herently
immoral, since God instructed in war the first nation that He ever
trained, not using its experience of His immediate interpositions to
supersede all need of human strife, but to make valiant soldiers, and
adding some of the most precious lessons of all their later experience
on the battle-field and by the sword. Now, it assuredly cannot be shown
that anything in itself immoral is fostered and encouraged by the Old
Testament. Slavery and divorce, which it was not yet possible to
extirpate, were hampered, restricted, and reduced to a minimum, being
"suffered" "because of the hardness of 'their' hearts" (Matt. xix. 8).
The wildest assailant of the Pentateuch will scarcely pretend that it
fosters and incites either divorce or slavery, as, beyond all question,
it encourages the martial ardour of the Jews.

And yet war, though permissible, and in certain circumstances necessary,
is only necessary as the lesser of two evils; it is not in itself good.
Solomon, not David, could build the temple of the Lord; and Isaiah
sharply contrasts the Messiah with even that providentially appointed
conqueror, the only pagan who is called by God "My anointed," in that
the one comes upon rulers as upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth
clay, but the Other breaks not a bruised reed, nor quenches the smoking
flax (Isa. xli. 25, xlii. 3, xlv. 1). The ideal of humanity is peace,
and also it is happiness, but war may not yet have ceased to be a
necessity of life, sometimes as ruinous to evade as any other form of
suffering.

Another necessity of national development is the advancement of capable
men. The empire of Napoleon would assuredly have withered, if only
because its chief was as jealous of commanding genius as he was ready to
advance and patronise capacity of the second order. It is a maxim that
true greatness finds worthy colleagues and successors, and rejoices in
them. And while the guidance of Jehovah is to be assumed throughout, it
is significant that the first mention of the splendid commander and
godly judge, during all whose days and the days of his contemporaries
Israel served Jehovah, comes not in any express revelation or
commandment of God; but the narrative relates that Moses said unto
Joshua, "Choose out men for us and go out, fight with Amalek: to-morrow
I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand."
They are the words of one who had noted him already as "a man in whom is
the Spirit" (Num. xx