3. Precisely as it progresses among any people it will produce a distaste for war.[5]
4. Consequently its progress among the nations is a progressive abolition of war. Every extension of this blessed religion is so much gained against war; quenching still another and another spark of infernal fire; repressing in some more minds those evil passions which are the prompters and the essential power of war.
5. Christianity is progressing among the nations.
6. Consequently it is reasonable to cherish the hope of a scene of universal peace (P. D. 2675).
Concluding Reflections.—1. The universal cessation of war means much more than merely the cessation of much mischief. Think what will be effected when the wealth, time, labour, art, ingenuity, of truly Christian nations are directed to the noblest purposes of peace! 2. Extirpate the war-spirit from your own breast. The selfish, proud, arrogant, envious, revengeful, are essentially of the war tribe, however, little they have to do with actual war, however much they may condemn and profess to deplore it. Such individuals are not fit for that future terrestrial “kingdom of heaven.”—John Foster: Lectures, Second Series, pp. 142–173.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] What a vision of destruction! Think of all that tormented and desolated the earth during the long period of the fall of the Roman Empire,—of that inundation of revenge and death, the progress and utmost extension of the Mahomedan power; of the mighty account of slaughter in the Spanish conquest of America; of the almost incessant wars among the states of civilised Europe down nearly to the present hour. Think even of the bloody wars within our own island, especially on the border between its northern and southern divisions; the hundreds of remaining fortresses, monumental of war. And to complete the account—as if the whole solid earth were not wide enough—the sea has been coloured with blood, and received into its dark gulf myriads of the slain, as if it could not destroy enough by its tempests and wrecks!—Foster.
[2] Almost four or five years since, our Government had a war with the Pindarees—a terrible assemblage of outlaws, robbers, and murderers, to the number of fifty thousand, occupying a strong and almost inaccessible tract on the northern frontier. Thence with impetuous rapidity, they rushed down, all horsemen, on the country, inhabited by a population of cultivators; seized whatever could easily be carried off, and with furious eagerness demolished, burnt, destroyed the rest. But far more than this, they were universally possessed with the spirit of murder; they killed the people without regard to sex or age. Not only so, but when sufficiently at leisure for such amusement, they inflicted excruciating tortures previous to death.
Now, when the Governor-General had intelligence of this—what was he to do? what, acting as a Christian? Nothing? What, as a great magistrate, did he “bear the sword” for? What was he Governor at all for? To lie in splendid state, and number and tax the people? Or was he to direct that prayer should be made in the churches for something very like a miracle? And on failure of that, prayers that the wretched people he governed might be all meekly resigned to their fate? and that even should the fell and fiendish legion, being unresisted, choose to pursue their way all down to Calcutta, all the people in their tract could not escape, and at last himself and the people of the city, might be enabled calmly to submit to a sovereign dispensation of Providence?
He did not do this. He chose rather to set out on the rule of his appointment, to be “a terror to evil-doers,” “a minister of God, a revenger, to execute wrath upon them that do evil” (Rom. xiii. 4). But if war is in all possible cases wrong, he perpetuated an enormous crime against Christianity in marching his armies with a celerity unparalleled in that climate, and encountering, intercepting, and exterminating the murderers, so that the surviving people could feel themselves in peace.