4. Familiarity with human destruction – with plunder
If the soldier engages in the destruction of his species, he should at least engage in it with reluctance, and abandon it with joy. The slaughter of his fellow men should be dreadful in execution and in thought:
But what is his aversion or reluctance?
He feels none; it is not even a subject of seriousness to him. He butchers his fellow candidates for heaven as a woodman fells a coppice: with as little reluctance and as little regret.
Those who will compute the tendency of this familiarity with human destruction cannot doubt whether it will be pernicious to the moral character:
What is the hope, that he who is familiar with murder, who has himself often perpetrated it, and who exults in the perpetration, will retain the principles of virtue undepraved?
His moral feelings are blunted; his moral vision is obscured:
We say his moral vision is obscured, for we do not think it possible that he should retain even the perception of Christian purity.
The soldier, again, who plunders the citizen of another nation without remorse or reflection, and bears away the spoils with triumph, will inevitably lose something of his principles of probity:
These principles are shaken; an inroad is made upon their integrity, and it is an inroad that makes subsequent inroads easier.
Mankind does not generally resist the influence of habit:
If we rob and shoot those who are “enemies” today, we are in some degree prepared to shoot and rob those who are not enemies tomorrow.
The strength of the restraining moral principle is impaired. Law may, indeed, still restrain us from violence, but the power and efficiency of principle are diminished.
And this alienation of the mind from the practice, love, and perception of Christian purity, therefore, of necessity extends its influence to the other circumstances of life.
It is hence, in part, that the general profligacy of armies arises:
That which we have not practiced in war we are not likely to practice in peace, and there is no hope we shall possess the goodness which we neither love nor perceive.