” there being nothing among men “like the smell of gunpowder for making a nation perceive the fragrance of divinity in truth.”[94] By war the different countries “have been opened up to the advance of true religion.”[95] “No people ever did, or ever could, feel the power of Christian principle growing up like an inspiration through the national manhood, until the worth of it had been thundered on the battle-field.”[96] War is, “when God sends it, a means of grace and of national renovation”; it is “a solemn duty in which usually only the best Christians and most trustworthy men should be commissioned to hold the sword.”[97] According to M. Proudhon, it is the most sublime phenomenon of our moral life,[98] a divine revelation more authoritative than the Gospel itself.[99] The warlike people is the religious people;[100] war is the sign of human grandeur, peace a thing for beavers and sheep. “Philanthrope, vous parlez d’abolir la guerre; prenez garde de dégrader le genre humain.”[101]
[90] Bacon, Letters and Life, i. (Works, viii.), 146.
[91] Réal de Curban, La science du gouvernement, v. 394 sq.
[92] Taylor, Whole Works, xii. 164.
[93] ‘The Sword and Christianity,’ in Boston Review devoted to Theology and Literature, iii. 261.
[94] Ibid. iii. 259, 257.
[95] Holland, Time of War, p. 14.