32. Safety of this reliance –
Evidence by private and natural experience
We have seen that the duties of the religion which God has imparted to mankind require non- resistance;
and surely it is reasonable to believe, even without a reference to experience, that he will make our non-resistance subservient to our interests –
that if, for the purpose of conforming to his will, we subject ourselves to difficulty or danger, he will protect us in our obedience and direct it to our benefit –
that if he requires us not to be concerned in war, he will preserve us in peace –
that he will not desert those who have no other protection, and who have abandoned all other protection because they confide in his alone.
And if we refer to experience, we shall find that the reasonableness of this confidence is confirmed.
There have been thousands who have confided in Heaven in opposition to all their apparent interests, but of these thousands has one eventually said that he repented his confidence, or that he reposed in vain?
“He that will lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall find it.”
If it is said that we take futurity into the calculation in our estimate of interest, I answer: So we ought. Who is the man that would exclude futurity, or what are his principles?
I do not comprehend the foundation of those objections to a reference to futurity which are thus flippantly made:
Are we not immortal beings?
Have we not interests beyond the present life?
It is a deplorable temper of mind that would diminish the frequency, or the influence, of our references to futurity. The prospects of the future ought to predominate over the sensations of the present.
And if the attainment of this predominance is difficult, let us at least, not voluntarily, argumentatively, persuade ourselves to forego the prospect, or to diminish its influence.
Yet, even in reference only to the present state of existence, I believe we shall find that the testimony of experience is that forbearance is most conducive to our interests.
An upright man,
free of guilt,
needs no weapon
to defend himself. – Horace.
And the same truth is delivered by much higher authority than that of Horace, and in much stronger language: “If a man’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.”
The reader of American history will recollect that in the beginning of the last century, a desultory and most dreadful warfare was carried on by the natives against the European settlers:
a warfare that was provoked, as such warfare has almost always originally been, by the injuries and violence of the Christians. The mode of destruction was secret and sudden.
The barbarians sometimes lay in wait for those who might come within their reach on the highway or in the fields, and shot them without warning; and sometimes they attacked the Europeans in their houses, “scalping some, and knocking out the brains of others.”
From this horrible warfare, the inhabitants sought safety by abandoning their homes, and retiring to fortified places, or to the neighbourhood of garrisons;
and those whom necessity still compelled to pass beyond the limits of such protection, provided themselves with arms for their defence.
But amidst this dreadful desolation and universal terror, the Society of Friends, who were a considerable proportion of the whole population, were steadfast to their principles:
They would neither retire to garrisons, nor provide themselves with arms. They remained openly in the country, while the rest were flying to the forts.
They still pursued their occupations in the fields or at their homes, without a weapon either for annoyance or defence. And what was their fate? They lived in security and quiet.
The habitation, which to his armed neighbour was the scene of murder and of the scalping knife, was to the unarmed Quaker a place of safety and of peace.
Three of the Society were, however, killed. And who were they?
They were three who abandoned their principles:
Two of these victims were men, who, in the simple language of the narrator, “used to go to their labour without any weapons,
trusted to the Almighty, and depended on his providence to protect them, it being their principle not to use weapons of war to offend others or to defend themselves.
But a spirit of distrust taking place in their minds, they took weapons of war to defend themselves.
The Indians
– who had seen them several times without them, and let them alone, saying they were peaceable men and hurt nobody, therefore they would not hurt them
– now seeing them have guns, and supposing they designed to kill the Indians, they therefore shot the men dead.”
The third whose life was sacrificed was a woman, who “had remained in her habitation,” not thinking herself warranted in going “to a fortified place for preservation; neither she, her son, nor daughter, nor to take thither the little ones.
But the poor woman after some time began to let in a slavish fear, and advised her children to go with her to a fort not far from their dwelling.”
She went, and shortly afterwards “the bloody, cruel Indians lay by the way and killed her.”
The fate of the Quakers during the rebellion in Ireland was nearly similar:
It is well known that the rebellion was a time, not only of open war, but also of cold-blooded murder – of the utmost fury of bigotry, and the utmost exasperation of revenge.
Yet the Quakers were preserved even to a proverb;
and when strangers passed through streets of ruin and observed a house standing uninjured and alone, they would sometimes point and say,
“That, doubtless, was the house of a Quaker.”
It is to no purpose to say, in opposition to the evidence of these facts, that they form an exception to a general rule. The exception to the rule consists in the trial of the experiment of non-resistance, not in its success.
Neither is it to any purpose to say that the savages of America or the desperadoes of Ireland spared the Quakers because they were previously known to be an unoffending people, or because the Quakers had previously gained the love of these by forbearance or good offices.
We concede all this; it is the very argument that we maintain:
We say that a uniform, undeviating regard to the peaceable obligations of Christianity becomes the safeguard of those who practice it.
We venture to maintain that no reason whatever can be assigned why the fate of the Quakers would not be the fate of all who should adopt their conduct.
No reason can be assigned why, if their number had been multiplied ten-fold or a hundred-fold, they would not have been preserved. If there is such a reason, let us hear it.
The American and Irish Quakers were, to the rest of the community, what one nation is to a continent.
And we must require the advocate of war to produce (that which has never yet been produced) a reason for believing that, although individuals exposed to destruction were preserved, a nation exposed to destruction would be destroyed.
We do not, however, say that if a people, in the customary state of men’s passions, should be assailed by an invader, and should suddenly choose to declare that they would try whether Providence would protect them – of such a people, we do not say that they would experience protection, and that none of them would be killed.
But we say that the evidence of experience is that a people who habitually regard the obligations of Christianity in their conduct towards other men,
and who steadfastly refuse, through whatever consequences, to engage in acts of hostility, will experience protection in their peacefulness,
and it matters nothing to the argument, whether we refer that protection to the immediate agency of Providence, or to the influence of such conduct upon the minds of men.
Such has been the experience of the unoffending and unresisting in individual life.
A national example of a refusal to bear arms has only once been exhibited to the world;
but that one example has proved, so far as its political circumstances enabled it to prove, all that humanity could desire and all that scepticism could demand in favour of our argument.
It has been the ordinary practice of those who have colonized distant countries to force a footing, or to maintain it, with the sword.
One of the first objects has been to build a fort and to provide a military. The adventurers became soldiers, and the colony was a garrison.
Pennsylvania was, however, colonized by men who believed that war was absolutely incompatible with Christianity, and who therefore resolved not to practice it. Having determined not to fight, they maintained no soldiers and possessed no arms.
They planted themselves in a country that was surrounded by savages, and by savages who knew they were unarmed. If easiness of conquest or incapability of defence could subject them to outrage, the Pennsylvanians might have been the very sport of violence.
Plunderers might have robbed them without retaliation, and armies might have slaughtered them without resistance. If they did not give a temptation to outrage, no temptation could be given.
But these were the people who possessed their country in security, while those around them were trembling for their existence. This was a land of peace, while every other was a land of war.
The conclusion is inevitable, although it is extraordinary:
they were in no need of arms because they would not use them.
These Indians were sufficiently ready to commit outrages upon other states and often visited them with desolation and slaughter;
with that sort of desolation, and that sort of slaughter, which might be expected from men whom civilization had not reclaimed from cruelty, and whom religion had not awed into forbearance.
“But whatever the quarrels of the Pennsylvanian Indians were with others, they uniformly respected, and held as it were sacred, the territories of William Penn.”
“The Pennsylvanians never lost man, woman, or child by them, which neither the colony of Maryland, nor that of Virginia could say, nor could the great colony of New England claim such.”
The security and quiet of Pennsylvania was not a transient freedom from war, such as might accidentally happen to any nation:
She continued to enjoy it “for more than seventy70 years,” and subsisted in the midst of six Indian nations, “without so much as a militia for her defence.”
“The Pennsylvanians became armed, though without arms;
they became strong, though without strength;
they became safe, without the ordinary means of safety.
The constable’s staff was the only instrument of authority among them for the greater part of a century, and never, during the administration of Penn or that of his proper successors, was there a quarrel or a war.”
I cannot wonder that these people were not molested, extraordinary and unexampled as their security was.
There is something so noble in this perfect confidence in the Supreme Protector, in this utter exclusion of “slavish fear,” in this voluntary relinquishment of the means of injury or of defence, that I do not wonder that even ferocity could be disarmed by such virtue.
A people, generously living without arms, amidst nations of warriors! Who would attack a people such as this?
There are few men so abandoned as not to respect such confidence. It would be a peculiar and an unusual intensity of wickedness that would not even revere it.
And when was the security of Pennsylvania molested, and its peace destroyed?
When the men who had directed its counsels and who would not engage in war, were outvoted in its legislature; when they who supposed that there was greater security in the sword than in Christianity became the predominating body.
From that hour, the Pennsylvanians transferred their confidence in Christian principles to a confidence in their arms; and from that hour to the present they have been subject to war.
Such is the evidence derived from a national example of the consequences of a pursuit of the Christian policy in relation to war.
Here were a people who absolutely refused to fight, and who incapacitated themselves for resistance by refusing to possess arms, and this was the people whose land, amidst surrounding broils and slaughter, was selected as a land of security and peace.
The only national opportunity that the virtue of the Christian world has afforded us of ascertaining the safety of relying upon God for defence has determined that it is safe.