He,

every new tie uniting distant lands in the intercourse of commerce, science, and a material civilization. All hail to the press, the steamboat, the railroad, and the telegraph, as connecting men together more and more, not by links of iron only, but by cords of love. But the causes of war are too inveterate to be cured by any thing short of the miraculous touch of the Son of God. He is the Prince of Peace. and he only, can say to a warring world, as he once said to the raging deep, "Peace, be still," and the winds and waves obeyed him. Thanks be accorded to all who are laboring for human improvement in every direction, and by every instrument, for they are co-laborers with the advocates of the uninterrupted brotherhood of nations.

But chiefly as Christianity pervades the mass of mankind in its life-giving spirit and efficacy, will men awake to the unutterable wickedness of war, and learn its horrid arts no more. Civilization itself is no adequate remedy; but civilization, after the Christian type, and uplifted and empowered with Christian ideas, will outgrow war. It has outgrown many barbarous notions and customs, - the ordeal, torture, persecution, superstition,—of earlier ages; and it is only a question of time and faithful effort, when this great embodiment of barbarism shall drop off from the expanding limbs of Freedom, on which it has so long hung as a hideous and monstrous excrescence.

Another lesson from these hostilities is, that what are called the improvements of warfare are poor pretexts to justify its continuance. Commend us not to war as a thing which is very susceptible of improvement. The devil cannot be disguised, though he be clothed in a suit of broadcloth, and have a musket and canteen, instead of a bow and arrows. He is still the devil. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he will be a murderer to the end. He will make children orphans, and wives widows, and parents childless. He may use different tools, the bomb instead of the batter

ing-ram, the rifle instead of the cross-bow, and the cannon instead of the scythed chariot; but the devil is the devil yet, and war is war. It cannot be smoothed, civilized, or evangelized. Much assurance indeed was given, that the late contest should be conducted on humane and just principles, so far as such a hellish work could be thus carried on. But the fulfilment of these fine promises must be looked for among the legitimate and illegitimate barbarities perpetrated. If large masses of men are trained to kill in the most dexterous and scientific modes at the behest of their superiors, it cannot be thought very strange if they sometimes do a little murdering on their own private account. If they are led forth to conquest with their passions stimulated to the utmost with the visions of national glory and aggrandizement, it were natural and pardonable, perhaps, that they should pilfer a trifle on their own hook, in view of the splendid example held up perpetually to view. Such has been the fact. Plundering, massacres, cruelties, the killing of the wounded on the field of battle, and even in some cases burning alive at the stake, have been recorded on the highest official authority, as a part of the history of the Mexican war. Two free Christian nations, in the nineteenth century, going to war with one another, and in that war witnessing and perpetrating barbarities that would disgrace New Zealand! Away with the idle pretence, that war can ever be any thing else than barbarous, sanguinary, cruel, and full of all manner of evil! Let not those who uphold it as the true method of settling international disputes, encourage the idea that it ever can be, from the very nature of the case, any thing else but violence, fraud, murder, and a temporary repeal of every commandment of the King of kings. If we are to have war, let us call it war, nor seek to baptize it in any other Christian title or surname. "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"

We see another proof in this contest of the essential injustice of all war. As a mode of redressing injuries, it is perfectly absurd, for it creates a thousand injuries and wrongs where it redresses one. It runs posterity into debt without their consent, and mortgages the industry and capital of future ages. Instead of punishing the guilty, it often visits the innocent with its heaviest calamities. The battle-field is not entitled in any sense to be regarded as a solemn tribunal of justice. The very notion of a battle is, that men temporarily lay aside all that they had gained by thousands of years of civilizing and Christian processes, resolve themselves into savages, and appeal from right, from reason, from the exercise of all those nobler faculties of our constitution, that had been predominant in peace, to the coarse, rude, and vindictive passions. The greatest of the poets drew it all to the life;

"In peace, there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it,
As fearfully as doth a galled rock

O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean;

Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostrils wide,

Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit
To his full height."

Our actions will, of course, partake of the nature of those passions or feelings which are uppermost at the time we act. If then the deeds of war are performed under the powerful stress of the animal nature, they must of necessity be of like color and character, "earthly, sensual, devilish."

And by what alembic a long career, a campaign, or several campaigns of such actions are to be sublimated into justice, and wrong to be righted, and evils to be cured, and injuries ́ to be placated, is more than we have been yet able to discover. Such temporary returns to the brutal age of the world inflict deep wounds upon a Christian state of society; for they are a virtual renouncement for the time being of the reign of truth and justice, and they cast discredit and discouragement upon all the moral and religious instrumentalities by which society is drawn up from the slough of sensual customs and habits into the light and life of civilization.

The Mexican war was, as we have seen, a signal example of this resorting to might instead of right, and employing the strong arm of force to compel the surrender of a part of another country. It was a compound of the crime of the highway-man, who puts his pistol at your head, and cries, "Deliver, or die," and the truckling of the pedlar who trades in small wares, and chuckles over his hard-driven bargain after it is made. Never was there a finer opportunity for what might be called national magnanimity, than for the stronger power in this case to bear and forbear with the weaker one, and aid, not thwart it, in carrying out the experiment of republican institutions.

A score of names, perhaps, in the whole range of history, have been accounted, called great. But who are they? How poor are all the results they left on earth compared with his who repressed the ignoble strife of his followers, who should be greatest. They were from below, he was from above. Some good men have attained the title, an Alfred, a Peter, a Charlemagne; but most have been great in crime and blood; an Alexander, a Pompey, a Cæsar, a Herod, a Louis, a Henry, a Frederic, a Charles, a Buonaparte. They were great in many things; great, perhaps, in ability, great in resolution of will, great in means of influence, and striking in their results; but little in the elements

of a truly great character; little in honesty, in truth, in love, mean, selfish, crafty, cruel, and implacable. They have been willing to sacrifice any amount of human life or happiness, to secure their end, and be accounted the greatest. But how poor the honor, how blood-stained the glory! How many death-pangs it has taken to refine their thrill of pleasure, how many tears to water their garlands of victory, how much human gore to dye their purple robes of royalty! What curses have loaded their names on earth, what awful memories must haunt them in the world of spirits!

We want no more such great ones. We have had enough of them. We want the truly great, the truly good. And if we would have such from among our youth, we must fill their heads and hearts not with pagan, or Mohammedan, but with Christian ideas and sentiments. We must baptize our children not only into the name of Christ, but also into his spirit. We must show them how much greater in reality Jesus, the well-beloved of the Father, was in washing his disciples' feet, than Xerxes riding forth at the head of his army to lay waste the fairest countries with fire and sword; Jesus dying in ignominy on the cross, than Cæsar making his triumphal procession into Rome with the spoils and captives of vanquished kingdoms.

This strife has repeated, in fresh and distinct tones, this lesson of the perverted standard of judgment created by war. We see how poor a thing is mere animal courage, and martial fame. We see that the most brilliant deeds of the soldier, (sold-ier, the man who is sold), are of such a character that, were they done by any other profession, the actors would be convicted and punished as the highest offenders against the peace, and order, and rights of men. What right can man claim thus to invent a system of war-morality, warhonor, war-reputation, which conflicts at every point with the government of the Most High?

The true nature of much that passes current in society as