ISAIAH 59
become separated from the rest by taking the wrong side of a ravine, which they expected soon to terminate, but which suddenly deepened into an impassable chasm. The officer in command signalled to the party an order to return. They mis- took the signal for a command to charge ; the brave fellows answered with a cheer and charged. At the summit of the steep mountain was a triangular platform, defended by a breastwork, behind which were seventy of the foe. On they went, charging up one of these fearful paths, eleven against seventy. The con- test could not long be doubtful with such odds. One after another they fell; six upon the spot, the remainder hurled backwards; but not till they had slain nearly twice their own number. There is a custom, we are told, among the hillmen, that when a great chieftain of their own falls in battle his wrist is bound with a thread of red or green, the red denoting the highest rank. According to custom they stripped the dead, and threw their bodies over the precipice. When their comrades came up, they found their corpses stark and gashed; but round the wrist of every British soldier was twined the red thread of honour." ^
III.
How are we to abolish War and preserve its Moral Value ?
We can throw off the horror and wickedness of war only by releasing from out this embroilment of blood, the moral qualities, the spiritual character, which have hitherto found their meaning and discipline under the conditions of war. Those qualities are too precious and rare for society to afford to lose them. They have on them the stamp of nobility — the ideal beauty that belongs to the high excellences of obedience, of restraint, of self-sacrifice. They keep alive in us the sense of causes and of creeds for which it is a light thing to lay down our lives. They sustain that moral fibre, that fine and nervous tempera- ment, which wealth, and ease, and the weight of crowds, and the irresolution of infinite debate, and the tumult of wordy talk, are but too apt to disannul. We cannot spare these virtues — we, least of all we English, who are so slack to recognise ideal motives, and so suspicious of all that is not practical and profit- able. Yes ; the world is right in its dim consciousness that, if
1 E. Caird.
6o THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
by abolishing war it dropped these moral characteristics of the happy warrior, it would pay too high a price. It would be morally retrograding. This is why the poets, who are our idealists, have so often disappointed us by the zeal with which they have sounded the trumpet for war as against industry, just because they have felt sorely the depressing conviction that an industrial era of peace meant too surely the dearth of those finer moral elements that have somehow, as yet, shone in their brightest and fairest through the smoke and heat of the battle. 5 We have got to make human society aware that it can ■secure and retain and develop, under conditions of unbroken peace, all those precious qualities which now go to make the highest type of soldierly excellence. We shall never fully succeed in that object until we make it evident to the spiritual element in us that it does not need war in order to survive ; that it can, without the ugly necessity of killing and being killed, still find vent for all that is in it of chivalry and of valour, for the heroism of self-devotion, and for the splendour of courage. We must educate these very qualities themselves to shrink in disgust from the barbarism of battle, to hunger for an exercise that will be free from cruelty and hate. If the soldier-spirit itself once learned the sensitiveness which would feel the moral hideousness of the scene in which it has to display its gift, then we might hope to see the beginning of the end. Then, and then only, could we genuinely look for the day when the very implements with which we fight should be turned to happier uses ; when the very temper out of which wars are bred should devote itself to the labours of peace ; when the very " swords should be turned into ploughshares, and the spears into pruninghooks."
IF I remember being deeply struck by an illustration of this truth, given in some words of Johnson, the noble-hearted missionary on Lake Nyassa, when, some years ago, he was pleading for a steamer, which at this moment is running up and down the waters of the lake carrying peace and goodwill amid villagers that once never met except to fight. He showed us how the difficulty of ending the slave trade lay in this — that the slave caravan was the only outlet for energy, the one spot of active motion that ever shook the stagnation of the blind African land. Into it, therefore, poured all that was vigorous
ISAIAH 6i
and alert; those who took no part in its vile work were those who had no craving to move and live and act. The material that went now to work the slave trade was the best stuff in Africa ; and you could never make anything of your civilisation there unless you could divert this excellent material into some new channel, where its energy would discover a fitter outlet than it could find in the old wickedness of enslaving. Therefore it was that he needed this steamer, in order that he might offer a field for the spirit of active adventure, which might thus be drawn off and purified and redeemed.^