AMERICA AT WAR

A SERMON

PREACHED IN THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF PHILADELPHIA
ON SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 1898
BY

JOSEPH MAY

PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY

THE UNITARIAN BOOK-ROOM
1708 CHESTNUT STREET
PHILADELPHIA

AMERICA AT WAR

" If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell
him his fault between thee and him alone.: if he shall hear
thee, thou hast gained thy brother.
" But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one
or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses
every word may be established.
" And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell il unto the
church : but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto
thee as an heathen man and a publican." — Mat. xviii :
<5-'>- ... ,
Scripture Lesson: Mat. v, 3-10; 21-23; 38-48; and
xvm, 15-17.
[This sermon opened with remarks addressed to the congregation,
personally, continuing as follows.]
I could have, at this moment, no greater relief of mind
than from the confidence I cherish that, in the horror and
sorrow which fill my heart at the unhappy condition of
our country, you are sure, substantially, to sympathize.
It is still the grief of the world that it does not yet
recognize the security and strength of the ethical princi
ples offered to its faith by its highest master in religion.
That pitiful lament ascribed to Jesus in one of those re-
¦ cently discovered " sayings" — " I stood in the midst of the
world, and I found all men drunken, and none found I
athirst among them, and my soul grieves over the sons
of men, because they are blind in their hearts" — rings in
my ears as I note how prompt men still are to look to
force to secure even the aims of righteousness and hu
manity, and how little patience they have for the methods
of forbearance, brotherly love, and moral influence, on
which Jesus insisted as not only „ right and beautiful, but
also adequate and sujficient in all the relations of life. It
fills me with sadness to see how readily, in the hearts of

those who have heard his words from infancy, the instincts
of prejudice and hate are aroused against distant commu
nities of persons, among whom, were we acquainted with
them, we should find uncounted thousands of good and
true men and women whom to know must be to love. I
have never been in any corner of the world where I did
not meet such ; and among descendants of that people
who are now placed in public antagonism to ours, have
been some, at least, of the finest characters I have ever
known. How unfortunate and misleading it is that great masses
of men become, as it were, personified in our thoughts,
their individualities merged in a common type (which ac
tually exists nowhere, but is an idea, merely), towards
which our sentiments, especially our inhuman sentiments,
readily go out under excitement, not qualified as they are
in actual personal relations by the presence of real facts,
but given free rein by fancy, prejudice and popular clamor !
I would not forget that, in fact, every nation is an ag
gregation of families, of industrious fathers, loving moth
ers; husbands and wives laboring jointly for their young
broods; good sons and daughters caring for their parents ;
friends and neighbors meeting in the happy intercourse of
life. All have their idiosyncrasies — our own type has its
very faulty ones — but all are human ; all are what the
providence of God, in history and nature, has made them ;
all are our brethren, to be thought of and dealt with in
the spirit of love, which should make us considerate of
the sources of their faults when these offend us, and pati
ent with them as we might wish they should be with our
own ; and all this as truly when they are aggregated into
nations as when we consider them individually.
My last entreaty of you, at this moment, shall be that
during the months or years of cruel strife which s^tdly lie
before us, you forget none of these things. We are not
individuals, but members one of another, and you will
now, for some time, be peculiarly conscious that, in even
the most important respects, the destiny and conduct of
the private man are powerfully overruled by his relation
to a great social order, over which the judgment, con-

science and will of particular men necessarily preside, to
mould common action. The organization of men in so
ciety, in states and nations, being essential to the devel
opment of God's plan for humanity, becomes a divine
thing, to which every man is bound to pay profound re
spect. This is, as I lately remarked, the underlying
truth of the apostle's saying, " The powers that be are
ordained of God." The existing political order is entitled
to that which it claims of every citizen — an essential
loyalty of spirit and purpose. Only so can it accomplish
its task, and the alternative must be anarchy.
Yet not that this, in a free state, may ever reduce the in
dividual to an automaton and puppet, such as despotisms
make him. The free citizen is forever the divinely or
dained critic of those who, while appointed to administer
affairs, are yet only the servants of the free community.
In no possible exigency, least of all in one abnormal and
dangerous, should the free citizen abandon or relax his
vigilant oversight of all that legislators or administrators
do. In critical times, the opportunities of corruption,
the risks of folly, the temptations to relax morals and
descend to planes of motive and conduct unworthy of an
advanced day, necessarily multiply. Conscious of our
own characteristic fault as a people, that, indifferent to
the noble quality of our institutions we have come to
place, in control of our affairs, so many of our least
worthy citizens ; that we so seldom, in fact, promote the
presence, in our public counsels, of the highest and best,
the wisest, truest and most capable of our citizens, we
are bound to watch at all times (and most of all in critical
times), every act of our public men, to scan its spirit, and
consider its form, that we may thus supply, ourselves, the
elements of wisdom and righteousness so often lacking
in those whom we select to represent us.
I have no words to express, my dear friends, my cha
grin and grief at the state of public affairs in which our
nation actually is, to-day. I cannot yet realize it, so as
adequately to judge it. To us all, I am sure, it must, for
a while, be as a hideous and sorrowful dream. I cannot
possibly give it my approval, nor approve the course of

5
those who have done most to bring it about. I pro
foundly distrust the most' effective motives which have
underlain their action. In large measure, I believe these
to have been sordid, dishonest, unpatriotic, — un-American
in whatever sense should give that term honor. I do not
feel that we have treated a sister- nation, even one whose
sincerity in diplomacy we have had grave reason to dis
trust, with the consideration which a magnanimous people
conscious of their unlimited power and resources, should
have manifested. I believe that a firm and persistent, yet
forbearing, course of policy, like that to which our Chief
Magistrate sought so earnestly and nobly to confine us,
would, in due time, have realized every worthy aspiration
and every just claim which is involved in this public issue.
There will forever be a profound pathos about the closing
paragraphs of the President's Message, in which he so
earnestly urged on Congress patience in dealing with a
difficult question, and besought them to leave to him, as
the executive head of the nation, the task of composing
it, of realizing the claims of humanity and justice. I
shall forever honor this man, on whom the responsibility
of supreme official station has so plainly worked to give
him the gravity, the conscientiousness and true patriot
ism which well become the uncrowned head of a mighty
people. The beatitude of the peacemakers places a halo
around the head of William McKinley.
But we are now in the presence of an accomplished
fact. The causes, the motives, the mistakes which have
brought it about are matters of history, — swiftly made in
our modern day.
The duty of a citizen of a free state, at war with a sis
ter nation, is the question for each private heart and con
science to consider.
What is it ?
First : — Forget not this, my friends, that no act of man
•can set aside the truths of God, which become the laws
of God in the world. Every law of right, every law of
human brotherhood, the whole law of love, are as impera
tive to-day as they were yesterday. " Though hand join
an hand, yet shall not the wicked go unpunished," Com-

mitted by the acts of our representatives to the ghastly
state of war, we are bound to mitigate that condition by
applying to it every moral palliative which progressing
civilization has made practicable. Already, as a nation,
we start out honorably, in the public declaration by our
Administration that the worst element of naval warfare,
the practice of privateering, shall be by us abandoned.
So, to the end, we are to insist that every other condi
tion of warfare which may reduce its miseries and moral
evils be unfailingly realized. It is one of the comforts of
the moment to feel sure that, in these respects, our nation
will not fail before the world. As the terrible contests
approaching will bring out novel horrors, through the
awful potency of the instruments employed, — and thus, I
hope, hasten the day when war shall cease through its
own impracticability, — so may something be achieved to
place the conduct of warfare on a higher moral plane, in
all respects.
Secondly : — I beg you, in your private hearts, abandon
'and put steadily aside every relic of barbarous thought
and feeling, of foolish and criminal pride, of that insane
joy in strife which comes so easily to the surface in times
such as await you. In the sight of God, recognize that
even a truly just war, if such there may ever be, is yet
the most deplorable of public necessities ; that all war is
a relic and expression of barbarism, which it is the tend
ency of civilization to outgrow and do away; that
one of which a humane expediency is, at best, the sole
moral' justification, is especially deplorable; to be prose
cuted only as a distressing and nauseous task, to which
'human weakness, error and perversity constrain us, and
for which we incessantly implore the - forgiveness of Al
mighty God.
Thirdly : — One of the worst evils to be apprehended
from this sudden outbreak of warfare, is the development
in our people of the military spirit. The presence of that
spirit among our Northern people is an unhappy legacy
from the Civil War. It hardly existed among us before
that unhappy struggle. There was an unapprehended
dignity in our position, in those former days, on which it

may be that the historian of the future will look back
wistfully. Already a great nation, with a vast territory,
our ports lay undefended ; our coast was open to the
prow of every approaching vessel ; we had scarcely the
rudiments of army or navy. Secure in that retirement
from .international complications which Washington had
enjoined, in the sober and industrious character of our
population, ambition and the love of strife lay dormant
and ineffective among us.
Alas ! the scene changed. We were forced into war,
and by it the military instinct was visibly awakened in
many breasts. The noblest spectacle of the war for the
Union was the quick disbandment of our huge armies, and
their immediate return to civil pursuits. Yet, by the ro
mance of military service, by its intense stimulation of
the virile passions, by the intoxication of our success, the
seeds of martial impulse and ambition were widely sown,
and they may yet bear bitter fruit in the coming develop
ment of our nation, unless their growth be rigorously re
pressed. To no people is the love of war so-perilous as to
a democratic one. It makes the principles of civil glory
look pale. It accustoms populations to subordination,
and to the idolatry of individual leaders. More than any
other principle, as history has shown, it paves the way for

We undoubtedly see this principle working to-day in
many hearts. It has plainly influenced us, lately, to
make us impatient of peaceful processes and ready for
the quick arbitrament of physical strife. I counsel you
to be on your guard against it, and watchfully to discour
age it in each other, and especially in the young. Let
not the possible instances of destruction and death which
we may inflict awaken in you an unchristian exultation
over a people who have become our public antagonists,
but whom God has made, evermore, and now as much as
ever, our brethren. Give no place in your hearts to hate.
Let there be no room there for that false and wicked illu
sion, " glory." Let the blood of men, with which our
terrible guns may presently incarnadine the Cuban seas,
blush before God for the lingering barbarity of our race,

8
and every tear which we cause some Spanish mother to
shed for her sons, rapt from her to perish of wounds or
fever, touch your hearts as tenderly as those which will
presently be coursing down the cheeks of our American
parents and brothers and sisters.
The time has gone by for men to rejoice in warfare
and its awful deeds of prowess and scenes of carnage.
General Sherman justly characterized it — let us thank
him for the formula — "War is Hell!" In its orgies let
devils glory, not Christian men, not Christian women,
whose garb might well be sackcloth while this Satan
rages on our coasts. On you, and such as you, my friends,
rests the solemn duty, during the coming days of strife,
to subdue in yourselves, and rigidly to discourage in
others, all admiration of war's horrible methods and its
guilty exploits.
War, in its facts, is simply everything that is cruel,
wicked, bad. It takes our educated youth, our honest
friends and neighbors, and turns them into pirates, mur
derers and robbers. It absorbs the whole energy of an
enlightened people in acts which, in normal times, are the
worst of crimes. "Inter arma, leges silent" — in war the
laws are silenced — was the ancient saying. Each princi
ple of justice and mercy is suspended. The true interests
of life languish. Prosperity stagnates ; art, education and
charity are robbed of their resources. Civilization pauses,
and its wheels turn back, while the Juggernaut-car rolls
on. Our children and grandchildren will gather the bit
ter fruits, the seeds of which our people have, to-day,
elected to sow. The historian of our nation may have
to chronicle a deep-seated arrest in the development of
our institutions and our popular character, dating from
the false, false step we have recklessly taken,
A thing I peculiarly and poignantly deplore, to-day, is
that the tender minds of our youth are to be saturated
with the baneful associations of strife, and with delusive
military ideals. I pray you, mothers and fathers, sisters
and brothers of the young, keep ever before them the
barbarity and wickedness of war ; the blasphemous horror
of its scenes of carnage and destruction ; and let not the

9
calm and holy ideals, the sacred visions of him who
spoke the Beatitudes, let not the eternal truth of God, the
Father of Love, be obscured by the smoke and dust of
the heaven-defying conflicts of which they shall presently
hear, alas ! too much.
Sometimes, my friends, open the pages of some great
master in thought and style, and read them a passage like
this, from Thomas Carlyle :
" What, speaking in quiet, unofficial language, is the net
purport and upshot of war ? To my own knowledge, there
dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually
some five hundred souls. From these, by certain ' natural
enemies ' of the French, there are successively selected,
during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men.
Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed
them ; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed
them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so
that one can weave, another build, another hammer-, etc.
Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are
selected, all dressed in uniform, and shipped away, at the
public charge, some thousand miles away, and fed there
until wanted.
" And now to that same spot are thirty similar French
artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wend
ing ; until at length, after infinite effort, the two come
into actual juxtaposition, and thirty stand fronting thirty,
each with a gun in his hands. Straightway the word
'fire' is given, and they blow the souls out of each
other, and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the
world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and
anon shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy
as the devil is, not the smallest ! They lived far enough
apart"; were total strangers each one to the other. How
then? Simpleton] . Their governors had fallen out, and
instead of shooting each other, had the cunning to make
these poor blockheads shoot."
Or read to your growing sons, my friends, tempted by
the military spirit, these words of another great writer,
John Ruskin :
-" If you have to take away masses of men from all in-

10
dustrial employment, and feed them by the labor of
others, transport them and provide them with destructive
machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive
cost (so that a gun of yesterday is useless to-morrow) ;
if you have to ravage the country which you. attack, to
destroy for a score of future years its roads, its woods, its
cities, and its harbors, and tear thousands of men to
pieces with jagged shot, and leave the fragments of dead
and wounded creatures beyond all help of surgery, to
starve and parch, through days of torture, until they sink
and mingle into clots of clay — what book of accounts
shall record the cost of your work ? What book of judg
ment sentence the guilt of it ?"
It is only by the temporary extinction of humanity and
morality in men's hearts that the awful injuries of war
fare can be committed by civilized men. It illustrates
strikingly the fact that the conscience and moral stand
ards of bodies of people are always below those of the
enlighted individual; and that, in corporate capacities,
men will often do, or consent to, acts which the individual
could not bring himself to do. War is only the principle
ofthe duel, surviving and operative among nations, when,
in the most highly civilized of them, it has been con
demned and discarded as not less wicked than foolish be
tween private persons. The "wager of battle," in private
life, is now superceded by the stern and sure process of
orderly judicature. It may be that had our nation, which
lately went so far towards securing the establishment of a
high court of arbitration between nations, — had it not so
unworthily rejected, at last, that promising and noble
aim, — might have achieved the settlement of present dif
ficulties in that civilized and rational way. The only
justification, in the light of international law, which can
be pleaded for the war, is that which our successive Chief
Magistrates, for many years have urged, but on which in
dividuals seem to be laying the least stress, namely, the
intolerable inconvenience, expense and friction occasioned
by the half anarchic condition of a community lying closely
contiguous to our own. 1 am sure that this is what has
urged the present Administration; as it did the preceding

II

and several before that. Surely, our appeal to an inter
national tribunal might have settled this, had such a tri
bunal existed. At least, in the spirit of that remarkable
passage which I read you just now from the counsels of
Jesus as to the settlement of disputes, it might and should
have been tried ; that, so far as possible, our skirts might
have been kept free of blood guiltiness. At least, some
appeal to the conscience of the world, to the congress of
the nations, might and should have been made before we
invoked the murderous issue of armed force. Had it not
succeeded, that final arbitrament would have been open.
War was, long ago, called ultima ratio regum — the last
argument of kings ; to fight and kill is. always in order.
But he only " has his quarrel just," in these enlightened
days, who completely exhausts every other alternative.
Only as the strictly last and inescapable resort, can war
be justified in the modern forum of morals. That justifi
cation the present war certainly does not possess.
Among our people, individually, it is plain that the
motive which enables some good men, and, alas ! some
women, to justify, morally, the step we have taken, is the
humanitarian one. I cannot discuss it at length. I will
only say that it seems to me utterly illogical and unsound.
Were the present case plainer, it would be a most dan
gerous innovation, in international relations, that one peo
ple might, by the irresponsible methods of warfare, inter
vene as their judgment should justify, in the concerns of
their neighbors, to right even great wrongs. It would
introduce such uncertainty, suspicion and distrust among
the nations as would offset, a hundred times, the good
-which, in a particular case, it might be alleged to achieve.
It seems to be overlooked, by those who now plead the
call of humanity, that all the sufferings of the victims of
war in Cuba could have been relieved by a ten-thousandth
part of the cost of war, and without its probable gigantic
additions to the sum of human misery.
And yet, in the actual prevalence of this humane idea
and sentiment, mistaken and misdirected as, in my solemn
judgment, it is, I see the one moral alleviation of the
action which has been taken by our representatives in

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3 9002 08540 1892

invoking war. Ignobler motives have unquestionably
worked potently in our Congress to that end ; principles
against which it shall be to the abiding honor of the
President that he strove earnestly, to the last. Cor
rupt politics, the ambition of parties and of individual
leaders, defeated his humane effort to stay the tide.
Yet, as in the war for the Union, the sympathy for the
slaves and desire to purge away the shame of slavery
became so potent and corrective a principle with our
Northern people, so it will take from this present unhappy
struggle something of its moral evil to us, that an intense
sympathy for the suffering reconcentrados, and for the
insurgents struggling to cast off a cruel political yoke,
is the animating sentiment which, while it blinds their
eyes, will yet, in some measure, defend their hearts from
the worst demoralizations, to which they would otherwise
be exposed. I doubt if there was ever a war against
which the instincts of good citizens were so generally
arrayed. In those who are able to give it an approval
which calmer and more religious reflection would, it seems
to me, withhold, the wish to do good, the belief that we
are acting in the interest of humanity and right will be,
under God, a measurable corrective of the debasing and
hardening influences of a state of war.-
Let us, at least, humbly hope and pray that out of the
sorrows and crimes of which every war is compact, and
out of those which are near, some good will be realized.
At least, let us hope than the barbarities of war, its in
consistency with high civilization, its flagrant inconsist
ency with the spirit of religion, and peculiarly with the
spirit of that holy and inspired soul whose personality
Christians adore, while to his precepts they give so little
practical attention and confidence,— let us hope that on
the lurid background of coming battles with their car
nage, of desolated homes, of mothers weeping for their
children because they are not, — the hatefulness of hate,
of strife, of violence, may so appear that no later genera
tion of our enlightened people may ever consent, again,
to achieve even aims which seem to them right and good
by means so uncivilized, brutal, bestial and God-defying.