THE MORAL EFFECT OF WAR AND PESTILENCE.
The Independent of March 11 publishes the following interesting article from the pen of Rufus B. Richardson, of Chicopee, Mass. “Second Adventists” do not look upon wars or terrible epidemics as moral agencies which will insure the success of the gospel; on the contrary, they believe that these public calamities have a demoralizing effect. They do not desire to see the judgments of the Almighty fall on their fellow-men. But they look upon the coming storm of which Mr. Richardson seems to have forebodings as something inevitable, because inspired men have foretold its approach. They look for troublous times in the near future, because the prophetic word and the signs of the times unite in showing that we are living in the last days of this world's history, when “there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time.” Mr. R. says:— Doubtless there are other persons besides Second Adventists who are inclined to look from a distance on a terrible epidemic, like the yellow-fever scourge of the past two years, with a sort of complacency, feeling that when the judgments of the Lord are in the earth the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness. The same persons look forward to the possibility of a civil war and the general breaking up of our institutions as our extremity that may prove to be God's opportunity. This tendency to expect progress through catastrophes, to despise our ordinary helpers, Moses and the prophets, and refuse to move till one rise from the dead, may deserve rebuke; but the times are perhaps such as to make it not entirely an unpractical question, What is likely to be the moral effect of great public calamities, like war and pestilence? That it is not an idle question is proved by the fact that men are constantly coming upon it from one or the other of two directions. On the one hand, we hear that the evils of our public life, being so great that we make little headway against them by ordinary efforts, demand heroic treatment, and, therefore, we may expect public calamities to humble and teach us. On the other hand, there is the actual danger in the shape of civil war, now a little cloud, dimly seen afar off and now making all the horizon dark. Sober-minded men are asking, Suppose it comes, what will be the chances of the church in it? In a general breaking up of our institutions, would not men turn to religion? No doubt the larger part of the people think it is nonsense to talk about the breaking up of our institutions. They think that every time we escape a danger, like the labor riots of 1877, or the recent approach to bloodshed in Maine, we give fresh proof that we have strength enough to escape everything of the kind. Each escape makes them more confident for the future. But there are many, who would not like to forfeit the title of sober-minded men, who feel that some of our escapes have been by a hair's breadth, whose thoughts are all taken up with the something more that might have proved fatal. “A little liquor,” says Neal Dow, “a warmer climate,” says a Richmond paper, and we should have had plenty of bloodshed in Maine. “An escape narrower than will perhaps ever be known,” is the verdict of so sober a man as General Chamberlain. We have, perhaps, tided over some dangers, like a ship driving in upon a shallow shore, and have no right to rejoice, but should gather fresh alarm at every escape. Unless we put the helm about, and accomplish, not what Bishop Haven used to call a Christianization of the Constitution, but a Christianization of the nation, from the highest servants of the State to the lowest strata of the cities; when the passions aroused in Maine shall be aroused on a larger theater and in more inflammable communities, we shall have occasion to look upon the question, What is likely to be the effect of public calamities on our religious life? as no longer a question lying somewhat too far off to be discussed, but so near that words are useless while fierce facts are deciding it. But before we join hands with war and pestilence, as auxiliaries in the cause of religion, we must submit them to a little questioning of their tendencies. We have had some experience of both within the past few years. Our war developed many manly qualities in our whole people, and brought men who were individually great to the front; but those most closely connected with it did not regard it as a school of religion. The prayers that it called forth in the North and in the South were more than drowned by the curses of bitter hatred. Then, too, it is the South to whom the lesson of the war is supposed to have been given mainly. In order to make out that war is a religious educator, the South ought to be evidently chastened by it. Who thinks that she is so? In our talk about striking the shackles from the bondman, we must not forget to set down the years of the war as a retrograde step in the religious history of America. But if there is anything in the fears alluded to (and the experience in Maine makes fears rational which a little while ago seemed silly), the war that is coming would be far worse than anything in our past. A civil war that is strictly sectional, even if pushed to the bitter end of crushing one party, must be far less bitter than a war of political parties, complicated perhaps by an attendant communistic war. In such a general disintegration, the Roman Catholic Church, with its magnificent organization, might stand up as a tower of strength. It might even become the principal aggressive power. But what room would there be in such a tempest for the gentle kingdom of God? The cases are few where nations fight for a noble principle and come forth ennobled, almost fit to be canonized. Nations for the most part drift into wars which are not moral helps to anybody. Religion and morality flourish, if at all, in spite of the savagery which they call forth. Religious teachers should not despise the “weak, piping time of peace,” for in it are their victories to be won. Those who have a half-confessed hope in pestilence, as the heavy hand of the Almighty leading us to repentance, ought to remember that Memphis was so far from turning to God under its awful calamity that the ordinary police were insufficient to stem the tide of wickedness, throwing down its usual restraints. Even those who looked for no directly religious results, but hoped that at least the charities called forth in the North might soften the hatred of the South toward us, now confess disappointment. This moral hardening is not something new in the history of pestilence. One of the soberest writers of antiquity, Thucydides, has given us this picture of the moral effects of the great plague that fell upon Athens during the first years of the Peloponnesian war. “The temples were full of the dead who died in them, for, when the disease overpowered them, men, not knowing what to have recourse to, turned to contempt of things sacred and profane alike. All the customs of burial which they formerly used were broken up.” (That alone would tell the story of utter demoralization.) “And the plague was the origin of greater lawlessness in the city in other points; for any one boldly indulged in pleasures which were before kept secret, since he saw the sudden changes that took place when the wealthy died in a moment, and those who just now had nothing immediately got their property. Accordingly, they thought proper to make their pleasures quick and delightful, since they regarded their bodies and their possessions alike as things of a day. And no one had any earnestness to toil for duty, because he thought it uncertain whether he should live long enough to accomplish it; but momentary pleasure, and what was in every respect conducive to this, usurped the place of duty, and neither fear of the gods nor the law of men acted as a check, since they judged reverence and irreverence to be all one, seeing, as they did, all perishing alike, and no one had any expectation of paying the penalty of his crimes by remaining alive long enough to come to trial, but thought a much greater judgment already passed against him, and thought it reasonable to enjoy life before this was executed.” Strip off the coloring of time and place, and this description would pass for that of the great London plague. London, to be sure, was Christian; Athens, pagan. But it is hardly doubtful that London was far the less moral and religious of the two. If it suffered less deterioration, it was because it was so low at the start. Did anybody ever claim that London was much changed for the better during the latter part of the reign of Charles the Second? Athens and London pass as fragments of our common humanity. Humanity is frail. There are blows which stun it and drive it wild. A victim of the Inquisition, with his body racked by torture, was not in a fit state to be reasoned with on religion. A nation racked by war and pestilence is in a similar case. I can hardly believe that there is any missionary who would not labor with greater hope in Bulgaria before the late war, blooming as a garden, than in Bulgaria after the war, trampled under foot. Our land, being still in peace and health, has the best conditions for religious progress. More and better laborers are the one thing needful. May the catastrophes stand aside, and give us room to work with the ordinary appliances.