11. Animosity of party – Spirit of resentment
I do not think that those who feel an interest in the virtue and the happiness of the world will regard the animosity of party and the restlessness of resentment that are produced by a war as trifling evils:
If anything is opposite to Christianity, it is retaliation and revenge. In the obligation to restrain these dispositions, much of the characteristic placability of Christianity consists.
The very essence and spirit of our religion abhor resentment. The very essence and spirit of war promote resentment; and what then must be their mutual adverseness? That war excites these passions needs not to be proved.
When a war is being contemplated, or when it has begun, what are the endeavours of its promoters?
They animate us by every artifice of excitement to hatred and animosity:
Pamphlets, placards, newspapers, and caricatures – every agent is in requisition to irritate us into malignity. No, dreadful as it is, the pulpit resounds with declamations to stimulate our too sluggish resentment and to invite us to blood.
And thus the most un-Christian of all our passions, the passion that it is most the object of our religion to repress, is excited and fostered.
Christianity cannot be flourishing under circumstances like these:
The more effectually we are animated to war, the more nearly we extinguish the dispositions of our religion. War and Christianity are like the opposite ends of a balance, of which one is depressed by the elevation of the other.
These are the consequences that make war dreadful to a state:
Slaughter and devastation are sufficiently terrible, but their collateral evils are their greatest. It is the immoral feeling that war diffuses – it is the depravation of principle – that forms the mass of its mischief.