All reasonable doubts are construed in his favor; questions of law may also be started at every step to arrest a final decision against him; and, if convicted, he may appeal to a higher tribunal, or, demand a new trial, or a hearing on such points of law as may yet open some loop-hole of escape. The whole court, too, are under oath to deal fairly with him; and not only may unfavorable rulings of the judge be carried up for revision to a full bench of his peers, but the jury of twelve men must be unanimous in their decision, and may be directed to review it several times in succession. This jury, composed of men never committed against the prisoner, are kept by themselves until they agree upon their verdict, and then are required in a body to present it in open court under all the responsibilities of their oath. Now comes the sentence, not from the jury, but from the judge; and even this may be arrested by an appeal, or suspended for a new trial, or its execution either delayed for time to elicit further evidence in the culprit's favor, and soften the asperities of prejudice and passion, or entirely prevented by the interposition of executive clemency with an absolute pardon, or a commutation of the penalty. What a series of safeguards! How many opportunities for escaping conviction, or the utmost rigors of punishment! How constantly does the law hold its shield over the offender, guard him against the slightest injustice, and give him, even when convicted, the hope of having his sentence either remitted or mitigated!

Now, is there in war a shadow of resemblance to all this? If so, tell us where. In its arrogant, stern refusal of reference to impartial umpires? In the mustering of its fleets and armies for conflict? In the savage butcheries of its battle-fields? In its siege, and sack, and demolition of cities? In its burning of villages, its plunder of provinces, its indiscriminate, cold-blooded massacre of peaceful inhabitants? Do you find here any open, impartial court, any charges fairly tabled, any accuser confronting the accused, any witnesses testifying under oath, any sifting of their testimony, any arguing of the law or the facts, any candid, thorough investigation of the case by men duly qualified, and solemnly bound to give a righteous decision?

But, mark the final exccution of justice. How cautiously, how tenderly does the law proceed to the infliction of its own sentence! The offender, even when convicted by an impartial jury of his peers, and after receiving his sentence from the lips of a select and sworn judge, cannot, after all, be sent to his doom without an express warrant from the highest executive authority. How protracted the process! And at every step the way is open for his escape; nor is the sword of justice suffered to fall upon any but the convicted wrong-doer.

Has war any process like this? Is it careful to hurl its thunderbolts on the guilty alone? Do its real authors bear the brunt of its evils? Are rulers its only sufferers? Is their blood alone shed, only their property destroyed, their families alone ravished, or butchered, or beggared? Alas! these very men, the greatest criminals in the world, generally escape, and even rise by war to wealth,

and power, and fame on the poverty and woes of the people!— Do you say it is impossible to arraign and punish a whole community as you can a single culprit? True; and this fact alone proves how utterly absurd is the idea of securing justice by war. What! justice by the process of twenty, fifty or a hundred thousand professional cut-throats meeting on a field of battle to shoot, and stab, and hew, and trample each other down! As well might you seek justice by letting loose a menagerie of jackals, tigers and hyenas, to tear each other to pieces.

Justice of war! what a strange abuse of terms! No law to define right; no judge to interpret that law, or jury to apply it; no tribunal to try the cause; no rules prescribing the mode of trial, and requiring notice of the complaint, and opportunity for vindication; no charges duly preferred; no testimony given under oath, and fairly examined; no delay or chance for the correction of errors; no privilege of appeal to a higher tribunal; no right to claim a new hearing; no hope of reprieve or pardon; no trustworthy officer to execute the precise sentence of the law; no restriction of the penalty to the exact demerits of the criminal; no precautions to guard the innocent against suffering with the guilty! Each party makes a law for itself, erects its own tribunal of blood, and then proceeds to act as accuser and witness, as counsel, judge and executioner. What a burlesque on all ideas of justice! What an outrage on common sense to call this a judicial process, a mode of redress for national grievances!

Do you say we have no other mode? Then surely it is high time we had. Do you deem any other impossible? How so? Each nation has provided the means of justice between individuals; and can the brotherhood of nations devise no means of justice between themselves? Cannot rulers adjust their difficulties in the same way that the people do theirs?

These questions, admitting only an affirmative answer, push us to the necessity of a. CONGRESS OF NATIONS, first to establish a Code of International Law, and next to organize a High Court of Nations for the interpretation of that law, and the peaceful, equitable adjustment of all national disputes. Without some provision of this kind, there never can be any system of justice between nations, with its standard of right, its board of arbitrators, and the rules requisite for a fair trial, and a righteous decision.

Already is the moral sense of the world giving its verdict against the arbitraments of war as no criterion of right. Does it guarantee the conquests of Napoleon? No; every one of them has been relinquished, and the boundaries of all Europe are nearly the same now that they were before his sword reconstructed almost its entire geography. Does Christendom submit to the partition of Poland? True; but it is with a deep under-tone of displeasure, with such a strong, settled conviction of its injustice as must render the possession continually precarious, and may yet restore Poland to her own sons.

AMERICAN PEACE SOCIETY, BOSTON, MASS

WAR AND MISSIONS,

OR

PEACE AUXILIARY TO THE WORLD'S CONVERSION.

God is intent on the salvation of our race; and his church, after ages of slumber, has at length girded herself somewhat in earnest for evangelizing all nations. The work is well begun; and al ready is the Bible translated into nearly two hundred languages, the cross is planted in not a few of the strongholds of paganism, and more than a thousand missionaries are at this hour preaching Jesus and him crucified in almost every country on the globe.

Let us, then, contemplate THE CAUSE OF PEACE AS AUXILIARY TO THIS WORK OF MISSIONS. The former seeks to abolish war; to extirpate the entire system from Christendom forever; to make peace among nations, as much as among individuals, co-extensive with our religion of peace; to weave its pacific principles once more into the creed and character of all professed Christians, and thus render these principles effective in securing peace wherever Christianity itself prevails.

Look at God's example in the case. Has he not always treated war as a most serious obstruction to the spread of his gospel? What time did he select for our Savior's great mission from heaven? A time when the temple of Janus at Rome, in token of general peace and tranquillity, was shut more than twenty years; a longer period of rest from war than had then been known for ages. Review the history of his church from that day to this; and where will you find her eras of zealous, successful evangelization? Not in war, but in peace almost alone; and during the last thirty years of general peace, more has been done towards the world's conversion to God, than had been done for centuries before.

Equally conclusive is the argument from the nature of the case. The missionary enterprise aims to spread Christianity over the whole earth; if peace is confessedly one of its fruits and promised results, it certainly ought to go along with the gospel; and hence the revival among ourselves of its pacific principles, is a very desirable, if not indispensable preparation for the missionary work. We shall of course give to the heathen a Christianity no better than we profess at home. Ours is the prototype of theirs; the character of the church must ever be the model of her converts; they will embrace the kind of Christianity exhibited before them; and, if that is in any respect defective, its imperfections will all be stamped upon them in bold relief. The converts to Popery among pagans have notoriously been a species of baptised idolaters, counterparts of Papists at home; and, since whole nations in Europe

P. T. NO. LVI.

were first driven into a nominal Christianity by the sword, it is no wonder that the religion of their descendants is now the patroness of a war-system the most terribly effective that the world ever saw. If rum-drinkers ourselves, we shall spread a rum-drinking Christianity; if slave-holders, a slave-holding Christianity; if warriors, or abettors of war, a war tolerating Christianity. Every point of our faith, every aspect of our character, we shall be likely to impress upon our converts among the heathen; and, if peace is a part of our religion, we should of course prepare to enforce it aright all over the earth.

What, then, does the gospel teach on this subject? Blessed are the peace-makers; for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and do good to them that despitefully use you. Do good unto all men. If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. See that none render evil for evil unto any man. Follow peace with all men; and let all bitterness, and anger, and wrath, and clamor, be put away from you. Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them. Avenge not yourselves; but whoso smiteth you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. Put up thy sword; for all they that take the sword, shall perish by the sword.' Such was the Christianity foretold by ancient prophets; and Isaiah, portraying its millennial triumphs, represents it as constraining all nations to 'beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruninghooks, and cease even from learning the art of war any more.'

Surely, then, peace is quite essential to a full preparation of the church for the work of converting all nations to the Christianity thus foretold by prophets, and thus taught by Christ and his Apostles. This work God has assigned to his people; but, if strangers to the pacific principles of his gospel, or reluctant to inculcate them aright, are they duly qualified to teach all nations a religion of peace? Christians they may be, and even excellent in other respects; but, while defective on this point, are they the coworkers required by a God of peace for preaching his gospel of peace to every creature? They may teach a part of it; but will they the whole? Will they so enforce its pacific principles as to uproot the Upas of war, and sweep away the entire mass of its abominations and woes? Will they not leave in their converts the moral gangrene of war? Here then is an obvious, important part of the training necessary to qualify Christians fully for their great work of converting the world to a pure, unmutilated gospel.

We insist on all this, moreover, as necessary to insure God's full blessing. Already has the missionary cause accomplished a great deal; but, in proportion to the means used, how little in comparison with what was achieved by a dozen fishermen starting from Galilee, poor and alone, on the vast project of a world's evangelization! How can we account for the difference? Only on the

supposition of God's refusal to bestow an equal blessing. But why this refusal? Is his arm shortened? Surely not. He could, if he would, crown our missionaries with all the success vouchsafed to Apostles. Why then does he not? There may be many other reasons; but we think a chief one is to be found in the wardegeneracy of the church. Even under the Jewish dispensation, God manifested his abhorrence of blood by forbidding David, expressly for this reason, to build the temple; and ever since the war-degeneracy of his followers, has the Prince of Peace shown his displeasure by his diminished blessing on their efforts to spread his religion. How rapid its early progress! How signal, how glorious the success of its first missionaries! How fast did she multiply her trophies, and gather her laurels, so long as she kept herself pure, and true to her peaceful Lord! Without scrip or purse, with no diadem on her brow save a crown of thorns, and no weapon in her hand but the sword of the Spirit, she went forth under God's smiles from conquering to conquer. Paganism bowed or fled before her; and in less than three centuries did she fill the Roman Empire with such a multitude of her converts, that Constantine took her to his throne, and robed her in imperial purple. It was a master-stroke of policy, and showed the extent of her triumphs and her power; but it proved well nigh her ruin. It was Delilah shearing Samson of his locks. She aped Cæsar, and shared Cæsar's fate. She took the sword, and she well nigh perished by the sword. The Holy Spirit, the Dove of peace from heaven, fled before the vultures of war; and from that day the church lost the secret of her power, the mainspring of her progress, her simple reliance under God on moral means alone. She abandoned her principles of peace; and the God of peace has frowned upon her for more than fifteen centuries. For ages had her members gone to the stake rather than turn warriors; but the she sent them forth, just like pagans, to this trade of blood, and has ever since lent it her sanction and support. The cross, emblem of peace, she put upon the banners of war; she left the stake, and went forth to the battle-field; instead of baring her own bosom to the persecutor's steel, she dipt her hands in the blood of her foes; and the result was, that for a thousand years she lost far more than she gained, and left nearly all the countries touching the Mediterranean on three continents, the very centre of her primitive triumphs, in a condition less favorable to the religion of Jesus than they were at the hour of his crucifixion. Her whole war-period was at best a dead loss to the church; it merely embalmed in blood the trophies of her primitive purity and zeal. So with the Reformation; it won all its triumphs with the sword of the Spirit, and cut the sinews of its strength when it drew the sword of war; nor has it in two or three centuries gained so much as it once did in a single year.

Peace, moreover, fosters the spirit of missions. The former is closely allied to the latter. It was the spirit of peace that brought