and temptations for degenerate man,
as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from
the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of
arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts
of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as
their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love
of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody
strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the
benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod
raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as
plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge
that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is
an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times
heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and
archangelic virtue. War, indeed, has the property of exciting much
generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special
recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and
unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the
rest, so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of
being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of
those whose passions it inflames. But it is on this very account a
perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil in any
other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the
frantic hero in "Maud," however, deviate into grosser folly. It is
natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence;
and under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and
children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose
whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their
daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to
positive want; and whose already low estimate is yet further lowered and
ground down when "the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of
fire." But what is a little strange is, that war should be recommended
as a specific for the particular evil of Mammon-worship. Such it never
was, even in the days when the Greek heroes longed for the booty of
Troy, and anticipated lying by the wives of its princes and its
citizens. Still it had, in times now gone by, ennobling elemen