War: How to Prepare Ourselves for it

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”—Ephesians vi. 12.

Many of you think that England may not always be as safe from an invasion as she has reckoned herself in time past. You hold, at all events, that security is dangerous; that preparation against every possibility is a duty. You do not profess to be seers; you may often change your minds about the presages of coming calamity; clouds, that looked black yesterday, may have passed away to-day. But you say that a nation should not need to speculate on contingencies; that it should be always ready for the worst; that then it may pursue its ordinary occupations calmly; that when it is most conscious of its own strength, it will be least suspicious and restless about the proceedings of its neighbours.

These are powerful arguments; they are supported by others, perhaps even more powerful. It is urged that great collateral benefits are likely to follow from the union of different classes—which are divided by social position, often by strong antipathies—in a common cause; that, great as may be the advantage of disciplined armies, a people which depends wholly on them is sure to become enfeebled, if not to lose its liberties altogether, because its citizens will not feel that it is their call to defend them, and its soldiers may feel that it is in their power to trench upon them; that when the first feels that he can take part in the defence of the soil, he becomes less shut up in his private interest; that the other is reminded for what ends weapons are put into his hands, and that he must never degrade himself into a mere machine or hireling.

I do not say that those who object to these sentiments may not have much to say for themselves, and that they are not entitled to a hearing. If the object is to unite all hearts, the obvious policy, the plain duty, is to recognize the force of all objections, to claim all as wishing well to the commonwealth, however they may differ about the means of serving it; to believe that their admonitions may contain profitable truth, even if you cannot shape your course according to them. A clergyman has, perhaps, from his circumstances and his education, a bias in favour of their conclusions. He must therefore be on his guard, lest he should be persuaded himself, or should try to persuade others, that want of nerve means love of peace, or absence of preparation, confidence in God. Since he can co-operate so little in the exertions of his countrymen, he must at least be very anxious that he may do nothing to discourage them. He should rather consider earnestly whether, in the fulfilment of his proper function, he may not point out to them some sources of strength which they may be forgetting, some causes of weakness which may make the best service and the best discipline ineffectual.

My text occurred, you may remember, in the Epistle of last Sunday. When I connect it with the subject of which I have just spoken, you may suppose that I wish to turn away your thoughts from the battles that are going on upon this earth,—the battles in which common men are engaged,—to some figurative conflict with unseen powers. I have no such purpose; I believe St. Paul had no such purpose. I believe that the last thought which would have occurred to him, was that he was dealing in metaphors. He was assuredly talking of realities——of a real conflict,—otherwise his vehemence and passion were quite thrown away. He was talking of a conflict with which common men had to do,—with which they had to do in all the common, rough work of their lives. When he says, “We wrestle not with flesh and blood,” he does not mean that he had no flesh and blood enemies; notoriously he had a great many, or he could not have suffered stripes, or spent so much of his life in a prison. He does not mean that the Ephesians had not such enemies, or that men in the times to come would not have them. And he does not mean that the fights stood apart from each other; that the conflict with Jews, or heathens, or false brethren, might take place on one day, and with principalities and powers another. Whenever he was in the one, he was also in the other. When he was scourged, or stoned, or imprisoned, he was tempted to anger and bitterness, or to base and cowardly compliances. And that was a spiritual battle; that was a battle not with visible but with unseen foes; that seemed to him infinitely more serious than the other; upon the issue of that it depended whether he should prevail or be worsted in the other. It is the same, I believe, with us and with our nation at this time. We may be engaged in a battle with flesh and blood enemies; we may have to encounter them on our own soil. But we are engaged in a battle with unseen enemies, with enemies that are assaulting the spirits of us all. It is no Sunday talk that this is so; it is the work of the week-day. Each man, to whatever trade or profession he belongs, is in this strife. He is in it while he is busy about the tasks which that trade or profession imposes upon him. And it depends upon the way in which each man behaves in this battle, whether he shall be of service in the other. It depends upon the way in which a Nation wrestles with the unseen evils that threaten it, whether it shall be able to repel its flesh and blood enemies, whether it shall have anything that it cares to save from them.

I. In saying this, I am uttering no paradox. I am repeating what has been said thousands of times: that the springs of a nation’s internal life are those which we must guard most carefully, if we would guard it from external foes; that when these have not been guarded, when they have been suffered to become corrupt, external violence comes naturally, and cannot be warded off, because the strength is gone which should lift the weapon, because the spirit is gone which should bind the hosts together. I say, brethren, that these are commonplaces which we all know. But they are commonplaces which we have need to reflect upon, and to apply to our own case, and to connect, far more closely than we have been wont to do, with the burning language of St. Paul. Let me try, by just two or three hints, to do this.

1. If I reminded you of the stories we have all read in the last few months of electoral corruption, you would admit that that was a monstrous evil. You would not describe it, in any sense, as metaphorical; you would not say that it had not to do with men’s vulgar—their most vulgar—existence. You would observe, perhaps, that however much these acts are to be lamented, legislation affords little help against them; that an occasional exposure of some detected criminal, a decimation in the ranks of the corruptors and the corrupted, is the only remedy which is likely to be effectual. I am not going to dispute these opinions: they have an appearance of reasonableness; they may be reasonable. But be the remedy what it may, the abomination remains the same. If you read of it in the records of any other country,—if you were told that men of the educated class who aspired to legislate for their land, through a set of agents in the class below them, did what in them lay to debase the minds and destroy the consciences of those in a class lower still,—would not you affirm, “There are symptoms of deep decay in that country. The more moral, the more religious it professes to be, the more alarming must be such symptoms, because they show that hypocrisy is working side by side with these social enormities, sometimes covering them with a seemly varnish, sometimes suggesting that they may be compensated by acts of devotion or charity”? This would be your judgment of any country which you were contemplating as bystanders. If you heard that a land carrying such a vice in its heart, was invaded by a foreigner, would you not tremble for it? Would you not foretell that, unless there were some earnest effort to extirpate that disease, it would cause a palsy in those who should go forth to oppose him?

And what does your doubtfulness about an external legislative remedy for what you feel to be so terrible, mean but this? You have lighted upon a plague which is floating all about you; which is spreading its infection so subtly that you know not how to arrest it or where to come up with it; which you feel must be approaching us all; which we all might be visited with if our circumstances placed us within its reach. And is not this an explanation to you of that phrase of the Apostle, “spiritual wickedness in high places”? Can you find a better? Does it not give you just the sense of vagueness, and yet of an actual, tremendous, penetrating curse, which your words and confessions indicate?

2. Think of another evil, which we all know of, which forces itself upon every one who walks through our streets; think of the moral and physical destruction of a great section of one sex to serve the appetites of the other; and consider whether this same language is not the most applicable to that state of things. All are aware of the evil; newspapers proclaim it; benevolent persons try to rescue a few of the victims. You feel that here too legislation may possibly do something to abate some of the outward forms of this mischief and misery. But the principle lies altogether beyond its scope and range. It belongs to another sphere. You feel that, down in the very root of society, there is an evil which requires to be encountered and overcome. You feel that what is destroying the life of society is also destroying the life of individuals,—of the tempter and the tempted; that if it is encountered and overcome in the body politic, it must also be in the members of the body. What do such words signify? Are you not coming again very near to those of St. Paul, which you were disposed to dismiss as metaphorical? Have not we spiritual wickedness somehow or somewhere to grapple with? Must we not be looking for some armour against it, if the other armour is not to become rusty and helpless?

I speak of this subject in connection with passing events, because the real force of a country, which it opposes to an invader, must lie in the young men of its different classes. I believe that with reference to them we may be deceived by a false and mischievous analogy. It may be said that our armies abroad have been anything but pure and self-restraining, and yet that they have done great deeds. The fact cannot be gainsaid. Who does not rejoice that such deeds have been possible, and that men who have yielded to many temptations, have taken part in those deeds; so showing that there was a noble and divine element in them which that which was contradicting it could not subdue, and which either great crises, or the habitual feeling of discipline and duty, could call forth into triumphant vigour? That divine element, one may confidently trust, would be awakened in numbers by the holier task of defending their own soil and the graves of their fathers. But it should be also remembered, that if it is crushed beforehand by the recklessness of dissipation, and the meanness which continually accompanies recklessness, this motive may be found far less prevalent and inspiring than the sense of shame and dishonour, which is worked into the very nature of the professed soldier. The citizen must be braced to a work which is not his customary one, by motives which the trained servant of the camp can in a measure dispense with. And if he has done all that in him lies to deprive himself of that preparation—if he has cultivated the habits which make his hearth and home indifferent, even distasteful to him,—it is an idle dream that the mere name of defender, however much he may prize it while it is a mere name and has only to do with holiday exercises, will give him the courage which is demanded for action. Nay, if he has that courage as a gift from above, if it has been nurtured in an English school, the shame for evil deeds, the sense of alienation from those whose counsels he has despised, the difficulty of making out to himself what it can signify whether a country should be free or enslaved, may lead him, as it has led so many others, to sell to the best bidder the faculties which sin has not been able to extinguish.

3. Especially is this likely to be the case if he has yielded to another form of evil, more characteristic perhaps of our times than that to which I last alluded, and I should say more debasing and withering. Debts and gambling might turn a bold spirit, like Catiline’s, into a conspirator against the order of society in his land. How many more have they turned into betrayers of their country to some foreigner, whose success might rid them of a burden, and secure to them a reward! Surely this spirit, the spirit of extravagance and the passion for getting money by any means, the most adventurous, the least toilsome being the best, must do more than anything to destroy the patriotism of a people, to create mutual suspicions, to make the pursuit of a common and general end impossible; to encourage therefore the hope of any one looking greedily at our territory, or only wishing to humble us on that one point upon which all, from the highest to the lowest, seem to be most sensitive. And has not the money-getting, gambling habit of mind, exactly that indefinable, diffusive, penetrating character, which corresponds to the description of spiritual wickedness,—wickedness which the sharpest swords cannot touch, or the best devised laws provide against?

We have, no doubt, a way of speaking of these curses, which is very different from St. Paul’s. We denote them by abstract names; he regarded them as actual powers. Our method serves us tolerably well in easy times. The question is, whether we shall not be obliged to fall back upon his, if we come into those difficult times which some of us look for. I believe all persons who are struggling with evil, in any of its forms, find it to be a power; a power which is ready to spring upon them, to hold them down, to take them captive. They must resort to the Apostle’s language, or some that is equivalent. It describes what is to them the most terrible of all facts. How not to sink under the power; how they may be raised out of it if they sink, is for them the only subject which is worth considering. It is altogether a personal subject; they themselves are in the fight; they must conquer or perish. Yet it is altogether a general, a universal question. They cannot separate themselves from their kind; they cannot discover that they are less prone to wrong than any other people; they cannot guess about other men’s perils, except from what they know of their own. And they cannot understand those nice distinctions which some people draw between spiritual wickedness and ordinary wickedness. It seems to them that ordinary wickedness,—if under that name we include all that goes to make men murderers, adulterers, thieves, liars,—must be spiritual wickedness. The impulse to be a murderer, an adulterer, a thief, a liar, assaults the spirit of the man. It addresses not his eyes, or ears, or taste, or touch, but him; it tries to withdraw him away from a law by which he confesses that he is bound, from a Father Who has spoken to him, and is speaking to him, in whispers or in thunders continually. It does not seem therefore to them more strange than it seemed to the Hebrew prophets, that this law should reveal itself to nations and to individuals through the threatened famine, or pestilence, or invasion; that this Father should by such warnings be turning His children to Himself. The sanitary precautions, or the rifle corps, they welcome as signs that men are alive to the message, and are honestly taking means to avert the danger. What more they desire is, that these measures should not be frustrated of their end through that selfishness which leads men to sacrifice the health and comfort of their neighbour to their own petty personal advantages, the well-being and freedom of their country to their own grovelling ambition, lust, and avarice.

II. These are spiritual evils, and therefore they must be fought against with spiritual armour. When we speak of this, we are not indulging in metaphors more than in the former case. The remedy is as little fantastic as the disease. That Right and Wrong are in some sense the great adversaries, that they have been so since the foundation of the world, most persons practically acknowledge, even those who in theory contend that right and wrong can be resolved into the expedient and the inexpedient, or that one is only a modification of the other. What the Scripture adds to this old and general belief is, the assertion that Right is the nature of God; that a living Being, the Author of this Universe and all which is in it, is pledged to assert and vindicate the Right; that Wrong is a lie and a rebellion; and that in yielding to it we yield to the Father of lies, to him who would not abide in the truth. Starting from that primary maxim, it goes on to affirm that Christ, the Son of God, took on Him the nature of man, that He might wrestle with this enemy of Right and Truth, and might deliver man from him. And thence it proceeds to that which is especially and characteristically the New Testament doctrine, that which St. Paul is asserting, here and everywhere,—that the Spirit of the Father and the Son is wrestling in the great human society, is wrestling in each nation and in each man, with that spirit of Wrong and Untruth.

No one of these principles, each of which is unfolded out of the other, has, I repeat it, the least element of fantasy, but is the antagonist of all that is fantastical. And, in them, I believe, lies the strength and hope for nations and for men in the day of battle. There would be something infinitely discouraging in the thought of our moral weaknesses and sins. The discouragement would be still more, if one began to reproach another with them,—if any one could say, “They belong to that man, but not to me; to that school or sect, but not to mine.” In such quarrelling and mutual recriminations lie the very pledges of discomfiture, because the hindrance to all united exertion is there. And religion might come in to deepen our fears, to lessen our confidence, by representing that our offences were provoking the anger of God, and that He would assuredly visit us for them. But if the old faith is true——if God is a God of Right, and not of mere Power;—if Right is not an abstraction, but is seated on the throne of heaven;—if Christ has proved it to be mighty over wrong, and He sits a Redeemer, a Judge, a King, for ever;—if, when our spirits are most dead, there is a Spirit to quicken them, and He is not far from any of us;—if He is bidding those whose spirits are in the closest bondage, to cast off their chains, and rise up, and walk;—if that Spirit is not partial or limited in His operations, but urges saint and sinner alike to distrust himself and trust in an eternal and loving God,—then, brethren, as there is nothing that need make us fear while we have moral strength and unity, so there is nothing in our worst condition that can prevent us from obtaining that moral strength and unity. We have only fairly to look our evils in the face, concealing none of them from ourselves, excusing none of them to each other, confessing them all to God. We have but to understand and remember continually the utter inefficiency of all physical appliances, if the inner strength and heart are absent. We have but to claim our share in all the sins of our country, not thrusting them upon other men, but owning that they belong to our evil nature, and how little we have fought against them. We have but to ask God to take away our self-conceit and pride, that we may be fit to stand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. And then it will be seen that the evils, which have clung so close to us and pressed so heavily upon us, are at last—not as our enemies may think, as we may be sometimes tempted to think ourselves, part of our national substance,—but rather a poison in the blood, which may be expelled, the tyranny of an evil spirit who may be cast out. And then God will clothe us in His own armour. And we shall go forth, in the name and the power of Right, against all who would set up power against Right, and therefore would establish an Antichrist, instead of the Christ. And God’s Spirit will stir up our wills to bring forth good works, the plenteous fruit of which shall redound to His glory, and shall bring rewards to the whole land.

So will it be, while we are in that daily war which we have to wage with the powers of evil that are seeking to destroy the life of our country and our own. So will it be, if God should send us the huge and fearful chastisement of a foreign enemy threatening our shores, or even entering our borders. We may trust humbly that even such a visitation will be turned to the extirpation of our vices, to the healing of our divisions, to the preparation of our hearts for the tasks which God has appointed us to perform, and which we have neglected. In that battle, as in the others from which we cannot shrink, we may ask that the Captain of the Lord’s Host will Himself be our leader and champion. And if no mortal lips should speak words of encouragement and hope, that voice which is as the sound of many waters will say to each fighter, and all the good men of every age will echo it, “Be ye faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of Life.”