s a
relic of barbarism. I believe in the gospel of peace on earth, good will
toward men. It would be better to settle our differences with England
even by flipping a coin than by fighting and killing one another. Let us
hearken unto the voice of God as it comes ringing down the centuries
from Mount Sinai, "Thou shalt not kill." Shall this new government start
out as the Cain among the nations of earth with the blood of our
brethren upon our hands? God forbid that we make ourselves so foolish
and so reckless as this! The history of trial by battle is the history
of folly and wickedness. As we revert to those early periods in the
history of the human race in which it prevailed, our minds are shocked
at the barbarism which we behold; we are horror stricken at the awful
subjection of justice to brute force.

Who told you, fond man! to regard that as glory when performed by a
nation, which is condemned as a crime and a barbarism, when committed by
an individual? In what vain conceit of wisdom and virtue do you find
this degrading morality? Where is it declared that God, who is no
respecter of persons, is a respecter of multitudes? Whence do you draw
these partial laws of a powerful and impartial God? Man is immortal; but
states are mortal. Man has a higher destiny than states. Shall states be
less amenable to the great moral laws of God than man? Each individual
is an atom of the mass. Must not the mass be like individuals of which
it is composed? Shall the mass do what the individual may not do? No! A
thousand times _NO_! The same laws which govern individuals govern
masses, as the same laws in nature prevail over large and small things,
controlling the fall of an apple and the orbits of the planets.

And who is this god of battles that some of you men believe in with so
much faith? It is Mars--man-slaying, blood-polluted, city-smiting, Mars!
Him we cannot adore. It is not he who causes the sun to shine on the
just and the unjust. It is not he who tempers the wind to the shorn
lamb. It is not he who distills the oil of gladness in every upright
heart. It is not he who fills the fountain of mercy and goodness. He is
not the God of love and justice. The god of battles is not the God of
Christians; to him can ascend no prayer of Christian thanksgiving; for
him no words of worship in Christian temples, no swelling anthem to peal
the note of praise.

Let us cease, then, to look for a lamp to our feet in the feeble tapers
that