It is pleasant to turn from these practical illustrations of the theory that no laws of war need be regarded in hostilities with savage tribes to the only recorded trial of a contrary system, and to find, not only that it is associated with one of the greatest names in English history, but also that the success it met with fully justifies the suspicion and disfavour with which the commoner usage is beginning to be regarded. The Indians with whom Penn made his famous treaty in 1682 (of which Voltaire said that it was the only treaty that was never ratified by an oath, and the only treaty that was never broken), were of the same Algonquin race with whom the Dutch had scarcely ever kept at peace, and against whom they had warred in the customary ruthless fashion of those times. The treaty was based on the principle of an adjustment of differences by a tribunal of an equal number of Red men and of White. ‘Penn,’ says the historian, ‘came without arms; he declared his purpose to abstain from violence, he had no message but peace, and not one drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an Indian’236 For more than seventy years, from 1682 to 1754, when the French war broke out, in short, during the whole time that the Quakers had the principal share in the government of Pennsylvania, the history of the Indians and Whites in that province was free from the tale of murders and hostilities that was so common in other districts; so that the single instance in which the experiment of equal laws and forbearance has been patiently persevered in, can at least boast of a success that in support of the contrary system it were very difficult to find for an equal number of years in any other part of the world.
It may also be said against Sepulveda’s doctrine, that the habits of a higher civilisation, where they are really worth spreading, spread more easily and with more permanent effect among barbarous neighbours by the mere contagion of a better example than by the teaching of fire and sword. Some of the Dyak tribes in Borneo are said to have given up human sacrifices from the better influences of the Malays on the coast district.237 The Peruvians, according to Prescott, spread their civilisation among their ruder neighbours more by example than by force. ‘Far from provoking hostilities, they allowed time for the salutary example of their own institutions to work its effect, trusting that their less civilised neighbours would submit to their sceptre from a conviction of the blessings it would secure to them.’ They exhorted them to lay aside their cannibalism, their human sacrifices, and their other barbarities; they employed negotiation, conciliatory treatment, and presents to leading men among the tribes; and only if all these means failed did they resort to war, but to war which at every stage was readily open to propositions of peace, and in which any unnecessary outrage on the persons or property of their enemy was punished with death.
Something will have been done for the cause of this better method of civilising the lower races, if we forewarn and forearm ourselves against the symptoms of hostilities with them by a thorough understanding of the conditions which render such hostilities probable. For as an outbreak of fever is to some extent preventable by a knowledge of the conditions which make for fevers, so may the outbreak of war be averted by a knowledge of the laws which govern their appearance. The experience which we owe to history in this respect is amply sufficient to enable us to generalise with some degree of confidence and certainty as to the causes or steps which produce wars or precede them; and from the remembrance of our dealings with the savage races of South Africa we may forecast with some misgivings the probable course of our connection with a country like New Guinea.
A colony of Europeans in proximity with barbarian neighbours naturally desires before long an increase of territory at the expense of the latter. The first sign of such a desire is the expedition of missionaries into the country, who not only serve to spy it out for the benefit of the colony, but invariably weaken the native political force by the creation of a division of feeling, and of an opposition between the love of old traditions and the temptation of novel customs and ideas. The innovating party, being at first the smaller, consisting of the feeblest and poorest members of the community, and of those who gladly flock to the mission-stations for refuge from their offences against tribal law, the missionaries soon perceive the impossibility of further success without the help of some external aid. The help of a friendly force can alone turn the balance of influence in their favour, and they soon learn to contemplate with complacency the advantages of a military conquest of the natives by the colony or mother-country. The evils of war are cancelled, in their eyes, by the delusive visions of ultimate benefit, and, in accordance with a not uncommon perversion of the moral sense, an end that is assumed to be religious is made to justify measures that are the reverse.
When the views and interests of the colonial settlers and of the missionaries have thus, inevitably but without design, fallen into harmony, a war is certain to be not far distant. Apparently accidental, it is in reality as certain as the production of green from a mixture of blue and yellow. Some dispute about boundaries, some passing act of violence, will serve for a reason of quarrel, which will presently be supported by a fixed array of collateral pretexts. The Press readily lends its aid; and in a week the colony trembles or affects to tremble from a panic of invasion, and vials of virtue are expended on the vices of the barbarians which have been for years tolerated with equanimity or indifference. Their customs are painted in the blackest colours; the details of savage usages are raked up from old books of travel; rumours of massacres and injuries are sedulously propagated; and the whole country is represented as in such a state of anarchy, that the majority of the population, in their longing for deliverance from their own rulers, would gladly welcome even a foreign conqueror. In short, a war against them comes speedily to be regarded as a war in their behalf, as the last word of philanthropy and beneficence; and the atrocities that subsequently ensue are professedly undertaken, not against the unfortunate people who endure them, but to liberate them from the ruler of their choice or sufferance, in whose behalf however they fight to the death.
To every country, therefore, which would fain be spared from these discreditable wars with barbarian tribes on the borders of its colonies, it is clear that the greatest caution is necessary against the abuses of missionary propagandism. The almost absolute failure of missions in recent centuries, and more especially in the nineteenth, is intimately associated with the greater political importance which the improved facilities of travel and intercourse have conferred upon them. Everyone has heard how Catholicism was persecuted in Japan, till at last the very profession of Christianity was made a capital crime in that part of the world. But a traveller, who knew the East intimately at the time, explains how it was that the Jesuits’ labours resulted so disastrously. On the outbreak of civil dissensions in Japan, ‘the Christian priests thought it a proper time for them to settle their religion on the same foundation that Mahomet did his, by establishing it in blood. Their thoughts ran on nothing less than extirpating the heathen out of the land, and they framed a conspiracy of raising an army of 50,00 °Christians to murder their countrymen, that so the whole island might be illuminated by Christianity such as it was then.’238 And in the same way, a modern writer, speaking of the very limited success of missions in India, has asserted frankly that ‘in despair many Christians in India are driven to wish and pray that some one, or some way, may arise for converting the Indians by the sword.’239
Nor are the heathen themselves blind to the political dangers which are involved in the presence of missionaries among them. All over the world conversion is from the native point of view the same thing as disaffection, and war is dreaded as the certain consequence of the adoption of Christianity. The French bishop, Lefebvre, when asked by the mandarins of Cochin China, in 1847, the purpose of his visit, said that he read in their faces that they suspected him ‘of having come to excite some outbreak among the neophytes, and perhaps prepare the way for an European army;’ and the king was ‘afraid to see Christians multiply in his kingdom, and in case of war with European Powers, combine with his enemies.’240 How right events have proved him to have been!
The story is the same in Africa. ‘Not long after I entered the country,’ said the missionary, Mr. Calderwood, of Caffraria, ‘a leading chief once said to me, “When my people become Christians, they cease to be my people.”’241 The Norwegian missionaries were for twenty years in Zululand without making any converts but a few destitute children, many of whom had been given to them out of pity by the chiefs,242 and their failure was actually ascribed by the Zulu king to their having taught the incompatibility of Christianity with allegiance to a heathen ruler.243 In 1877, a Zulu of authority expressed the prevalent native reasoning on this point in language which supplies the key to disappointments that extend much further than Zululand: ‘We will not allow the Zulus to become so-called Christians. It is not the king says so, but every man in Zululand. If a Zulu does anything wrong, he at once goes to a mission-station, and says he wants to become a Christian; if he wants to run away with a girl, he becomes a Christian; if he wishes to be exempt from serving the king, he puts on clothes, and is a Christian; if a man is an umtagati (evil-doer), he becomes a Christian.’244
It is on this account that in wars with savage nations the destruction of mission-stations has always been so constant an episode. Nor can we wonder at this when we recollect that in the Caffre war of 1851, for instance, it was a subject of boast with the missionaries that it was Caffres trained on the mission-stations who had preserved the English posts along the frontiers, carried the English despatches, and fought against their own countrymen for the preservation and defence of the colony.245 It is rather a poor result of all the money and labour that has been spent in the attempt to Christianise South Africa, that the Wesleyan mission-station at Edendale should have contributed an efficient force of cavalry to fight against their countrymen in the Zulu campaign; and we may hesitate whether most to despise the missionaries who count such a result as a triumph of their efforts, or the converts whom they reward with tea and cake for military service with the enemies of their countrymen.246
It needs no great strain of intelligence to perceive that this use of mission-stations as military training-schools scarcely tends to enhance the advantages of conversion in the minds of the heathen among whom they are planted.
For these reasons, and because it is becoming daily more apparent that wars are less a necessary evil than an optional misery of human life, the principal measure for a country which would fain improve, and live at peace with, the less civilised races which touch the numerous borders of its empire, would be the legal restraint or prevention of missionary enterprise: a proposal that will appear less startling if we reflect that in no quarter of the globe can that method of civilising barbarism point to more than local or ephemeral success. The Protestant missions of this century are in process of failure, as fatal and decided as that which befel the Catholic missions of the French, Portuguese, or Spanish, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and very much from the same causes. The English wars in South Africa, with which the Protestant missionaries have been so closely connected, have frustrated all attempts to Christianise that region, just as ‘the fearful wars occasioned directly or indirectly by the missionaries’ sent by the Portuguese to the kingdoms of Congo and Angola in the sixteenth century rendered futile similar attempts on the West Coast.247
The same process of depopulation under Protestant influences may now be observed in the Sandwich Islands or New Zealand that reduced the population of Hispaniola, under Spanish Christianity, from a million to 14,000 in a quarter of a century.248 No Protestant missionary ever laboured with more zeal than Eliot did in America in the seventeenth century, but the tribes he taught have long since been extinct: ‘like one of their own forest trees, they have withered from core to bark;’249 and, in short, the history of both Catholic and Protestant missions alike may be summed up in this one general statement: either they have failed altogether of results on a sufficient scale to be worthy of notice, or the impartial page of history unfolds to us one uniform tale of civil war, persecution, conquest, and extirpation in whatever regions they can boast of more at least of the semblance of success.
Another measure in the interests of peace would be the organisation of a class of well-paid officials whose duty it should be to examine on the spot into the truth of all rumours of outrages or atrocities which are circulated from time to time, in order to set the tide of public opinion in favour of hostile measures. Such rumours may, of course, have some foundation, but in nine cases out of ten they are false. So lately as the year 1882, the Times and other English papers were so far deceived as to give their readers a horrible account of the sacrifice of 200 young girls to the spirits of the dead in Ashantee; and people were beginning to ask themselves whether such things could be suffered within reach of an English army, when it was happily discovered that the whole story was fictitious. Stories of this sort are what the Germans call Tendenzlügen, or lies invented to produce a certain effect. Their effect in rousing the war-spirit is undeniable; and, although the healthy scepticism which has of recent years been born of experience affords us some protection, no expenditure could be more economical than one which should aim at rendering them powerless by neutralising them at the fountain-head.
In the preceding historical survey of the relations in war between communities standing on different levels of civilisation, the allusion, among some of the rudest tribes, to laws of war very similar to those supposed to be binding between more polished nations tends to discredit the distinction between civilised and barbarian warfare. The progress of knowledge threatens the overthrow of the distinction, just as it has already reduced that between organic and inorganic matter, or between animal and vegetable life, to a distinction founded rather on human thought than on the nature of things. And it is probable that the more the military side of savage life is studied, the fewer will be found to be the lines of demarcation which are thought to establish a difference in kind in the conduct of war by belligerents in different stages of progress. The difference in this respect is chiefly one of weapons, of strategy, and of tactics; and it would seem that whatever superiority the more civilised community may claim in its rules of war is more than compensated in savage life both by the less frequent occurrence of wars and by their far less fatal character.
But, however much the frequency and ferocity of the wars waged by barbarian races as compared with those waged by civilised nations has been exaggerated, there is no doubt but that in warfare, more than in anything else, there is most in common between civilisation and savagery, and that the distinction between them most nearly disappears. In art and knowledge and religion the distinction between the two is so wide that the evolution of one from the other seems still to many minds incredible; but in war, and the thoughts which relate to it, the points of analogy cannot fail to strike the most indifferent. We see still in either condition, the same notions of the glory of fighting, the same belief in war as the only source of strength and honour, the same hope from it of personal advancement, the same readiness to seize any pretext for resorting to it, the same foolish sentiment that it is mean to live without it.
Then only will the distinction between the two be final, complete, and real, when all fighting is relegated to barbarism, and regarded as unworthy of civilised humanity; when the enlightenment of opinion, which has freed us already from such curses as slavery, the torture-chamber, or duelling, shall demand instinctively the settlement of all causes of quarrel by peaceful arbitration, and leave to the lower races and the lower creation the old-fashioned resort to a trial of violence and might, to competition in fraud and ferocity.
CHAPTER VII.
WAR AND CHRISTIANITY
Etsi adierant milites ad Joannem et formam observationis acceperant, si etiam centurio crediderat, omnem postea militem Dominus in Petro exarmando discinxit.– Tertullian.
The war question at the time of the Reformation – The remonstrances of Erasmus against the custom – Influence of Grotius on the side of war – The war question in the early Church – The Fathers against the lawfulness of war – Causes of the changed views of the Church – The clergy as active combatants for over one thousand years – Fighting Bishops – Bravery in war and ecclesiastical preferment – Pope Julius II. at the siege of Mirandola – The last fighting Bishop – Origin and meaning of the declaration of war – Superstition in the naming of weapons, ships, &c. – The custom of kissing the earth before a charge – Connection between religious and military ideas – The Church as a pacific agency – Her efforts to set limits to reprisals – The altered attitude of the modern Church – Early reformers only sanctioned just wars – Voltaire’s reproach against the Church – Canon Mozley’s sermon on war – The answer to his apology.
Whether military service was lawful for a Christian at all was at the time of the Reformation one of the most keenly debated questions; and considering the force of opinion arrayed on the negative side, its ultimate decision in the affirmative is a matter of more wonder than is generally given to it. Sir Thomas More charges Luther and his disciples with carrying the doctrines of peace to the extreme limits of non-resistance; and the views on this subject of the Mennonites and Quakers were but what at one time seemed not unlikely to have been those of the Reformed Church generally.
By far the foremost champion on the negative side was Erasmus, who being at Rome at the time when the League of Cambray, under the auspices of Julius II., was meditating war against the Republic of Venice, wrote a book to the Pope, entitled ‘Antipolemus,’ which, though never completed, probably exists in part in his tract known under the title of ‘Dulce Bellum inexpertis,’ and printed among his ‘Adagia.’ In it he complained, as one might complain still, that the custom of war was so recognised as an incident of life that men wondered there should be any to whom it was displeasing; and likewise so approved of generally, that to find any fault with it savoured not only of impiety, but of actual heresy. To speak of it, therefore, as he did in the following passage, required some courage: ‘If there be anything in the affairs of mortals which it is the interest of men not only to attack, but which ought by every possible means to be avoided, condemned, and abolished, it is of all things war, than which nothing is more impious, more calamitous, more widely pernicious, more inveterate, more base, or in sum more unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian.’ In a letter to Francis I. on the same subject, he noticed as an astonishing fact, that out of such a multitude of abbots, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals as existed in the world, not one of them should step forward to do what he could, even at the risk of his life, to put an end to so deplorable a practice.
The failure of this view of the custom of war, which is in its essence more opposed to Christianity than the custom of selling men for slaves or sacrificing them to idols, to take any root in men’s minds, is a misfortune on which the whole history of Europe since Erasmus forms a sufficient commentary. That failure is partly due to the unlucky accident which led Grotius in this matter to throw all his weight into the opposite scale. For this famous jurist, entering at much length into the question of the compatibility of war with the profession of Christianity (thereby proving the importance which in his day still attached to it), came to conclusions in favour of the received opinion, which are curiously characteristic both of the writer and his time. His general argument was, that if a sovereign was justified in putting his own subjects to death for crimes, much more was he justified in using the sword against people who were not his subjects, but strangers to him. And this absurd argument was enforced by considerations as feeble as the following: that laws of war were laid down in the Book of Deuteronomy; that John the Baptist did not bid the soldiers, who consulted him, to forsake their calling, but to abstain from extortion and be content with their wages; that Cornelius the centurion, whom St. Peter baptized, neither gave up his military life, nor was exhorted by the apostle to do so; that the Emperor Constantine had many Christians in his armies, and the name of Christ inscribed upon his banners; and that the military oath after his time was taken in the name of the Three Persons of the Trinity.
One single reflection will suffice to display the utter shallowness of this reasoning, which was after all only borrowed from St. Augustine. For if Biblical texts are a justification of war, they are clearly a justification of slavery; whilst, on the other hand, the general spirit of the Christian religion, to say nothing of several positive passages, is at least equally opposed to one custom as to the other. If then the abolition of slavery is one of the services for which Christianity as an influence in history claims a large share of the credit, its failure to abolish the other custom must in fairness be set against it; for it were easier to defend slave-holding out of the language of the New Testament than to defend military service, far more being actually said there to inculcate the duty of peace than to inculcate the principles of social equality: and the same may be said of the writings of the Fathers.
The different attitude of the Church towards these two customs in modern times, her vehement condemnation of the one, and her tolerance or encouragement of the other, appears all the more surprising when we remember that in the early centuries of our era her attitude was exactly the reverse, and that, whilst slavery was permitted, the unlawfulness of war was denounced with no uncertain or wavering voice.
When Tertullian wrote his treatise ‘De Corona’ (201) concerning the right of Christian soldiers to wear laurel crowns, he used words on this subject which, even if at variance with some of his statements made in his ‘Apology’ thirty years earlier, may be taken to express his maturer judgment. ‘Shall the son of peace’ (that is, a Christian), he asks, ‘act in battle when it will not befit him even to go to law? Shall he administer bonds and imprisonments and tortures and punishments who may not avenge even his own injuries?.. The very transference of his enrolment from the army of light to that of darkness is sin.’ And again: ‘What if the soldiers did go to John and receive the rule of their service, and what if the Centurion did believe; the Lord by his disarming of Peter disarmed every soldier from that time forward.’ Tertullian made an exception in favour of soldiers whose conversion was subsequent to their enrolment (as was implied in discussing their duty with regard to the laurel-wreath), though insisting even in their case that they ought either to leave the service, as many did, or to refuse participation in its acts, which were inconsistent with their Christian profession. So that at that time Christian opinion was clearly not only averse to a military life being entered upon after baptism (of which there are no instances on record), but in favour of its being forsaken, if the enrolment preceded the baptism. The Christians who served in the armies of Rome were not men who were converts or Christians at the time of enrolling, but men who remained with the colours after their conversion. If it is certain that some Christians remained in the army, it appears equally certain that no Christian at that time thought of entering it.
This seems the best solution of the much-debated question, to what extent Christians served at all in the early centuries. Irenæus speaks of the Christians in the second century as not knowing how to fight, and Justin Martyr, his contemporary, considered Isaiah’s prophecy about the swords being turned into ploughshares as in part fulfilled, because his co-religionists, who in times past had killed one another, did not then know how to fight even with their enemies. The charge made by Celsus against the Christians, that they refused to bear arms even in case of necessity, was admitted by Origen, but justified on the ground of the unlawfulness of war. ‘We indeed,’ he says, ‘fight in a special way on the king’s behalf, but we do not go on campaigns with him, even should he press us to do so; we do battle on his behalf as a peculiar army of piety, prevailing by our prayers to God for him.’ And again: ‘We no longer take up the sword against people, nor learn to make war any more, having become through Jesus, who is our general, sons of peace.’ Nothing could be clearer nor more conclusive than this language; and the same attitude towards war was expressed or implied by the following Fathers in chronological order: Justin Martyr, Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, Archelaus, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Cyril. Eusebius says that many Christians in the third century laid aside the military life rather than abjure their religion. Of 10,050 pagan inscriptions that have been collected, 545 were found to belong to pagan soldiers, while of 4,734 Christian inscriptions of the same period, only 27 were those of soldiers; from which it seems rather absurd to infer, as a French writer has inferred, not that there was a great disproportion of Christian to pagan soldiers in the imperial armies, but that most Christian soldiers being soldiers of Christ did not like to have it recorded on their epitaphs that they had been in the service of any man.250
On the other hand, there were certainly always some Christians who remained in the ranks after their conversion, in spite of the military oath in the names of the pagan deities and the quasi-worship of the standards which constituted some part of the early Christian antipathy to war. This is implied in the remarks of Tertullian, and stands in no need of the support of such legends as the Thundering Legion of Christians, whose prayers obtained rain, or of the Theban legion of 6,00 °Christians martyred under Maximian. It was left as a matter of individual conscience. In the story of the martyr Maximilian, when Dion the proconsul reminded him that there were Christian soldiers among the life-guards of the Emperors, the former replied, ‘They know what is best for them to do; but I am a Christian and cannot fight.’ Marcellus, the converted centurion, threw down his belt at the head of his legion, and suffered death rather than continue in the service; and the annals of the early Church abound in similar martyrdoms. Nor can there be much doubt but that a love of peace and dislike of bloodshed were the principal causes of this early Christian attitude towards the military profession, and that the idolatry and other pagan rites connected with it only acted as minor and secondary deterrents. Thus, in the Greek Church St. Basil would have excluded from communion for three years any one who had shed an enemy’s blood; and a similar feeling explains Theodosius’ refusal to partake of the Eucharist after his great victory over Eugenius. The canons of the Church excluded from ordination all who had served in an army after baptism; and in the fifth century Innocent I. blamed the Spanish churches for their laxity in admitting such persons into holy orders.251
The anti-military tendency of opinion in the early period of Christianity appears therefore indisputable, and Tertullian would probably have smiled at the prophet who should have predicted that Christians would have ceased to keep slaves long before they should have ceased to commit murder and robbery under the fiction of hostilities. But it proves the strength of the original impetus, that Ulphilas, the first apostle to the Goths, should purposely, in his translation of the Scriptures, have omitted the Books of Kings, as too stimulative of a love of war.
How utterly in this matter Christianity came to forsake its earlier ideal is known to all. This resulted partly from the frequent use of the sword for the purpose of conversion, and partly from the rise of the Mahometan power, which made wars with the infidel appear in the light of acts of faith, and changed the whole of Christendom into a kind of vast standing military order. But it resulted still more from that compromise effected in the fourth century between paganism and the new religion, in which the former retained more than it lost, and the latter gave less than it received. Considering that the Druid priests of ancient Gaul or Britain, like those of pagan Rome, were exempt from military service,252 and often, according to Strabo, had such influence as to part combatants on the point of an engagement, nothing is more remarkable than the extent to which the Christian clergy, bishops, and abbots came to lead armies and fight in battle, in spite of canons and councils of the Church, at a time when that Church’s power was greater, and its influence wider, than it has ever been since. Historians have scarcely given due prominence to this fact, which covers a period of at least a thousand years; for Gregory of Tours mentions two bishops of the sixth century who had killed many enemies with their own hands, whilst Erasmus, in the sixteenth, complains of bishops taking more pride in leading three or four hundred dragoons, with swords and guns, than in a following of deacons and divinity students, and asks, with just sarcasm, why the trumpet and fife should sound sweeter in their ears than the singing of psalms or the words of the Bible.