JESUS CHRIST AND WAR.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
trust that the importance of the issue between, or, as you would put it, the harmony between, Christian idealism and your "New Way of Life" is so great that you will allow the utterance of the other point of view.
You deduce Christian sanction to war from the absence of any such specific text as "Thou shalt make no war; but shalt heap coals of fire on the head of the invader of thy country." Nor is there any immediate attack in the Gospels on military employment. We do not hear that the Centurion of great faith threw up his commission, nor did Cornelius, and we remember that Paul obtained a guard from the chief Captain. But we must use some historic imagination and try to realise the actual setting of the ministry of our Lord. He sowed a seed,—less than a grain of mustard-seed. However potentially revolutionary a seed may be, it must have time before it can split rocks, wear down walls, and overrun prairies. The testi- mony against war came to ripeness in plentiful teachings of all the Christian Fathers up to the union of the Church with the Empire by Constantine. It has never died, but has, strangely enough, appeared anew whenever a Christian body was sufficiently separated from the State to enable the conscience freely to criticise the State. It is as steady and strong in Wyelif as in George Fox ; and Waldensians, Albigenses Mennonites, Doukhobors, the modern adherents of the Bab in Persia, and others, in revolting from the priesthoods of the State, have revolted from its wars too. But to return to Christ. Had He lived to old age we know not how many appliCations of His principles He might have worked out. But the enemy had to be taken in the order of his urgency; the chief priests and Pharisees were the nearest and the most dangerous, and He lost His life at their hands at the very outset of His career in the first application He made of the Gospel. He was cut off with the knowledge of how incom- plete was His message. He had many other things to tell, but He died trusting in the inward teacher He left behind. Few things were less pressing" than an abstract doctrine of war. The land was enjoying the 'Etonian Peace. The Mediterranean world, at rest, was policed by a scanty garrison. The will of Augustus ordered that his successors should not extend the frontiers of the Empire. The distant campaigns of Yams or Germanicus on the Rhine would hardly have echoes in Palestine. The soldiers kept order. John the Baptist's advice to them was to be honest policemen. "Don't exact more than your due: don't black- maiL" Now our Lord's teaching was never comprehensive as a code is, never systematic. But it was never in the air; it was always elicited in response to actual need. And the human spirit had to learn much and travel far before there was any need to enter upon a general attack upon society either in regard to war or to the other great evil of slavery, which was also vigorously defended in its barbarous day by the plea of the silence of Christ. Moral teaching without immediate application is a form of cloud-castle-building. What would have befallen teaching, had He given it, on Trusts and company promotion, on drunkenness and licensing, on gambling about horses, on housing conditions and infant mortality, on smoke pollution and sanitation, and on the right use of magazines, halfpenny papers, 'music-halls, motor-cars, or the week-end habit ? We have to deal with these and with war in the light of that summary of Christ's teaching which we call the Sermon on the Mount. I marvel that you should fnd no exception mada to His fulfilment of the law in respect to its revengeful teaching. "Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time but I say unto you is the introduction to all the extreme sayings : "Resist not evil." "Turn the other cheek." "Let him have thy cloak also." I must submit, with deference to your Old Testament knowledge, that there is no actual war contem- plated or regulated in the Law.
One passage which you quote, the Gethsemane one, demands thought. Jesus was faze to face with torture and death; and apparently with the failure of His mission. One of His intimate friends was leading the troop who were on the point of arresting Him. His chosen three, the very nearest, could not even keep awake in the tragic moment of crisis. They seemed to realise nothing. The little circle of His influence seemed cracked to its centre. For a moment He lost hope, and said strange words which Luke alone has handed down. "When I sent you without purse and scrip and shoes, lacked ye anything?" And they said: "Nothing." And He said unto them : "But now he that bath a purse, let him take it, and likewise a wallet, and he that hath none, let him sell his cloak and buy a sword, for that which con- cerneth me hath an end." And they said : "Lord, behold, here are two swords," and He said unto them: "It is enough." He could say no more ; they could not under- stand.
Here we have plainly the temporary loss of His lifelong idealism. No more was His to be the mission of lambs in the midst of wolves ; no more was it safe to rely on such provision as God had made for Elijah. You had better take money and be worldly wise, for I am done. "The things con- cerning me have an end." In such a general &Mete of faith occurs the order to buy a sword. A moment after He was Himself again. When the sword was used on the man's ear, there came peremptorily the order to put it into its sheath, for violence only bred violence. "They that take the sword shall perish by the sword." The chief guidance really given us by Christ was in action, not in word. He refused to lead a war of liberation, exactly the kind of just war you often dwell on, though it never occurs in modern English experience. He regarded that as bowing down and serving the Devil, in return for the promise of conquered kingdoms. Instead of the traditional Messiah liberator, He came as the Son of Man. The significance of this broad title brushes away every plea that a defiant, yet fearful, nationalism has anything in common with the GospeL
May I, in all brevity, add that I agree with you that there are many things worse than Death our friend, that it is well and glorious to die for one's country, but that many are actually doing it now in time of peace, and that Quakers are not, like Tolstoy, hostile to all use of force P—I am, Sir, Scc., [We are delighted to hear that the Quakers of to-day are not hostile to all use of force. That being so, the only point between us is the question of the righteousness of the use of force in the particular case. The proposition becomes, not that it is un-Christian to use force, but that it is =- Christian to use force ill or for a bad cause. To this we heartily agree, with the necessary consequence that to defend one's country from external attack cannot be un-Christian.-•. ED. Spectator.]
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