We have seen that there are two attitudes to this question of the necessity of War. The one is that war has always been and will always be. The other is that war need never have been and ought never to be again. We now look at the second.
“There is,” says Mr. F. Wood,” no necessity for war. The idea of such necessity is just one of the illusions into which the stupidity of a so-called patriotism is so easily betrayed; or rather it is one of the hollow hypocrisies under which the selfishness of the same plausible and pretentious sentiment seeks to hide its true character.” [Note: F. Wood, Suffering and Wrong, 67.]
1. Let us state the arguments.
(1) The first argument is that war is simply murder on a large scale. You must not do as a nation what you may not do as an individual. If it is wrong for you to break into your neighbour’s house, rob his safe, and cut his throat, it is wrong for you and ten thousand others to inflict those same wrongs upon the Russians or the Zulus.
Says Father Payne: “I look upon war as a sort of pestilence, a contagion which spreads under certain conditions. But we disguise the evil of it from ourselves, if we allow ourselves to believe in its being intrinsically glorious. I can’t believe that highway robbery has only to be organized on a sufficiently large scale to make it glorious. A man who resists highway robbery, and runs the risk of death, because he wants to put a stop to it, seems to me a noble person—quite different from the man who sees a row going on and joins in it because he does not want to be out of a good thing Do you remember the story of the Irishman who saw a fight proceeding, and rushed into the fray wielding his shillelagh, and praying that it might fall on the right heads? We have all of us uncivilized instincts, but it does not make them civilized to join with a million other people in indulging them. I think that a man who refuses to join from conviction, at the risk of being hooted as a coward, is probably doing a braver thing still.” [Note: A. C. Benson, Father Payne, 125.]
This argument is expressed in undisguised language by W. J. Fox: “God has pronounced him guilty who sheds his fellow’s blood; there may be an exception for self-defence; but for the command of superiors there is no exception. Mr. Scargill, in his short but excellent essay on War, avows the same opinions: ‘He who wantonly puts a fellow-creature to death is guilty of murder; and he who puts a fellow-creature to death without knowing why is equally guilty; the cause may be good, but if he knows it not, he is a murderer. No casuistry can save him from the guilt of it. He may conclude that they who lead him to slaughter know and are assured of the justice of the cause; but unless he knows it also, he is in the sight of God guilty of violating the laws of heaven. A man may be honestly engaged in the service of a certain cause, in which circumstances may lead him to war—and if fighting may be justified at all, it may be right in certain circumstances—but he is not thereby bound to fight in every cause which his superiors may adopt.’ The plain question is, Does the command of a superior justify a violation of the laws of God? If it does for the hired soldier, it does also for the hired assassin. Suppose a man were to go to Copenhagen, and shoot a person whom he never saw before; then to Washington, and stab another, by whom he was never injured; then to the coast of France, and burn a third in his own house: what would all this be but repeated and atrocious murder? Would its moral character be changed by the command of a prince, minister, or general? Certainly not; any more than their command would justify perjury or forgery.” [Note: The Collected Works of W. J. Fox, i. 250.]
(2) Another argument against war is that it never accomplishes its end; there may be gains but they are small in comparison with the losses, and that to the victor as well as to the vanquished. The following testimony is from a published letter from an officer at the Front. “War I think morally futile, because I do not believe at all in the romantic view of it, i.e. in the good qualities which it is supposed to breed. It is true that it tests men, like plague, shipwreck, famine, or any other adversity, but in so doing it does not make the good qualities that come to light, it merely makes them apparent. No man in his senses would advocate the occasional sinking of a liner, or the inoculation of a disease, in order to promote heroism and self-sacrifice; yet justification of war on such grounds is equally indefensible.”
(3) Another argument is that hitherto war has been due to ignorance and brutality. The world is now leaving behind the ape and the tiger: why should we continue our rivalry into this illogical and brutal extremity? The only excuse that can be made is that our ancestors did it. But our ancestors had no other way of competing; practically they only came into contact with foreign nations for the sake of bloodshed and plunder. But engineering progress has made travel and international intercourse easy, and we can go abroad now with more facility than they could then travel across England. Language is still a barrier, and is responsible for many misunderstandings, but in all essentials it is easy now to be on friendly terms with every civilized nation. We trade together, we study the same problems and encounter the same natural difficulties. In thousands of ways we can help each other: in one way and one way alone can we do each other serious damage. Exertion is good, and fighting is strenuous exertion, but why not fight now solely by means of organization and enterprise and scientific skill and ingenuity? Why not show emulation and high spirit in the various industries and arts of peace? Why destroy and ravage the property of humanity? Why should one section seek to destroy another, when all can cooperate together for the common good, and when all are members of a common brotherhood, so that if one is injured all suffer?
(4) But the great argument against the continuance of war for any purpose whatsoever is that it is contrary to the mind of Christ. Can we, it is asked, realize at all what war means and what Christ stood for without having the whole question settled for us of the impossibility of concord between Christ and Belial? How can we speak of the Father who numbers our hairs and makes all things to work for our good, without whom not even a sparrow falls, if we compromise at all with a system for which human beings are mere masses to be hurled at each other’s throats, and which devises ingenious machinery and pours out endless treasure for their destruction? And how can an order based upon respect for individual rights and mutual service and common good-will, an order of love based upon respect for the worth of the humblest moral personality, be promoted by the race hatreds and murderous passion bred by war? Is it not better to tolerate any wrong than wrong our own consciences by implicating ourselves in such brutal and insensate slaughter? What can murder by machinery have to do with the religion of One who taught us not to resist evil, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies, to esteem it our chief perfection to be like our Father in Heaven who sends His rain upon the evil and the good alike?
Nor does the matter end with precepts, which might have their justification in the occasion, so that, while they might be absolute as against personal rancour, they might not be absolute as against moral indignation; or, while they might be absolute against personal injury, they might not apply to the oppression of others, or to public resistance to an act which wrongs humanity. A more general and a more impressive consideration springs from the nature of the Kingdom of God as righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. Such a combination of righteousness and peace and joy in spiritual blessings is presented as possible precisely because their security is not by might nor by power, but by God’s Spirit, because the strong thing in the world in the end is not violence, but the sacrifice and service of love. If, then, in spite of all that appears to the contrary, the meek shall inherit the earth, because they alone find the true uses even of this present life, what part can we have on any ground even of righteousness with this wholesale slaughter?
Let us concede that, so far as we can see, force will always be a necessary element in the education of the human race. Let us further allow that the time has not yet come, perhaps may not yet be even in sight, when the rough and irrational method which we call war shall disappear from among the nations of the earth. Let us even adopt the extreme view, that so long as humanity divides itself into states and countries, war must continue to be a normal condition of international relations. Nevertheless, war belongs to the secular process. It has no place in the Kingdom of God. If “there was war in heaven,” it was only till the devil was cast out. To suffer death is Christian. To inflict it, if not repugnant to the Christian appeal, has always been instinctively felt to be incompatible with it.
“I cannot read the New Testament now,” said a lady to me not long ago, “for I find it very difficult to think Christianity. I must turn to the Old Testament—and only to parts of that.” [Note: J. R. P. Sclater, The Eve of Battle, 10.]
2. Now, the answer to all these arguments is the same. If war is the worst thing that is ever seen on earth, then it is never permissible to go to war. But if there are worse things than war, and if war may put an end to these things, war is not only permissible but necessary. The answer will be developed in the third part of this chapter.
Here a word may be said on the last argument.
The prevailing conception of Jesus Christ has been that of a passive sufferer, a submissive victim, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and Christian art has transmitted this picture of an ascetic, resigned, non-combatant Christ. Very different from this was the Jesus of the Gospels. His dominating qualities were not weakness, submission, and resignation, but strength, mastery, and power. “His word was with power,” (Heb_1:3) it was written of Him. “He taught as one having authority” (Mat_7:29). He scourged the traders; he defied the Pharisees; He rebuked Pilate at the judgment-seat; He died for a cause that seemed lost, as a soldier leads a charge. When a captain of the guard, who had soldiers under him, sought the help of the new Teacher, Jesus saw in that soldierly discipline which said to one man, Go, and to another, Come, because it was itself under authority, the spirit of His own work and said: “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel” (Mat_8:10).
When one turns from the Master to His most effective disciple, the same appreciation of soldierliness is seen. The best that Paul could ask for his young friend Timothy was that he should be “a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” The best hope that anyone could cherish was that he “might please him who had chosen him to be a soldier.” The apostolic command to a Christian was “to war a good warfare.” In short, it is impossible to reckon either Jesus or Paul among teachers of peace-at-any-price. The blessing of Jesus is not for those who praise peace or even for those who pray for it, but for those who by efficiency and willing sacrifice make peace. Such are the true pacificists, the peacemakers who are the children of God. The praise of Paul is not for those who deplore fighting with arms, but for those who “fight a good fight of faith”; not for those who passively await peace at the command of God, but for those who “follow after the things that make for peace,” and achieve the peace that comes “to every man that worketh good” (1Ti_6:12). The conversion of militarism, the spiritualization of soldierliness, the Christianization of courage, the enlistment of good soldiers of Jesus Christ—that is the New Testament way of deliverance from the horrors of war.
The conscience of the Reformed Churches has testified to the possibility of waging war in the interests of God’s cause and kingdom. The lawfulness of war was emphatically asserted by Calvin, and the matter was deemed of such moment that declarations in this sense were embodied in the public testimonies down to the Westminster Confession. The virile tradition of the Scottish Church, in particular, is utterly inconsistent with Quaker principles. The Scottish Reformation was carried through, humanly speaking, because of the steps taken at the crisis by John Knox to secure the intervention of an English fleet and the expulsion of a French army of occupation. With the hearty approval of the Church, Scotland sent an army into England to second the cause of the Parliament against Charles I., and at a later date it as earnestly attempted to dispute the triumphal progress of Oliver Cromwell. When the Covenanters took to the moors, they carried with them the Bible in the one hand and the sword in the other. In the period following the Union with England, when Scotland took its share in the upbuilding and defence of the Empire, there was no greater misgiving as to the lawfulness of fighting. During the Napoleonic wars, in particular, there was a profound and enthusiastic conviction that resistance to the schemes of the mighty conqueror was a duty imposed by loyalty to the King of kings. [Note: W. P. Paterson, In the Day of the Muster, 6.]
