War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ. David Low Dodge
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then depend upon them to be their stay and comfort in their declining years. Alas, how many expectations of fond parents are blasted! Their sons are taken away from them and hurried into the field of slaughter.
In times of war the youth—the flower, strength, and beauty of the country—are called from their sober, honest, and useful employments, to the field of battle; and if they do not lose their lives or limbs, they generally lose their habits of morality and industry. Alas! few ever return again to the bosom of their friends. Though from their mistaken and fascinating views of a soldier’s life and honor they may be delighted in enlisting, and merry in their departure from their peaceful homes, yet their joy is soon turned into pain and sorrow. Unthinking youth, like the horse, rushes thoughtlessly into the battle. Repentance is then too late; to shrink back is death, and to go forward is only a faint hope of life. Here on the dreadful field are thousands and hundreds of thousands driven together to slaughter each other by a few ambitious men, perhaps none of whom are present. A large proportion are probably the youth of their country, the delight and comfort of their parents. All these opposing numbers are most likely persons who never knew or heard of each other, having no personal ill-will, most of whom would in any other circumstances not only not injure each other but be ready to aid in any kind office; yet by the act of war they are ranged against each other in all the hellish rage of revenge and slaughter.
No pen, much less that of the writer’s, can describe the inhumanity and horrors of a battle. All is confusion and dismay, dust and smoke arising, horses running, trumpets blasting, cannon roaring, bullets whistling, and the shrieks of the wounded and dying vibrating from every quarter. Column after column of men charge upon each other in furious onset, with the awful crash of bayonets and sabers, with eyes flashing and visages frightfully distorted with rage, rushing upon each other with the violence of brutish monsters; and when these are literally cut to pieces others march in quick succession, only to share the same cruel and bloody tragedy. Hundreds are parrying the blows; hundreds more are thrusting their bayonets into the bowels of their fellow-mortals, and many, while extricating them, have their own heads cleft asunder by swords and sabers; and all are hurried together before the tribunal of their Judge, with hearts full of rage and hands dyed in the blood of their brethren.
O horrid and debasing scene! my heart melts at the contemplation, and I forbear to dwell upon the inhuman employment.
VII. WAR IS INHUMAN, AS IT MULTIPLIES WIDOWS AND ORPHANS, AND CLOTHES THE LAND IN MOURNING
The widow and fatherless are special objects of divine compassion, and Christianity binds men under the strongest obligation to be kind and merciful towards them, as their situation is peculiarly tender and afflicting.
“A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widow, is God in his holy habitation.” “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.”
To be active in any measure which has a natural tendency to wantonly multiply widows and orphans in a land is the height of inhumanity as well as daring impiety.
I will venture to say that no one circumstance in our world has so greatly multiplied widows and fatherless children as that of war. What has humanity ever gained by war to counterbalance simply the afflictions of the widow and fatherless? I verily believe nothing comparatively. I am well aware that a very popular plea for war is to defend, as it is styled, “our firesides, our wives and children”; but this generally is only a specious address to the feelings, to rouse up a martial spirit which makes thousands of women and children wretched where one is made happy. I am sensible that those will sneer at my opinion who regard more the honor that comes from men than they do the consolation of the widow and the fatherless.
In times of war thousands of virtuous women are deprived of their husbands and ten thousands of helpless children of their fathers. The little tender children may now gather round their disconsolate mothers, anxiously inquiring about their fathers, remembering their kind visages, recollecting how they used fondly to dandle them on their knees and affectionately instruct them; but now they are torn from their embraces by the cruelty of war, and they have no fathers left them but their Father in heaven.
It is probably no exaggeration to suppose that in Europe there are now two hundred thousand widows and a million fatherless children occasioned by war. What a mass of affliction! humanity bleeds at the thought! These children must now roam about without a father to provide for, protect, or instruct them. They now become an easy prey to all kinds of vice; many probably will be trained up for ignominious death, and most of them fit only for a soldier’s life, to slaughter and to be slaughtered, unless some humane hand kindly takes them under its protection.
And here I cannot help admiring the spirit of Christianity. It is owing to the blessed spirit and temper of the gospel of peace that many of the evils of war are so much ameliorated at the present day as well as the inhuman slavery of men.
The numerous asylums that now exist for the relief of the needy, the widow, and the fatherless are some of the precious fruits of Christianity; and if this spirit were universal the bow would soon be broken to pieces, the spear cut asunder, and the chariots of war burnt with fire, and wars would cease to the ends of the earth.
And is it not the duty of all who name the name of Christ to do all in their power to counteract this destroying evil?
War not only multiplies widows and orphans but clothes the land in mourning. In times of war multitudes of people are clothed with ensigns of mourning. Here are gray-headed parents shrouded in blackness, weeping for the loss of darling sons; there are widows covered with veils mourning the loss of husbands, and refusing to be comforted; children crying because their fathers are no more. Cities and villages are covered in darkness and desolation; weeping and mourning arise from almost every abode.
And it may be asked, What inhuman hand is the cause of all this sorrow? Perhaps some rash man, in the impetuosity of his spirit, has taken some unjust, high ground, and is too proud to retrace a step, and had rather see millions wretched than to nobly confess that he had been in the wrong.
Surely Christians cannot be active in such measures without incurring the displeasure of God, who styles himself the father of the fatherless and the judge and avenger of the widow.
Thus I have shown that war is inhuman and therefore wholly inconsistent with Christianity, by proving that it tends to destroy humane dispositions; that it hardens the hearts and blunts the tender feelings of men; that it involves the abuse of God’s animal creation; that it oppresses the poor; that it spreads terror and distress among mankind; that it subjects soldiers to cruel privations and sufferings; that it destroys the youth and cuts off the hope of the aged; and that it multiplies widows and orphans and occasions mourning and sorrow.
The fact that war is inhuman is indeed one of those obvious truths which it is difficult to render more plain by argument; those who know in what war consists cannot help knowing that it is inhuman.
What Mr. Windham said with reference to the inhumanity of slavery may be said of the inhumanity of war. In one of his speeches in the House of Commons against the slave trade he stated his difficulty in arguing against such a trade to be of that kind which is felt in arguing in favor of a self-evident proposition. “If it were denied that two and two made four, it would not be a very easy task,” he said, “to find arguments to support the affirmative side of the question. Precisely similar was his embarrassment in having to prove that the slave trade was unjust and inhuman.”
Whoever admits that the slave trade is inhuman must admit that war is inhuman in a greater variety of ways and on a much larger scale.
The inhumanity of the slave trade was the great and, finally, triumphant argument by which it was proved to be inconsistent with Christianity.
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