ed to carry it
into immediate effect, have been scanty in numbers, and obscure. A few
early Christian communities, soon extinct; a few hermits isolated from
their fellows; a few monks in secluded cloisters; a few friars
repudiated by their own orders; a few small antinomian Protestant sects
springing up and vanishing with gourd-like rapidity; a few groups of
Slavonic dreamers forming the innocent extreme of the Nihilist
fraternity--such have been the leading professors of Gospel Anarchy. One
can, even while condemning them, respect them for their purity of
purpose, their lofty idealism, their sincerity, and their consistency in
following their false premiss to its logical conclusion.

Much more numerous, but far less worthy of regard, are those who have
picked and chosen among the precepts of the Lord, have accepted what
seemed good to them and have explained away the rest. It would be easy,
did space allow, to present a motley succession of fanatics and heretics
from apostolic days to the present who have developed fantastic theories
and have maintained them by means of passages drawn from the Sermon on
the Mount.

No damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text.

Only one group, however, now concerns us, and that is the group of
anti-militarists who, for the most part arbitrarily ignoring or
repudiating the other commands of their authority, fasten on those
precepts that seem to inculcate the doctrine of non-resistance, and on
the strength of these erect the visionary superstructure of pacificism.
They form a strange and suspicious company. Among their early
representatives stand prominent the able advocate, but furious
schismatic, Tertullian; the amiable scholar, but heretically Gnostic,
Origen; the accomplished stylist, but bigoted and ignorant
special-pleader, Lactantius. It would not be a harsh judgment to say
that most of the early pacificists had some twist of mind or character
that disturbed the perfect balance of their sanity.

The later sects who have included pacificism in fleeting religious
systems of varying degrees of impossibility and absurdity are still more
open to suspicion on mental and moral grounds. The Cathari, the
Waldenses, the Anabaptists, and the "Family of Love," not only
developed monstrous doctrines: they also boasted of an antinomian
freedom from legal restraint which led some of their devotees into such
wild excesses of conduct as made the