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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 corps 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. On this point we cannot here dwell; its full discussion would require a volume; and we can only commend it to the serious consideration of all that seek the prosperity of religion at home or abroad.

But suppose the church, after all, able and willing in the midst of war to do even 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 dependant 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 heralds of the cross reach their field; and will they there find no obstruction from war? How often has its occurrence on the spot arrested or neutralized their labors, broken up their stations, and driven the missionaries out of the country! Go to Syria, to China, to Burmah, to Africa, to the islands of the Pacific; and you will find ample and startling illustrations of this truth.

But the worst effect is seen in the prejudices diffused all over the earth by the wars of nations reputedly Christian. These wars, so many libels of blood on our religion of peace, have filled the world with such hatred of its character, such contempt of its claims, or such fears of its influence, as to make them dread its approach, and spurn its offers. Let us listen to the testimony of men who have themselves witnessed these very results. This country,' says Mr. Hume, an American missionary in India so late as 1844, was conquered at an immense expense of treasure and blood; the government still retains it by the power of the sword; and the effect is most unhappy on the minds of the natives, who regard the missionary as the representative and teacher of a religion which lends its sanction to war, nor seeks to restrain its professors from the rage of conquest, and the lust of gain.' 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 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 baptised warriors carrying, or threatening to carry, fire and sword into the heart of their dominions. Here was the secret of the persecution waged for a time against those missionaries; and, had they 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.

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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 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?" ›

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We cannot suppose the heathen ignorant of our war character. Have they read none of our history written for so many ages in blood? Have they never heard of such campaigns as those of Marlborough, Eugene and Napoleon; of such sieges as that of Magdeburg, Saragossa or Genoa; of such battle-fields as those of Agincourt and Fontenay, of Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo? 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 wartracks in fire, and blood, and tears?

This argument, however, we rest not on the strongest facts of the case. We will not now detail the frauds and outrages of our own forefathers on the sons of the forest; we will not retrace the long train of Spanish wars in North and South America; nor will we review the crusades, or the centuries of fierce, bloody conflict with Mohammedans, or the scores of wars on the shores of Africa, or the southern peninsula of Asia. Leave all these out of view, and come, we do not say to the cold-blooded butcheries of Napoleon on the sands of Syria, but to the atrocities perpetrated in war by nominal Christians upon the heathen in the heart of this very century. Look at our own ruthless, infamous war against the Seminoles in Florida. Go to Scinde or Afghanistan, and there witness from British soldiers rapine, carnage and conflagration at which even a savage might shudder. See Britain, the chief nurse of modern missions, sending her fleets and armies to force the poison of India upon the sons and daughters of China. Hear some of the results from the lips of her own agents in this work of villany and blood. At Amoy, we killed fifteen hundred of the Chinese, with the loss ourselves of only sixteen men. Such a

tremendous bombardment as was continued for two hours in a neighborhood so densely populated, must of course have occasioned the most pitiable sights; and at one spot four children were struck down, and the frantic father was seen first embracing their dead bodies, and then attempting to drown himself in a neighboring tank. Numerous scenes like this were witnessed!'

Trace the British in their late crusade against the Afghans. At Ghuznee, a wild fusilade was opened upon them by our troops; and, in the midst of indescribable confusion, the native soldiers, gathering in threes or fours around each Afghan, shot and hunted them down like mad dogs. The scene soon excited feelings of horror, as the Afghans sunk under repeated wounds, and the ground was strewed with bleeding, mangled, heaving carcasses; here ghastly figures stiffly stretched in calm but grim repose, and there the last breath yielded up through clenched teeth in attitudes of despair and defiance, with hard struggles, and muttered imprecations. At the sacking of Istalif, supposed to contain 14,000 soldiers, 'Maj. Sanders was engaged for two days in directing the work of destruction; and during this time the place was given over to fire and sword; not a living soul was spared, whether armed or unarmed; the men were hunted down like wild beasts, not a prisoner taken, no mercy dreamt of! Whenever the body of an Afghan was found, the Hindoo Sepoy set fire to his clothes, that the curse of a "burnt father" might rest upon his children; and even the wounded, when found alive, were in this way roasted to death! Cabool, also, with its 60,000 inhabitants one year before, we made a heap of ruins, and left here and at Istalif 80,000 human beings houseless, and without food. We laid waste the country wherever we went, burning the strongholds of the chiefs, and villages of the peasantry, showing no mercy, and giving no quarter to friend or foe, armed or unarmed, open enemies, or professed allies.'

Take another case from China. 'At Ningpo, the people, hurrying to get out of the city as fast as possible, were crowded in dense masses into the narrow street, where, coming up with our cannon within one hundred yards of them, we poured upon the crowded fugitives so destructive a fire of grape and canister, that we had to remove their dead or wounded bodies to the sides of the street, before our guns could advance; and thus we pursued them for miles with our artillery and bayonets !'

Look now at a case of individual suffering. After we had,' says Capt. Loch, 'forced our way over piles of furniture placed to barricade the door, we entered an open court strewed with rich stuffs, and covered with clotted blood; and upon the steps leading to the great hall, lay in their own gore, two bodies of youthful Tartars, apparently brothers, cold and stiff. Having gained the threshold of their abode, they had fallen from the loss of blood, and died on the spot. Stepping over these bodies, we entered the hall, and met face to face three women seated, a mother and two daughters. At their feet lay two bodies of elderly men, with their throats cut from ear to ear, and their senseless heads resting on the feet of their relations. To the right were two young girls, beautiful and delicate, crouching over a living soldier, and endeavoring thus to conceal him. I stopped, horror-struck at what I saw, and stood spell-bound to the spot. The women must have discovered my feelings; for the expression on the mother's face of cold, unutterable despair, soon changed to the evident workings of scorn and hate, which at last burst forth in a paroxysm of invective, and finally sought relief in floods of tears. Action was the only language she could make intelligible to us; and, coming close to me, she seized me by the arm, and, with clenched fist and deadly frown, pointed to the bodies, to her daughters, to herself, and her yet splendid house. Then she stepped back a pace, closed her hands firmly, and in a hoarse, husky voice spoke, as I could see by her gestures, of her misery, of her hate, and, I doubt not, of revenge. It was a scene one could not bear long. I attempted by signs to explain, and offered my services to pass her in safety through the gates into the open country; but the poor woman would not listen to me, and the whole family were by this time in loud and bitter lamentations.'

What must be the result of all this? The British forces,' says an eye-witness, 'have made Christianity and civilization, in the eyes of the Chinese, synonymous with murder and rapine. Violating women; breaking in pieces monuments of the dead; digging up and mutilating bodies; protecting, with the ships of war, the opium smugglers on the coast; opening the way for them, and for pirates, to Whampoa, and making the settlement of Hong Kong a sink where the filth of China and of Europe run together!' Thus have baptised warriors 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 wardogs from Christendom have been there before him, to throw in his way obstacles which ages can hardly suffice to remove.

Surely, then, it is high time for the church to remove from Christendom this crying sin and shame. Do you say she cannot? Yes, she can, if she will; for she has in her hands all the power requisite under God for the purpose. Let her come up to this work in earnest; let her put forth upon it her utmost energies; let all her members through the world unite as one man against war; let all her pulpits open their moral batteries upon it; let every press under her control or influence teem with remonstrances against it; let all her schools and all her firesides train the young to hold it in deep, undying abhorrence; let every Christian pray, and talk, and act against it, and utterly refuse it his support or sanction in any way; and not only would there be no more war in Christendom, but the whole system would come to an end ere-long and forever.

Do you still plead that war is an affair of the state, rather than the church? True, the state does wage it; but has the church lent it no aid, no encouragement? Does she never talk of its glories, never train her own sons for its murderous work, never pray to the God of peace for its success, never return him thanks for its blood-drenched victories? Be it then that she cannot alone abolish or prevent war, she certainly can clear her own skirts of its guilt, by solemnly protesting before all men against it as utterly unchristian, and thus compel the whole world henceforth to regard Christianity as no more responsible for the wars of Christendom, than for the idolatries of India, or the cannibalism of New Zealand.

Do you tell us, however, to spread Christianity, and that alone will, while nothing else can, put an end to war? True, if we spread the gospel in its purity, its pacific like its other principles, so as to secure peace equally with repentance and faith; but has the church done this for fifteen hundred years? If so, what mean the centuries of war among her own members, the millions of bayonets even now bristling all over Christendom, or the thousand millions of dollars still wasted every year upon its war-system? Make men such Christians, and they will cease from war! Have they? If so, tell us when and where. Do you say they were Christians only in name? None of them real disciples of Christ? None such now engaged in war, or lending it their countenance? Alas! the archbishop of England stereotyped, to be repeated in all her churches, a solemn form of thanksgiving to God for the very atrocities of which we have here quoted a few specimens from Scinde, Afghanistan and China. Put an end to war by spreading such views of Christianity, a gospel thus bathed in blood, and steeped in pollution! Never. We must weave peace into the actual Christianity of Christendom,before our missionaries will carry peace along with them as one of its fruits. Thus all say of intemperance; and why not of war? So long as the evil was in the bosom of the church; so long as her officers trafficked in the liquid poison for a livelihood; so long as her members, without rebuke, drank it as a

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