404 LAWFULNESS OF WAR. [ESSAY III. what then must be their mutual adverseness? That war excites these passions needs not to be proved. When a war is in contemplation, or when it has been begun, what are the endeavours of its promoters? They animate us by every artifice of excitement to hatred and animosity. Pamphlets, placards, newspapers, caricatures,-every agent is in requisition to irritate us into malignity. Nay, dreadful as it is, the pulpit resounds with declamations to stimulate our too sluggish resentment, and to invite us to slaughter.-And thus the most unchristian-like of all our passions, the passion which it is most the object of our religion to repress, is excited and fostered. Christianity cannot be flourishing under circumstances like these. The more effectually we are animated to war, the more nearly we extinguish the dispositions of our religion. War and Christianity are like the opposite ends of a balance, of which one is depressed by the elevation of the other. These are the consequences which make war dreadful to a state. Slaughter and devastation are sufficiently terrible, but their collateral evils are their greatest. It is the immoral feeling that war diffuses,—it is the depravation of principle, which forms the mass of its mischief. To attempt to pursue the consequences of war through all their ramifications of evil were, however, both endless and vain. It is a moral gangrene which diffuses its humours through the whole political and social system. To expose its mischief is to exhibit all evil; for there is no evil which it does not occasion, and it has much that is peculiar to itself. That, together with its multiplied evils, war produces some good, I have no wish to deny. I know that it sometimes elicits valuable qualities which had otherwise been concealed, and that it often produces collateral and adventitious, and sometimes immediate advantages. If all this could be denied, it would be needless to deny it, for it is of no consequence to the question whether it be proved. That any wide-extended system should not produce some benefits can never happen. In such a system, it were an unheard-of purity of evil which was evil without any mixture of good. But, to compare the ascertained advantages of war with its ascertained mischiefs, and to maintain a question as to the preponderance of the balance, implies, not ignorance, but disingenuousness, not incapacity to decide, but a voluntary concealment of truth. And why do we insist upon these consequences of war?-Because the review prepares the reader for a more accurate judgment respecting its lawfulness. Because it reminds him what war is, and because, knowing and remembering what it is, he will be the better able to compare it with the standard of rectitude. LAWFULNESS OF WAR. I would recommend to him who would estimate the moral character of war, to endeavour to forget that he has ever presented to his mind the idea of a battle, and to endeavour to contemplate it with those emotions which it would excite in the mind of a being who had never before heard of human slaughter. The prevailing emotions of such a being would be astonishment and horror. If he were shocked by the horribleness of the scene, he would be amazed at its absurdity.-That a large number of CHAP. 19.] APPEALING TO ANTIQUITY-CLARENDON. 405 persons should assemble by agreement and deliberately kill one another, appears to the understanding a proceeding so preposterous, so monstrous, that I think a being such as I have supposed would inevitably conclude that they were mad. Nor is it likely, if it were attempted to explain to him some motives to such conduct, that he would be able to comprehend how any possible circumstances could make it reasonable. The ferocity and prodigious folly of the act would in his estimation outbalance the weight of every conceivable motive, and he would turn unsatisfied away, "Astonished at the madness of mankind." There is an advantage in making suppositions such as these because, when the mind has been familiarized to a practice, however monstrous or inhuman, it loses some of its sagacity of moral perception: the practice is perhaps veiled in glittering fictions, or the mind is become callous to its enormities. But if the subject is, by some circumstance, presented to the mind unconnected with any of its previous associations, we see it with a new judgment and new feelings; and wonder, perhaps, that we have not felt so or thought so before. And such occasions it is the part of a wise man to seek; since, if they never happen to us, it will often be difficult for us accurately to estimate the qualities of human actions, or to determine whether we approve them from a decision of our judg ment, or whether we yield to them only the acquiescence of habit. It may properly be a subject of wonder, that the arguments which are brought to justify a custom such as war receive so little investigation. It must be a studious ingenuity of mischief which could devise a practice more calamitous or horrible; and yet it is a practice of which it rarely occurs to us to inquire into the necessity, or to ask whether it cannot be, or ought not to be, avoided. In one truth, however, all will acquiesce, -that the arguments in favour of such a practice should be unanswerably strong. Let it not be said that the experience and the practice of other ages have superseded the necessity of inquiry in our own; that there can be no reason to question the lawfulness of that which has been sanctioned by forty centuries; or that he who presumes to question it is amusing himself with schemes of visionary philanthropy. "There is not, it may be," says Lord Clarendon, "a greater obstruction to the investigation of truth, or the improvement of knowledge, than the too frequent appeal, and the too supine resignation of our understanding, to antiquity." Whosoever proposes an alteration of existing institutions will meet, from some men, with a sort of instinctive opposition, which appears to be influenced by no process of reasoning, by no considerations of propriety or principles of rectitude, which defends the existing system because it exists, and which would have equally defended its opposite if that had been the oldest. "Nor is it out of modesty that we have this resignation, or that we do, in truth, think those who have gone before us to be wiser than ourselves: we are as proud and as peevish as any of our progenitors: but it is out of laziness; we will rather take their words, than take the pains to examine the reason they governed themselves by." To those who urge objections from the authority of ages, it is indeed a sufficient answer to say that they apply to every long-continued custom. Slave-dealers urged them against the friends of the abolition; papists urged them against Wickliffe and Luther; and the Athenians 406 BECCARIA-ERASMUS-WATSON-KNOX. [ESSAY III. probably thought it a good objection to an apostle, that "he seemed to be a setter forth of strange gods." It is some satisfaction to be able to give, on a question of this nature, the testimony of some great minds against the lawfulness of war, opposed, as these testimonies are, to the general prejudice and the general practice of the world. It has been observed by Beccaria, that "it is the fate of great truths to glow only like a flash of lightning amid the dark clouds in which error has enveloped the universe;" and if our testimonies are few or transient, it matters not, so that their light be the light of truth. There are, indeed, many who, in describing the horrible particulars of a siege or a battle, indulge in some declamation on the horrors of war, such as has been often repeated, and often applauded, and as often forgotten. But such declamations are of little value and of little effect; he who reads the next paragraph finds, probably, that he is invited to follow the path to glory and to victory; to share the hero's danger and partake the hero's praise; and he soon discovers that the moralizing parts of his author are the impulse of feelings rather than of principles, and thinks that though it may be very well to write, yet it is better to forget them, There are, however, testimonies, delivered in the calm of reflection, by acute and enlightened men, which may reasonably be allowed at least so much weight as to free the present inquiry from the charge of being wild or visionary. Christianity indeed needs no such auxiliaries; but if they induce an examination of her duties, a wise man will not wish them to be disregarded. "They who defend war," says Erasmus, "must defend the dispositions which lead to war; and these dispositions are absolutely forbidden by the gospel. Since the time that Jesus Christ said, Put up thy sword into its scabbard, Christians ought not to go to war.-Christ suffered Peter to fall into an error in this matter, on purpose that, when He had put up Peter's sword, it might remain no longer a doubt that war was prohibited, which, before that order, had been considered as allowable."—"Wickliffe seems to have thought it was wrong to take away the life of man on any account, and that war was utterly unlawful."*. I am persuaded," says the Bishop of Landaff, "that when the spirit of Christianity shall exert its proper influence, war will cease throughout the whole Christian world."† "War," says the same acute prelate, " has practices and principles peculiar to itself, "which but ill quadrate with the rule of moral rectitude, and are quite abhorrent from the benignity of Christianity." A living writer of eminence bears this remarkable testimony:-" There is but one community of Christians in the world, and that unhappily of all communities one of the smallest, enlightened enough to understand the 'prohibition of war by our Divine Master, in its plain, literal, and undeniable sense and conscientious enough to obey it, subduing the very instinct of nature to obedience." " Dr. Vicessimus Knox speaks in language equally specific :-" Morality and religion forbid war, in its motives, conduct, and consequences." Those who have attended to the mode in which the moral law is instituted in the expressions of the Will of God, will have no difficulty in supposing that it contains no specific prohibition of war. Accordingly * Priestley. + Life of Bishop Watson. +Ibid. Southey's History of Brazil, Essays The Paterines or Gazarı of Italy in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, "held that it was not lawful to bear arms or to kill mankind." CHAP. 19.] THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES. 407 if we be asked for such a prohibition, in the manner in which Thou shalt not kill is directed to murder, we willingly answer that no such prohibition exists; and it is not necessary to the argument. Even those who would require such a prohibition are themselves satisfied respecting the obligation of many negative duties on which there has been no specific decision in the New Testament. They believe that suicide is not lawful yet Christianity never forbade it. It can be shown, indeed, by fmplication and inference, that suicide could not have been allowed, and with this they are satisfied. Yet there is, probably, in the Christian Scriptures not a twentieth part of as much indirect evidence against the lawfulness of suicide, as there is against the lawfulness of war. To those who require such a command as Thou shalt not engage in war, it is therefore sufficient to reply, that they require that which, upon this and upon many other subjects, Christianity has not seen fit to give. We have had many occasions to illustrate, in the course of these disquisitions, the characteristic nature of the moral law as a law of benevolence. This benevolence, this good-will and kind affections towards one another, is placed at the basis of practical morality,-it is "the fulfilling of the law," it is the test of the validity of our pretensions to the Christian character. We have had occasion too to observe, that this law of benevolence is universally applicable to public affairs as well as to private, to the intercourse of nations as well as of men. Let us refer then to some of those requisitions of this law which appear peculiarly to respect the question of the moral character of war, "Have peace one with another."-"By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." "Walk with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love." "Be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another; love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous: not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing." "Be at peace among yourselves." "See that none render evil for evil unto any man."-" God hath called us to peace.” "Follow after love, patience, meekness."-"Be gentle, showing all meekness unto all men.' "Live in peace." 99 Lay aside all malice."- Put off anger, wrath, malice."—" Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice." 66 66 Avenge not yourselves." "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink.". Recompense to no man evil for evil.""Overcome evil with good." Now we ask of any man who looks over these passages, What evidence do they convey respecting the lawfulness of war? Could any approval or allowance of it have been subjoined to these instructions, without obvious and most gross inconsistency?-But if war is obviously and most grossly inconsistent with the general character of Christianity; if war could not have been permitted by its teachers without an egregious violation of their own precepts, we think that the evidence of its unlaw fulness, arising from this general character alone, is as clear, as absolute, and as exclusive as could have been contained in any form of prohibition whatever. But it is not from general principles alone that the law of Christianity respecting war may be deduced." Ye have heard that it hath been said, 408 THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES. [ESSAY III. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."-" Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; for if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye ?"* Of the precepts from the Mount the most obvious characteristic is greater moral excellence and superior purity. They are directed, not so immediately to the external regulation of the conduct, as to the restraint and purification of the affections. In another precept it is not enough that an unlawful passion be just so far restrained as to produce no open immorality,-the passion itself is forbidden. The tendency of the discourse is to attach guilt, not to action only, but also to thought. It has been said, "Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment; but I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment." Our Lawgiver attaches guilt to some of the violent feelings, such as resentment, hatred, revenge; and by doing this, we contend that he attaches guilt to war. War cannot be carried on without those passions which he prohibits. Our argument therefore is syllogistical:-War cannot be allowed if that which is necessary to war is prohibited. This indeed is precisely the argument of Erasmus :-" They who defend war must defend the dispositions which lead to war; and these dispositions are absolutely forbidden." Whatever might have been allowed under the Mosaic institution as to retaliation or resentment, Christianity says, "If ye love them only which love you, what reward have ye ?-Love your enemies." Now what sort of love does that man bear towards his enemy who runs him through with a bayonet? We repeat, that the distinguishing duties of Christianity must be sacrificed when war is carried on. The question is between the abandonment of these duties and the abandonment of war, for both cannot be retained.† It is however objected, that the prohibitions "Resist not evil," &c. are figurative; and that they do not mean that no injury is to be punished, and no outrage to be repelled. It has been asked, with complacent exultation, What would these advocates of peace say to him who struck them on the right cheek? Would they turn to him the other? What would these patient moralists say to him who robbed them of a coat? Would they give a cloak also? What would these philanthropists say to him who asked them to lend a hundred pounds? Would they not turn away? This is argumentum ad hominem: one example among the many of that low and dishonest mode of intellectual warfare which consists in exciting the feelings instead of convincing the understanding. It is, however, some satisfaction that the motive to the adoption of this mode of warfare is itself an indication of a bad cause; for what honest reasoner would produce only a laugh, if he were able to produce conviction? * Matt. v. 38, &c. † Matt. v. 21, 22. Yet the retention of both has been, unhappily enough, attempted. In a late publication, of which a part is devoted to the defence of war, the author gravely recommends soldiers, while shooting and stabbing their enemies, to maintain towards them a feeling of "goodwill!"-Tracts and Essays by the late William Hey, Esq., F.R.S. And Gisborne, in his Duties of Men, holds similar language. He advises the soldier, "never to forget the common ties of human nature by which he is inseparably united to his enemy!" |