8. Resignation of moral agency
I do not know, indeed, under what circumstances of responsibility a man supposes himself to be placed, who thus abandons and violates his own sense of rectitude and of his duties.
Either he is responsible for his actions or he is not, and the question is a serious one to determine:
Christianity has certainly never stated any cases in which personal responsibility ceases:
If she admits such cases, she has at least not told us so; but she has told us, explicitly and repeatedly, that she does require individual obedience and imposes individual responsibility.
She has made no exceptions to the imperativeness of her obligations, whether we are required to neglect them or not;
and I can discover in her sanctions no reason to suppose that in her final adjudications she admits the plea that another required us to do that which she required us to forbear.
But it may be feared, it may be believed, that howsoever little religion will abate of the responsibility of those who obey, she will impose not a little upon those who command.
They, at least, are answerable for the enormities of war; unless, indeed, anyone shall tell me that responsibility attaches nowhere:
that that which would be wickedness in another man is innocence in a soldier;
and that heaven has granted to the directors of war a privileged immunity, by virtue of which crime incurs no guilt and receives no punishment.
It appears to me that the obedience which war exacts to arbitrary power possesses more of the character of servility, and even of slavery, than we are accustomed to suppose;
and as I think this consideration may reasonably affect our feeling of independence, howsoever little higher considerations may affect our consciences, I would allow myself a few sentences upon the subject:
I will acknowledge that when I see a company of men in a stated dress, and of a stated colour, ranged, rank and file, in the attitude of obedience,
turning or walking at the word of another, now changing the position of a limb, and now altering the angle of a foot, I feel humiliation and shame.
I feel humiliation and shame when I think of the capacities and the prospects of man, at seeing him thus drilled into obsequiousness and educated into machinery.