THE BISHOPS AND THE WAR.
ALETTER from the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, published in the Echo of Tuesday last, vindicates his course in voting for the Government in relation to the Afghan war. The Bishop of Manchester, on the other hand, in our own columns of to-day, explains why, but for illness, he should cer- tainly have joined the Bishop of Oxford in voting against the war. Even so, the authority of the Bishops would have been favourable to the war in the proportion of four to one, eight having voted or paired in favour of the war ; while, but for Dr. Fraser's illness, there would have been two episcopal votes against it. Even that result would have been startling enough. And though we acknow- ledge that we were not justified in suggesting that the vacancy in the Bishopric of Durham had anything to do with the vote,—such suspicions being certainly uncharitable, and if not in all cases, yet in some cases flagrantly unjust,—tbat they will glance across the mind of men of the world in accounting for so strange a phe- nomenon as the character of the Bishops' vote, is certain. No doubt it would be far better if this kind of imputation, which can never be proved, and which is almost certain to injure the public estimation of some one or other who is entirely free from any shadow of an interested motive, were not uttered. We regret, therefore, what we wrote on the subject of the vacant bishopric,—in the first irritation of seeing those eight names ranged on the side of an aggressive war. Such imputations are dangerous weapons. which even when they hit a mark, are pretty sure also to hit and wound beside the mark. Putting aside, then, all imputations of conscious or unconscious self-interest as unfair and uncharitable, let us consider how a Bishop's vote in such a case as this ought to be decided, in connection with Dr. Ellicott's defence of his own vote, in the columns of the Echo.
We are quite willing to admit that if a lay Peer can be right in voting for an aggressive war, a Bishop may be equally right in voting for such a war. There is not one political rule for a layman and another for an ecclesiastic, any more than there is one moral rule for a layman and another for an ecclesiastic. A Bishop's view of what is right or righteous, ought not to be in any respect different from any high-minded nobleman's view of what is right or righteous. But we think that it would usually be, and perhaps ought usually to be, arrived at from a very different approach. There is at least no blame to a military man, if he thinks first of the military side of the issue, so long as he absolutely subordinates his judgment on that point to the higher considerations affecting the political and moral issue. There is no blame to the statesman, if he thinks first of the political side of the question, and next of the military, so long as he, too, subordinates his judgment on these points to the higher considerations affecting the moral issue. But we do think that there is some blame to a Bishop, if he fails to look first at the moral issue, and to make that not only what all men should make it,—the guiding and over- ruling issue of all,—but the consideration which gives him the first clue to his judgment,—the one which, so to say, preoccu- pies his mind, if any one consideration is allowed to preoccupy it at
all. This is the only reason why we properly look for a different kind of judgment from the Bishops from that which we expect from other Peers of Parliament, and feel a certain shock when we see that the vote of the Bishops was eight to one (or say, if we count Dr.
Fraser's illness as an unfortunate accident, four to one) in favour of an aggressive war, though the votes of the Lay Peers show only three to one in favour of it. As a rule, we should expect that the primary consideration affecting so critical a question as this would, if any, be the biassing consideration,—the one which weighs proportionally more than its due weight, instead of less.
If that were so, it is clearly not unreasonable to suppose that men with whom the moral and religious consideration is the leading consideration, would be, if not quite impartial, influenced rather more than they ought to be, instead of less, by the fear of lending any factitious support to an unjust aggression. We do not think it very unnatural or highly culpable for a soldier like Lord Napier of Magdala to change his mind, chiefly in consequence of military con- siderations, from opposing the Afghan policy, to supporting it.
We do not think it culpable for a statesmanlike Lord Derby, who admits that he sanctioned the Afghan policy of 1876 and the early part of 1877, to be led into strong disapprobation of the war which has been the sequel to it, by considerations of policy rather than of pure morality. And so, too, we should acquiesce in it as a very natural result, if the Bench of Bishops were chiefly biassed by that moral and religions prepossession against anything that can even plausibly be called aggressive war, which would apparently be the antecedent bias of a Christian preacher. It is somewhat startling to find that there is apparently no such bias on the Bench of Bishops, as a whole ; that if such a prepossession weighed too much in any case at all, it can only have been in two cases. Nor is the unpleasant surprise which this discovery causes us at all lessened by Dr. Ellicott's letter.
We find the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol opening his case thus :—" After listening attentively to the statements of those who had been the principal actors in these complicated transactions, I seemed to myself to come clearly to the conclusion that the war was one of necessity, and not of injustice or of concealed designs." This statement Dr. Ellicott supports by urging, in the first place, the Prime Minister's argument, that our Indian frontier on the side of Afghanistan is insecure. Clearly that is not a plea of necessity, or else the demand of France for the Rhine might be called a plea of necessity. Dr. Ellicott's next
plea is the political argument derived from the fact that the Afghan Prince bad declined accepting from us the sort of Embassy which he had accepted from Russia. Is
that a plea of necessity, or only one of expediency,—of the flimsiest kind ? The third consideration which weighs with the Bishop is the fear that if England had quietly accepted this situation, Russian designs would have been encouraged. Possibly so, but is that a plea of necessity in favour of offensive war ? And his fourth consideration is that English prestige in the Indian peninsula would suffer by our keeping the peace, and that Orien- tal nations would regard our acquiescence as a distinct evidence of weakness. Thus with the Bishop, as with the Prime Minister, the military consideration appears to stand first ; then come three political considerations, of a highly politic and quite unmoral kind, the last being founded on the duty of keeping up our "prestige." When all these considerations have been urged,— and not till then,—we discover that so-called religious considera- tions remain behind. But when we come to the so-called re- ligious considerations, we find, to our regret, that they appear to be anything but what we at least should call properly " religious." We will quote this part of Dr. Ellicott's letter in full :—
"But I voted al-o as a Minister of the Gospel. For, let it be remem- bered, decline of English influence means also a decline in the advance of the Gospel. Imperfectly as we have hitherto done our duty to India. we are now certainly awaking to our tremendous responsibilities ; and for England's power now to wane in India would be for the evangeli-a- tion of that portion of the Oriental world to be retarded, it may bo for centuries. I have seen nothing in the missionary efforts of Russia to lead me to think that, in the blessed work of the propagation of the Gospel, the influence of that country could be advantageously sub- stituted for that of England."
That seems to us, so far as it is a religious argument at all, only one of a secondary kind, and one which may even be called an irreligious argument, if it is permitted to supply the place of the only kind of considerations which could possibly justify
a war of seeming aggression. If you have justified on other and unequivocal grounds the shooting of a man through the head, you may fairly confirm yourself in the resolve to de- fend yourself in that way by the consideration that your life is of more value to the community, whether on religious or on other grounds, than the life of the man you are about to shoot. If he is attacking you, for instance, you are morally right in de- fending yourself ; and you may fairly screw yourself up to the unpleasant duty by weighing in your own mind the value of the life of a respectable citizen against the value of the life of a burglar or assassin. But you cannot rightly put the latter con- sideration in the front of the battle. You cannot rightly say that, because your life is of more account than his, you may shoot him by way of precaution, and because you have plausible reason to believe that he may some day try to shoot you, if you are not beforehand with him. The Bishop's argument, standing alone as it does, without any proper moral justification of the war, sounds very like the religious trustee's justification of a little illegitimate borrowing of funds from those who have trusted him,—namely, that his disgrace in the eyes of the world would be a great blow to the cause of religion, and would furnish ground to the ungodly to rejoice and to the Philis- tines to triumph. The evangelisation of India may be a cause more or less identified with the growth of English influence, but that is no reason at all for sustaining English influence by an aggressive war of pure policy. It is a good additional reason for doing right, that to do so will increase the influence of right- minded people ; but it is no excuse at all for doing wrong, and no justification at all of an act which is not only disputable, but prima facie at least censurable on other grounds,—as an aggressive war of course is. Yet the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol justifies the morality of this aggressive war by four considerations founded on very questionable calculations of political expediency, and one founded on the consideration of ultimate religious expedi- ency, though he never even refers for a moment to the fact that to slaughter and conquer Afghans because they received an em- bassy from Russia, and not from us, is very unlikely indeed to spread the fame of English Christianity among the Afghans, whatever it may do among the peoples of the peninsula. One would have sup- posed that, to a Bishop at least, the danger of renewing horrors like those committed by English soldiers in the last Afghan war, would have been one of the first and most formidable of moral calculations. But the truth is that Dr. Ellicott seems entirely destitute of the sort of moral prepossession which we have assumed as at least natural and praiseworthy in a Bishop. It does not occur to him that there is at least a prima facie case against an aggressive war declared on so doubtful a pretext as the refusal of a neighbour to receive such a mission from us as he had accepted from a rival Power. The Christian prepossessions are weak in the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. The military and politi- cal prepossessions are strong. Surely, this is hardly what we should expect from a Bishop, qua Bishop ?
And yet Dr. Ellicott has the advantage of the other Bishops who voted for the Government at least in this,—that he has thought it his duty to state why he voted for an aggressive war, while they have not thought even as much as that necessary. They seem to think it quite superfluous to explain their reasons for such an act of moral paradox. They give a silent vote with the Government, as if the natural course for Bishops was to support the Government, even in waging an aggressive war,—as if this were a course not needing so much as a word of explanation,—as if deference to the Government were the characteristic attitude of the Church in relation acts of violence and blood, no less than in relation to acts of reconciliation and order. The Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol at least so far feels the paradox of his position, that having failed to explain his reasons in the House of Lords, he feels called upon to attempt doing so in the Press. His attempt is feeble enough ; but his brother-Bishops do not even feel the necessity for making any such attempt. They are content to vote silently for aggression, violence, and conquest., as if nothing in the world could be more decorous, appropriate, and becoming the position of a chief pastor in the Church of Christ, than such a vote as this. We do not think that the nation at large will agree with them.
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