to the whole world? But, if we spent in our war with a handful of Indians in Florida, more than $40,000,000; if our revolutionary war cost England some seven hundred millions, and her wars with the French revolutionists four or five thousand millions; if those wars wasted for all Europe from thirty to forty thousand millions; if the war debts of Christendom are now some ten thousand millions; how easy, by a mere fraction of the bare interest on such sums, to furnish all the money needed to evangelize forthwith every tribe and family on the globe!

But war, moreover, dries up or poisons the very fountains of those moral influences which sustain the missionary enterprise. These are all found in the general prosperity of the church at home-in the growth of her members and her graces; in her frequent and glorious revivals of religion; in the multitude and ceaseless activity of her Sabbath schools; in her system of educating a body of able, devoted men for her ministry; in the success of her efforts to stay the ravages of intemperance, and fill the land with tracts, and Bibles, and churches, and the benign influences of a Sabbath devoted to the worship of God, and the salvation of souls. Here are the mainsprings of the missionary cause; and every one of them a vigorous, long-protracted war would either destroy, suspend, or seriously paralyze.

But suppose the church, even in the midst of war, to do more than ever for the spread of her gospel, how are her missionaries to reach their distant fields, or to carry on their blessed work there? Our vessels of commerce, which now transport them, war would of course sweep from the ocean; and so entirely dependent should we be on the mercy of a powerful, exasperated foe, that France, with a solitary war-ship, might drive most of our

missionaries from the Pacific, and England, with a single dash of her premier's pen, might silence half our missionaries now in the eastern world.

But let the missionary reach his field, and what does he there meet? A host of strong, bitter prejudices against his religion of peace, from the history of warring Christendom. Why were the Jesuit missionaries expelled from China, and all Christians forbidden to set foot on the shores of Japan? Those countries caught a horror of men so notorious, as nominal Christians are, for their rapacity, and their terrible success in war.

What

drew down the wrath of Burmah upon Judson and his co-workers? Not hatred of Christianity, for the Burmans as a body knew not enough about the gospel to hate it intelligently; but their dread of British bayonets bristling along their borders, of baptized warriors carrying, or threatening to carry, fire and sword into the heart of their dominions. Had those missionaries never been confounded with warriors from Christendom, they might have been permitted to continue their work unmolested, until all Burmah had bowed at the foot of the cross. Why was it for ages so extremely difficult to Christianize the aborigines of America? Ask the story of their wrongs, the history of our wars against them. A Romish priest, soon after the conquest of South America by the Spaniards, was one day conversing with some Indians, and urging them, by the awful retributions of heaven and of hell, to embrace Christianity, the religion of their conquerors. "Are there any Spaniards in heaven?" inquired those savages. "Spaniards!" replied the priest; "to be sure; the Spaniards are the children of the church-they all go to heaven." "Then," retorted those indignant, outraged sons of the forest," then, sir, we'll go to hell!" What a plunge! Yet so

felt not only the twelve millions whom the Spaniards are said to have destroyed in little more than forty years, but nearly all the Indians both in South and North America; and the gangrene of a similar prejudice has crept more or less over the great mass of unevangelized minds on the globe.

Still more specific are the statements of Wolfe, the missionary who traversed three continents. "A Jew once said to me, 'You go to war, and you call Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and pray to him to help your warriors to vanquish your enemies; and, after battle, you go to your churches, and there sing Te Deum for the victory.' When in the land of the Afghans, a minister of the prince asked me, 'What is your religion in England? Have you any at all? Yes,' said I, 'we have.' What then is it?' he retorted. 'You send messengers here to bribe the king, and stir up war. Is that your religion? I once gave a Turk the gospel to read, and pointed him to the fifth chapter of Matthew as showing the beauty of its doctrines. But,' said he, 'you Christians are the greatest hypocrites in the world.' 'How so?' 'Why, here it is said, Blessed are the peace-makers; and yet you, more than any others, teach us to make war, and are yourselves the greatest warriors on earth! How can you be so shameless ?'"

The heathen are not ignorant of our war character. Have they read none of our history written for ages in blood? Know they not that Christendom is now covered with barracks, and bristling with millions of bayonets? Nay, have we not ourselves carried the proof of our guilt to the very doors of the heathen? Show us in the wide world any considerable country which nominal Christians have not drenched in blood. Traverse all Asia, all Africa, all America; and where will you not

find their war-tracks in fire, and blood, and tears? Thus has war made the very name of Christianity a hissing, a scorn and a loathing through the pagan world; and the missionary, go where he will, must meet these deep, bitter, almost incurable prejudices against our religion of peace, so strangely belied for fifteen centuries by her warring votaries. Not a sea can he cross, not a country reach, scarce an island touch, but the war-dogs from Christendom have been there before him, to throw in his way obstacles which ages can hardly suffice to remove. Abolish war among nominal Christians; and you pave the way for the speedy, thorough conversion of the whole world to God, and peace will be found to be quite indispensable to the full success of the missionary enterprise.

SECTION IV.

INFLUENCE OF WAR ON THE SALVATION OF MANKIND.

THE Soul is man's great interest; and no created mind can adequately conceive how much will be gained by its salvation, or lost by its ruin. Earth has no arithmetic for such calculations. Ask the tenants of the spirit-world, the saint bowing in rapture before the eternal throne, or the lost sinner writhing in the agonies of perdition; ask Him who made the soul for himself, or Him who came from heaven to redeem the soul by his own blood, or that blessed Spirit who is now at work amid the ruins of the fall to renew the soul, and render it meet for the paradise above; for the omniscient God alone can tell the sum total of bliss or woe which awaits every traveller to eternity.

Here lies the chief evil of war—in its tendency to ruin the soul. It does so with a wide and fearful efficacy. It makes men forget their immortal interests. A war, in actual progress, becomes of course the all-engrossing theme of society; the whole land is full of it; the public mind is saturated with it; and such an absorption of high and low, old and young, saints and sinners, on any other subject than that of vital godliness, cannot fail to obstruct their salvation.

War, also, disqualifies men for a saving reception of the gospel. Metals must be melted before you can cast them; you must heat iron before you can weld it; and upon a community of minds impregnated with war-passions, the strongest truths of God's word would fall powerless as moon-beams on a mountain of ice. But war throws millions of minds into such a state. It fills whole empires with animosity, malevolence, revenge. It makes the public heart a caldron of seething, boiling passions. It blinds the mind to God's truth; it sears or perverts the conscience; it hardens or exasperates the heart; it renders the whole soul well-nigh impenetrable for the time to any arrows even from the quiver of the Almighty. Can you bring the truth of God into saving contact with minds thus affected? Can you, with any hope of success, preach the gospel to an army on tiptoe for battle, or to a community roused and convulsed with the fierce, vindictive passions of war? No; breathe the genuine war-spirit into every bosom on earth; and from that moment must the work of conversion and sanctification cease everywhere.

War, moreover, prevents the use of means for the salvation of men. The millions of standing warriors now in Christendom, it deprives even in peace of nearly all religious privileges, and thus exposes them