wrong.

Surely Christians cannot be active in such measures without incurring the displeasure of God, who styles himself the father of the fatherless and the judge and avenger of the widow.

Thus I have shown that war is inhuman and therefore wholly inconsistent with Christianity, by proving that it tends to destroy humane dispositions; that it hardens the hearts and blunts the tender feelings of men; that it involves the abuse of God’s animal creation; that it oppresses the poor; that it spreads terror and distress among mankind; that it subjects soldiers to cruel privations and sufferings; that it destroys the youth and cuts off the hope of the aged; and that it multiplies widows and orphans and occasions mourning and sorrow.

The fact that war is inhuman is indeed one of those obvious truths which it is difficult to render more plain by argument; those who know in what war consists cannot help knowing that it is inhuman.

What Mr. Windham said with reference to the inhumanity of slavery may be said of the inhumanity of war. In one of his speeches in the House of Commons against the slave trade he stated his difficulty in arguing against such a trade to be of that kind which is felt in arguing in favor of a self-evident proposition. “If it were denied that two and two made four, it would not be a very easy task,” he said, “to find arguments to support the affirmative side of the question. Precisely similar was his embarrassment in having to prove that the slave trade was unjust and inhuman.”

Whoever admits that the slave trade is inhuman must admit that war is inhuman in a greater variety of ways and on a much larger scale.

The inhumanity of the slave trade was the great and, finally, triumphant argument by which it was proved to be inconsistent with Christianity.