The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Leo Tolstoy [reading cloud ebooks .TXT] 📗

his friends say, ‘Put him in the Army.’ What has he to do in the army? Why, not to love his enemies, but whenever he sees an enemy to run him through the body with a bayonet. That is the nature of all religious teaching in this country. I do not think that that is a very good way of carrying out the precepts of religion. I think if it is a good thing for the boy to love his enemy, it is a good thing for the man to love his enemy.”

And farther: “The nations of Europe⁠ ⁠… keep⁠ ⁠… somewhere about 28,000,000 of armed men to settle quarrels by killing one another, instead of by arguing. That is what the Christian nations of the world are doing at this moment. It is a very expensive way also; for this publication which I saw⁠ ⁠… made out that since the year 1872 these nations had spent the almost incredible amount of £1,500,000,000 of money in preparing, and settling their quarrels by killing one another. Now it seems to me that with that state of things one of two positions must be accepted, either that Christianity is a failure, or that those who profess to expound Christianity have failed in expounding it properly.”

“Until our ironclads are withdrawn, and our Army disbanded, we are not entitled to call ourselves a Christian nation,” says Mr. J. Jowett Wilson.

In a discussion which arose in connection with the question of the obligatoriness of Christian pastors to preach against war, Rev. G. D. Bartlett said, among other things: “If I understand the Scriptures I say that men are only playing with Christianity when they ignore this question,” that is, say nothing about war. “I have lived a longish life, I have heard many sermons, and I can say without any exaggeration that I never heard universal peace recommended from the pulpit half a dozen times in my life.⁠ ⁠… Some twenty years ago I happened to stand in a drawing-room where there were forty or fifty people, and I dared to moot the proposition that war was incompatible with Christianity. They looked upon me as an arrant fanatic. The idea that we could get on without war was regarded as unmitigated weakness and folly.”

In the same sense spoke the Catholic Abbé Defourny:

“One of the first precepts of this eternal law which burns in the consciences of men is the one which forbids taking the life of one’s like, shedding human blood without just cause, and without being constrained by necessity. It is one of those laws which are most indelibly engraved in the human heart.⁠ ⁠… But if it is a question of war, that is, of the shedding of human blood in torrents, the men of the present do not trouble themselves about a just cause. Those who take part in it do not think of asking themselves whether these innumerable murders are justified or not, that is, if the wars, or what goes by that name, are just or iniquitous, legal or illegal, permissible or criminal⁠ ⁠… whether they violate, or not, the primordial law which prohibits homicide and murder⁠ ⁠… without just cause. But their conscience is mute in this matter.

“War has ceased for them to be an act which has anything to do with morality. They have no other joy, in the fatigue and perils of the camp, than that of being victorious, and no other sadness than that of being vanquished.⁠ ⁠… Do not tell me that they serve their country. A long time ago a great genius told you these words, which have become proverbial, ‘Reject justice, and what are the empires but great societies of brigands?’ And are not a band of brigands themselves small empires? Brigands themselves have certain laws or conventions by which they are ruled. There, too, they fight for the conquest of booty and for the honor of the band.⁠ ⁠… The principle of the institution” (he is talking of the establishment of an international tribunal) “is this, that the European nations should stop being a nation of thieves, and the armies gangs of brigands and of pirates, and, I must add, of slaves. Yes, the armies are gangs of slaves, slaves of one or two rulers, or one or two ministers, who dispose of them tyrannically, without any other guarantee, we know, than a nominal one.

“What characterizes the slave is this, that he is in the hands of his master like a chattel, a tool, and no longer a man. Just so it is with a soldier, an officer, a general, who march to murder and to death without any care as to justice, by the arbitrary will of ministers.⁠ ⁠… Thus military slavery exists, and it is the worst of slaveries, particularly now, when by means of enforced military service it puts the chain about the necks of all free and strong men of the nations, in order to make of them tools of murder, killers by profession, butchers of human flesh, for this is the only opus servile for which they are chained up and trained.⁠ ⁠…

“Rulers, to the number of two or three⁠ ⁠… united into a secret cabinet, deliberate without control and without minutes which are intended for publicity⁠ ⁠… consequently without any guarantee for the conscience of those whom they send out to be killed.”

“The protests against the heavy arming do not date from our day,” says Signor E. T. Moneta. “Listen to what Montesquieu wrote in his time:

“ ‘France’ ” (you may substitute the word “Europe”) “ ‘will be ruined by the military. A new malady has spread through Europe; it has infected our princes and has made them keep a disproportionate number of troops. It has its exacerbations, and it necessarily becomes contagious, because, as soon as one state increases what it calls its troops, the others suddenly increase theirs, so that nothing is gained by it but the common ruin.

“ ‘Every monarch keeps on a war footing all the troops which he might need in case his people