Books – Historians – Poets Crimes should be traced to their causes, and guilt should be fixed upon those who occasion, although they may not perpetrate them. And to whom are the frequency and the crimes of war to be principally attributed? To the directors of public opinion, to the declaimers upon glory, to men who sit quietly at home

1. Palpable ferocity of war When I endeavour to divest myself of the influence of habit, and to contemplate a battle with those emotions which it would excite in the mind of a being who had never before heard of human slaughter, I find that I am impressed only with horror and astonishment – and perhaps, of the two emotions,

2. Reasonableness of the inquiry It may properly be a subject of wonder that the arguments, which are brought to justify a custom such as war, receive so little investigation. It must be a studious ingenuity of mischief that could devise a practice more calamitous or horrible; and yet it is a practice of which it rarely occurs to us

3. Revealed will of God the sole standard of decision It is agreed by all sober moralists that the foundation of our duty is the will of God, and that his will is to be ascertained by the Revelation that he has made. To Christianity, therefore, we refer in determination of this great question. We admit no other test of

4. Declarations of great men that Christianity prohibits war There are, however, testimonies, delivered in the calm of reflection by acute and enlightened men, which may reasonably be allowed at least so much weight as to free the present inquiry from the charge of being wild or visionary. Christianity indeed needs no such auxiliaries; but if they induce an examination

5. Christianity In an inquiry into the decisions of Christianity upon the question of war, we have to refer to the general tendency of the revelation, to the individual declarations of Jesus Christ, to his practice, to the sentiments and practices of his commissioned followers, to the opinions respecting its lawfulness which were held by their immediate converts, and to

6. General character of Christianity It is a remarkable fact that the laws of the Mosaic dispensation, which confessedly was an imperfect system, are laid down clearly and specifically in the form of an express code; while those of that purer religion which Jesus Christ introduced into the world are only to be found casually and incidentally scattered, as it

7. Precepts and declarations of Jesus Christ It appears, therefore, to follow that in the inquiry of whether war is sanctioned by Christianity, a specific declaration of its decision is not likely to be found. If, then, we are asked for a prohibition of war by Jesus Christ in the express term of a command, in the manner in which

8. Arguments that the precepts are figurative only It is, however, objected that the prohibitions “ resist not evil ” and the like are figurative, and that they do not mean that no injury is to be punished and that no outrage to be repelled. It has been asked, with complacent exultation, what would these advocates of peace say to