WAR is a something which we desire to see take end; and we must set our faces like flints against the views that it is a biological necessity, or that it is a necessary accompaniment of humanity organized into states. Christian men hold that it is an accompaniment of a condition of society incompletely governed by Jesus Christ; and that the kingdom for which we work is to be a kingdom not only of righteousness and joy, but also a kingdom of peace.
At the same time, war does not produce evil only. Out of evil, sometimes, good does come. Occasionally men do gather grapes of thistles. Indeed, the fact that that can be done is one of the best reasons for believing in God. For we have evidence and to spare of a gracious power that takes our griefs and pains and follies—yes, and our sins—and transmutes them; a power which can say: “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” So in the case of war. Evil as it is, if men face it rightly it gives them a chance of obtaining benefits.
The first step which it behoves the “pacifist” to take, before he can reach a better theory, a clearer vision, and a more living hope, is to do far more justice to war than he has commonly yet done. Wars may be and have been ignoble; but does he not commonly feel that wars have at least often been, like the god Janus, two-faced —unjustifiable, tyrannic or sordid on one side, but inevitable and even noble on the other? To a nation as to an individual, the crisis of fate may come, when it must “put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.” Broadly speaking, all wars of independence have been of this nobler character. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the contrast between Scotland, on the whole unconquerable, and Ireland, too often overpowered and crushed, shows how much the victorious effort to assert independence is worth—in the first place to the threatened nationality, in the second place to humanity generally, and in the third place even to the nation baulked in its efforts at forcible dominion. Similarly, England as well as France has reason to worship Joan of Arc: Spain as well as England to be grateful for the defeat of the Armada. What “pacifist” regrets Thermopyl and Marathon? [Note: P. Geddes and G. Slater, The Making of the Future: Ideas of War, 44.]
No one has ever eulogized war so unreservedly as De Quincey. This is the conclusion of his Essay:
Under circumstances that may exist, and have existed, war is a positive good; not relative merely, or negative, but positive. A great truth it was which Wordsworth uttered, whatever might be the expansion which he allowed to it, when he said that
“God’s most perfect instrument
In working out a pure intent
Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter :
Yea, Carnage is His daughter.”
There is a mystery in approaching this aspect of the case which no man has read fully. War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered. To execute judgments of retribution upon outrages offered to human rights or to human dignity, to vindicate the sanctities of the altar and the sanctities of the hearth: these are functions of human greatness which war has many times assumed, and many times faithfully discharged. But, behind all these, there towers dimly a greater. The great phenomenon of war it is, this and this only, which keeps open in man a spiracle—an organ of respiration—for breathing a transcendent atmosphere, the dealing with an idea that else would perish: viz. the idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, doing and suffering, that finds its realization in a battle such as that of Waterloo—viz. a battle fought for interests of the human race, felt even where they are not understood; so that the tutelary Angel of Man, when he traverses such a dreadful field, when he reads the distorted features, counts the ghastly ruins, sums the hidden anguish, and the harvests,
“Oh horror breathing from the silent ground,”
nevertheless, speaking as God’s messenger, “blesses it, and calls it very good.” [Note: De Quincey’s Works (Masson’s ed.), viii. 392.]
The blessings that war is said to bring may be divided into three classes:
1. It is a means of civilization and social progress.
2. It is an instrument (some would add, in the hands of God) for purifying and strengthening the national life.
3. It is an opportunity for the discipline of character and the exercise of heroic virtues.
