SUPPRESSED BY ARMIES.

5

Messina, Naples, Venice, Berlin, Vienna, were successively a prey to revolutionary war. It overspread the plains of Lombardy, it travelled along the Rhine, it reached Denmark, it broke forth at Rome; it raged so fiercely in Hungary, that Austria, divided against herself, was glad to owe her preservation to Russian armies. There have been tumults and bloody conflicts in the streets of many of the chief cities of Europe; battles in the tented field, sieges, bombardments, burnings and massacres, desolation, and misery. The degree of peace and security which Europe enjoys, has been obtained in the various countries where those revolutions occurred, by the suppression of an organized conspiracy, extending from kingdom to kingdom, to overthrow the established governments, to dissolve existing institutions, and on the ruins of the old social system to erect a new one, in which public and private property were to be seized and distributed, and all things were to be enjoyed in common, until all things were consumed. From this happy consummation the continental nations have been preserved by means of their armies.

England has not been involved in these troubles, and our knowledge of them is derived from narratives which can give but a faint impression of their awful reality. But those details of revolutionary warfare were calculated to strengthen the opinion which we hope gains ground in England, that war, however necessary, is a tremendous evil; that our diplomatic intercourse with foreign powers ought to be conducted with great temper, forbearance, and moderation; that we ought carefully to avoid causes of irritation and quarrel, and when they do arise, should earnestly endeavour to preserve amity and concord, accounting it far nobler and manlier to make generous concessions for the sake of peace, than pertinaciously to urge doubtful claims that might provoke war,—a calamity of which it is impossible to count the cost, to calculate the injury, or to foresee the end.

There is a beautiful example of the advantage of cultivating the spirit of peace, and of overcoming evil with good, in the early history of Pennsylvania. While others irritated the Indian savages by injustice and cruelty, William Penn

AND HIS FOLLOWERS.

and his associates always treated them kindly. The strong passions of the savage, which are aroused by strife and bloodshed, were subdued by gentleness and beneficence. Between the Indians and the armed settlers there sprang up mutual suspicion, hatred, and revenge, which led to a war of extermination. But the keenly observant and not ungenerous savages could well distinguish their kind benefactors from their armed persecutors. The first they spared, the others they massacred. Thus against the bold and insidious attacks of the Indians, benevolence and mercy were a better safeguard than sword or gun. But when England, on very mistaken and insufficient grounds, unjustly went to war with that great British colony, which afterwards became the United States of America, many of the younger disciples of William Penn, forgetting or renouncing his principles of nonresistance, enlisted as soldiers in the American army, to fight against the English. Their conduct was probably disapproved by other members of the Society of Friends, who I believe adhere to those principles most conscientiously. If I cannot entirely agree with their opinion concerning

8

PEACEFUL VICTORIES

war, I believe it to be erroneous, only because it is too good for the still wicked world we live in. Our country may dispense with military service from a class of subjects who are so nobly and perseveringly zealous in good works; who have laboured with so much assiduity and success to improve prisons, to emancipate slaves, to relieve the destitute and afflicted, and who possess that moral courage which is the best element in true bravery. Let them continue to uphold and to exemplify the maxims of peace, and to remind us of the evils of war, which unfortunately is still but too congenial to human nature.

Peaceful victories have also been gained over the untamed passions of barbarous men by the missionaries of the gospel. I need only advert to the devoted and self-denying labours of the Moravian missionaries in Greenland and elsewhere, to those of Williams in the South Sea Islands, and to the very remarkable conquest of New Zealand, achieved, not by force, but by the influence of the Christian religion, which was first communicated to the savage inhabitants by the missionaries of the Church Missionary Society. The ferocious New Zealanders had

OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES.

9

been regarded as the tigers of the human race; and their inhospitable shore inspired such terror, that for several years Mr. Marsden could not obtain a vessel to convey him thither. Many were the dangers and difficulties which that venerable man and his associates encountered, but, committing themselves to the protection of Providence, they persevered, until at length, around the missionary settlement, there was a charmed circle where bows and arrows, spears and scalping knives, were not employed, and the horrid feasts of human victims were relinquished, and the fruits of peaceful cultivation arose amid the wilderness. That unwonted and beautiful spectacle of tranquil industry arrested the attention of the New Zealand chiefs and their barbarous followers; and as they marched past to their sanguinary conflicts in other parts of the island, they paused to gaze and wonder. Even the leaves of a New Zealand Testament, taken from a Christian convert, and partly used as wadding for a gun, were the means of imparting the doctrines and precepts of the religion of peace and good will to a chief who had seen with surprise the happy effects of that faith and