III. THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF THE CHURCH
The Church as a whole during the long and varied course of her history has been true to the general Biblical principle that evil should, where possible, be overcome by gentle means which give the evildoer room for repentance, but that it should be stamped out by the force of inexorable justice where gentle means have failed. No one can contend, I fear, that the Church has always been wise or Christly in her application of this sound Scriptural doctrine. She has, it must be admitted, sometimes encouraged premature resort to force, and has given her blessing to countless wanton wars. She has at other times treated as evils to be suppressed by violent means offences which have been mere deviations from her own arbitrary standards, and not violations of the eternal laws of truth and right. Nevertheless, however imperfect her practice, all her great teachers from Athanasius to Aquinas, and from Aquinas to the present day, have rightly recognized the legitimacy of the employment of force for moral purposes in the last resort, have admitted the compatibility of Christianity with military service, and have confessed that, evil as war is, there are evils still greater, and that the duty of every Christian man may be to fight lest the cause of righteousness and justice should suffer defeat. If the Church had taught otherwise—if she had been captured by the Gnostic heresy of non-resistance—Mediæval Christendom and Western Civilization would inevitably have been destroyed by the assaults of Huns and Saracens, Magyars and Tartars, Vikings and Turks; while within the borders of Christendom itself law and order would have perished at the hands of wicked and violent men. Similarly in modern times common Christian opinion has agreed that there are causes worth fighting for and worth dying for. The English Puritans, for instance, including the early Quakers, considered that political freedom and religious liberty were ideals that justified and indeed demanded armed resistance to tyranny. During the last three centuries there have been few who, on religious grounds, have condemned the revolt of Christian peoples against Turkish misrule. In the American Civil War many professed pacificists felt that for the abolition of slavery they must need take arms. In our own recent history men like Havelock, Gordon, and Roberts have regarded as sacred trusts the tasks of saving women and children from massacre, of suppressing fanatical and cruel tyranny, of preventing intolerable wrong. The Church with confident consistency has rightly sanctioned and sanctified their heroic enterprises. While condemning wars of ambition, conquest, or revenge, she has taught that those who take arms to defend from murderous violence the weak and helpless, to maintain the priceless heritage of freedom, and to vindicate the majesty of law, may with humble assurance and firm faith pray for and expect the benediction of the Lord of Hosts. The Christian doctrine of war is admirably summarized by Burke in the words:—"The blood of man is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind; the rest is vanity; the rest is crime."[46]
FOOTNOTE:
[46] Burke. Regicide Peace, vi, 145.
IV. FORCE AS A MORAL INSTRUMENT
Force, in short, has a proper and necessary place in the ethical sphere. It is an indispensable instrument of the will to righteousness. The good man and the good government resolve, in the spirit of the Lord, that certain abominations shall not take place. They express their will in a law. That law remains futile, it is a mockery and a fraud, unless they are prepared to enforce it by all the means in their power, even if need be by the shedding of blood. Much, no doubt, can and will be done to secure obedience by education, by persuasion, and by appeal. Every effort will be made to prevent the evildoer, and to convert him to the good way. But the fact has to be faced that there are in the world insensate scoundrels and hardened malefactors wholly beyond the reach of education, persuasion, and appeal; men who have deliberately chosen evil to be their good, and have made a binding compact with the powers of darkness. With them force is the only possible argument. Unless it is applied, there is nothing to prevent them from dominating the earth, defying all law, and establishing the kingdom of the devil. At the back of all effective law there is, in fact, physical force. Behind the police stands the army. The magistrate would be wholly ineffective without the soldier. The criminal population would laugh civilian restraints to scorn, if it did not know that out of sight, but never far away, are the bayonets and the guns of the ultimate defenders of the peace. The salvation of the criminal is not everything: the salvation of Society is more. Society would perish in a day if the basis of force were removed from beneath the fabric of law. One of the falsest of false generalizations is that which says that "force is no remedy." It is in many cases the only remedy. In other cases it is better than a remedy; it is a sovereign preventive of wrong. Force is the very essence of government. By its means countless evils have been suppressed in the past, such as highway-robbery, private war, duelling, piracy, slave-trading. Only through fear of it is their recrudescence obviated. If a man sees wrongs being perpetrated which he has strength to prevent—if, for instance, he sees a child being tortured, a woman being outraged, a helpless fellow-man being set upon and murdered—if he sees these things and does not intervene with all his might, then he is not a pacificist but a traitor to humanity, not a man but a contemptible or infatuated worm. Similarly if a State stands on one side inactive while small nations are wantonly stamped out of existence, while treaties are violated, while International Law is defied, while unprecedented barbarities are perpetrated, it sinks to the level of an accomplice in crime, and proves itself worthy of the perdition which awaits those who make "the great refusal."
The days of universal and enduring peace, for whose dawning we all ardently look, will not be ushered in by any diminution of the forces wielded by the powers of goodness in the world, but rather by their immense increase. Just as in our own country the King's Peace became the secure possession of every Englishman only when the King's might became irresistible, so in the larger sphere of the Society of Nations the world's peace will be firmly established only when it is maintained by the united forces of all the federated Peoples of goodwill.