her population, of the guilt and cruelty and blood of Europe, from whence are now coming up the Heralds of the Gospel of Peace upon their shores. If the day of her deliverance is delayed, this will have the mightiest influence in effecting it. And this hindrance to the redemption of China, and of many other benighted nations, can be best obviated at home. Let it be a fact that shall spread with the Bible, and strengthen the hands of those who carry it, that in Europe, bloody as it has been, in Europe and America, those who love the Bible, who are engaged under the influence of its spirit in sending it abroad wide as its commission, are themselves rallying under its banner of peace and love, and combining all their influence and energy for the abolition of war forever. This will be an antidote to all past impressions; and this too will carry forward, fast as the conversion of the nations goes on, a religion whose practice as well as precept is "peace on earth ;" and whose results are no more surely "glory to God" than "good will to. man."

ARTICLE II.

THE EVILS AND GUILT OF WAR; SOURCES OF ILLUSION IN RESPECT TO IT; AND MEANS

OF COUNTERACTION.

BY REV. A. S. PACKARD, PROFESSOR IN BOWDOIN COLLEGE.

DID we not know man too well, we should cry out upon the strange anomaly implied in seriously discussing the practicability and expediency of measures for the suppression of war and the promotion of peace, in a community professedly Christian. But the most disastrous wars have within our own memory occurred on Christian lands. Christian temples are now decorated with flags taken from a flying foe, and with monuments recording the valour of heroes bearing the Christian There is not one of our readers who would not shrink from being called a man of war; not one probably, who does not suppose that his feelings in regard to war are, in the main, correct. Yet it may be, that of those who have not given at

name.

tention to this topic, not one views the practice of war in its proper light, not one is in the strictest sense of the words a man

of peace.

Do we listen with delight to the story of war? Do we hear with a thrill of pleasurable emotion of the mustering of the hosts to battle? Do we trace with eager attention the movements of hostile powers? Do we hang with breathless interest over the battle field, and admire the gallantry and daring of the warrior, and at the same time forget the untold sorrows and woes, and the deep guilt which are concealed beneath all that is exciting and attractive in these scenes? If so, our feelings are enlisted on the side of war; yet thus it is with by far the greater number even of professed Christians. The avowed friends of peace, they are yet undoubted admirers of war.

A strange delusion has settled down upon the minds of men. Could facts be clearly exhibited to the view of a visitant from another sphere, how would they strike his mind. We would ask him to go upon some eminence from whence his eye could wander over a happy, prosperous kingdom, and where he might regale his vision with the sight of its peaceful villages and hamlets, reposing in the midst of fertility and joy, its waving fields ripe for the harvest, its cities thronged with a busy people, sending forth its products to all parts of the globe, and receiving the treasures of other lands in return. After having gazed a while with delight on this wide spread scene of abundance and happiness, we would ask him to look once more. A change has passed over this vision of enchantment. Those villages

are now heaps of smouldering ruins, and the happy villagers have been cruelly slaughtered or, driven from their homes, are exposed to insult, outrage and death. Those beautiful fields have been blasted and laid waste as by devouring fire. Those cities have been pillaged and razed to the ground or stand desolate masses of blackened ruins. The busy haunts of traffic are now silent, and the commerce of the kingdom which once waved in every port under heaven, is now dismantled and mouldering away; and when in amazement our visiter should

inquire whence this sad reverse, our answer would be, this is the desolation of war.

We would traverse with him the plains of the East, the site of cities once famed for their splendour and opulence, and as he viewed with wonder those imposing relics of ancient magnificence, the porticoes, broken arches, and prostrate columns of Palmyra, Balbec, Persepolis, or the more beautiful remains. of Grecian and Roman art, we would tell him that here too he saw the footsteps of the demon of war, who hath thus swept over the earth like a whirlwind of the Almighty's wrath, desolating her fairest scenes, uprooting kingdoms and empires, depopulating extensive territories, turning back through ages the tide of improvement, and bringing down upon unhappy men the darkness of ignorance and sin. We would go with him to the battle fields of Arbela, Cannæ, Borodino, Beresina, and Waterloo, and would show him the soil fattened with the blood and remains of tens of thousands of our fellow men; we would trace with him the disastrous Russian campaign, when in 173 days, 500,000 perished;--we would shew him this pleasant world, designed to be the abode of intelligent, moral and social beings, strewed with the 15 or 20 thousand millions of its inhabitants, who on a moderate calculation have fallen the victims of war. But there are other scenes of woe which he has not yet beheld. We would conduct him to the homes of those wretched sufferers, and ask him to listen to the low moan of sorrow, or the wail of despair and heart-rending grief, that comes up from the loved ones who have lost their stay and staff, their hope and consolation, on the field of battle, and then would we say to him: here is a picture of civilized war. We would show him how this spirit of evil has availed himself of the science and ingenuity of man, for the destruction of man; how the invention of a Christian monk hath compounded a black, inert, and apparently inoffensive powder, which, on the application of the smallest spark, kindles into an amazing energy, with a voice of thunder, propelling missiles with resistless force and certain death, or springing an unseen mine, throws large structures with their inmates into the air. We would lead

him to the vast magazines, filled with the engines and materials of destruction, erected and sustained at the cost of a nation's treasure; to the schools, where are trained with watchful vigilance and consummate skill, youth who may in subsequent life wield the apparatus of human destruction with most effect; to the fortresses, and the encampments, and the naval depots, all well furnished, even in times of peace, and affording him proof that the destruction of man by his fellow man is a matter of calculation and arrangement, and, as it were, an indispensable concomitant of human society. Having surveyed this vast machinery of human woe, he would in amazement exclaim--what evil destiny hath fallen upon man, that his whole history is little else than a detail of voluntarily inflicted suffering! What dire necessity drives men to the dread alternative of war? Nay, we must reply, it is the most frightful scourge of Heaven, but man has seized it, and with ruthless hand played with it as with an infant's toy. Men glory in it. The warrior is extolled; poets sing the praises of his valour; and multitudes throng around him to pay the homage of their admiration. In horror and disgust at the infatuation and wickedness of man, would he not wing his way to his sphere of light and peace.

Thus would it appear to us all, if we would but throw off the delusion which veils our minds, and view things as they truly are; nor can there be a doubt, that at no distant period, exclamations of horror and disgust will burst from the reader of what are now regarded as the most brilliant passages of the world's history.

For let us consider, in the first place, the FOLLY and WICKEDNESS of war as a mode of settling disputes. Its folly. Individuals, when they have a controversy, submit to arbitrament, or the case is tried by a jury ef their equals. To resort to violence and physical force, is always deemed not only barbarous, but palpably unjust. In such a case, the right is most manifestly with the stronger. The brawn and muscle of an ancient Milo would carry it against a legion of puny antagonists, however just their cause. Why is it not so with nations? What

We speak

makes it ludicrous for individuals to fight, for nations, glorious and wise? Next consider the wickedness of war. of the majority of wars which have been waged, when we affirm that wars are most commonly unnecessary and fruitless. Every one moderately conversant with history, is aware that they have arisen from unfounded, often most trivial causes, and that in most cases, the result of the war, if it has not been misfortune to the party that commenced it, has not compensated at all for the blood and treasure which it has cost. Said Burke, so paltry a sum in the eyes of a financier, as 3d., an article so insignificant in the eyes of a philosopher, as tea, has shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe. Of 286 wars of magnitude in which Christian nations have been engaged, as enumerated in one of the publications of the Massachusetts Peace Society, scarcely one can be regarded as strictly a war of self-defence, and were the causes of them all exhibited in their true light, the detail, most shocking and humiliating as it would be, would be scarcely less ludicrous than the humorous account of the causes of war given by Dean Swift.*

Now why should we send those who stir up a noisy brawl in our streets, to the house of correction, but commit the greater brawls of kingdoms, accompanied with the deaths of thou

# He asked me what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another? I answered, they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern. Sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of their subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinion has cost many millions of lives. For instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue. Sometimes the quarrel between two powers is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions where neither of them pretend to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrels with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong; and sometimes be. cause he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight till they take ours or we theirs."-Gulliver's Travels, Part 4, Ch. 5.