And the greatest of all these dreams and ideals which the world has lost, the thing which has been at the back of every good war since time began, is love. If you ask nine out of ten people to define love to-day, they will say it is the absence of hate. This is the definition of a man intellectually and morally standing on his head. Love is no negation. Love is no pale, sentimental mist. Love is a great, burning fire which flames so fiercely in the breast that one rushes, like what the world would call a madman, to throw one’s life away for what one loves, to defend it, to slay its enemies, to champion it, to let one’s death for it bear witness to one’s passion.
How completely extravagant such a definition sounds to us who have emasculated love until it is but the negation of hate! How absurd it seems to us of the very practical, and very drab, twentieth century! We love our wives and husbands so mildly that we let them divorce us rather than fight with and for them. We love our country by politely putting a flag up on the Fourth of July and by insisting on her protecting us in our personal affairs. We love our Church so mildly that we cannot bear to see her enter upon social and industrial battles, into which she may drag us. We love God, goodhumoredly patronizing Him by not opposing Him. And we think we are in charity with all men because we do not quarrel with them even when they take the high-road to Hell. We think we love people because we have stopped fighting them.
If we really loved them, we should have to fight them often, for their good. And if we really loved God we should have to fight for his truth. The fact that men quarrel no more about religion is a sign that their religion has become formal and perfunctory. The fact that men have ceased to war for their ideals is a sure sign that they have not any ideals worth fighting for. If a man really has a dream before him, a dream not yet realized upon the earth, he will have to fight, — shed blood, kill, and die if necessary, —to embody that dream.
To determine the morality of any struggle one must discover the motive of that struggle. A fight conducted for some one’s else benefit is a good fight. A fight for one’s own selfish benefit is an evil fight. Wars for territory or markets or that sort of thing, these are evil. Wars for religions, wars for theories, wars for mad dreams, these are right. What if in them men are killed and injured, wives left widows, children made fatherless? These things are not always unmixed disasters. Is not the heritage left a child by him who has lost his life for a noble cause of more value than either the caresses or the material wealth that the father might otherwise have given it? Is not the widow of a martyred hero made rich in the knowledge that she helped to make that hero? Was it not Calvary which really made the Virgin blessed among women ? There are things worse than death and better than life, and in our hearts, if not in our minds, we know it.
The records of Christ show that He knew all this, despite all the emasculating criticism of the Tolstoyans and near-Tolstoyans. He said, indeed, that the ultimate purpose of his coming was to establish peace. His hearers, with their usual denseness, supposed that He meant that all wars should forthwith cease. Wherefore He was careful to say these words: ‘Think not that I came to send peace upon the earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughterin-law against the mother-in-law, and a man’s foes shall be those of his own household. ... He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.’
Would it not be just as well for Christians to stop singing indiscriminately the praises of that pale negation which moderns falsely call peace? Would it not be just as well to cease shouting unmixed anathemas at war? Would it not be just as well to admit that often toleration and a desire for peace are but other names for spiritual bankruptcy? It is perfectly possible to damn mightily those who would use war and fighting for their own selfish ends,—personal, party, or national, — and at the same time to continue to honor with all devotion those who have laid down, are laying down, or shall lay down their lives battling for the fraternity of men and the love of God. Professor James has said that what we need to-day is a ‘moral equivalent of war.’ The records of the ages have shown us that there is only one moral equivalent of war, and that one is war itself.