be remembered that no other than that unresisting demeanour throughout was possible. They could not with any chance of success in their mission, have followed any other course than the one so earnestly prescribed them. To pursue the figure, they were sent forth as a flag of truce, weaponless, for weapons they could not have used. But we, the host at large, are not therefore deprived of the weapons that just sense of right may render lawfully useful. We have an option of other conduct, they had none. They had no choice, their very position precluding it. We have a choice, and the only question is how shall we exercise it? Shall it be yielding to every encroachment, or, scrupulously respecting others' rights, temperately but firmly maintain our own?

Generosity and rapacity, absolute abandonment of one's own right and the invasion of others', are extremes. But medio tutissimus-safety lies between extremes, and justice furnishes that safety. Concession never cured encroachment, but a sense of justice dispenses with both by quenching desire for either. For, contrarily to what Alpha insinuates at p. 7 of your pamphlet, it is not the resistance to aggression that causes the evils he speaks of, but the desire to aggress. Determination to keep to what is your own never yet bred evil in the world, but the not keeping to your own, and infringing on that which is another's. Resisting unrighteous interference with right, where resistance is feasible, is moreover a grand ingredient in abating wrong. Action is rarely determined irresistibly, but usually on a balance of motives, and the balance against aggression grows with every effectual resistance, that rests, mind you, within the bounds of its own right, and does not pass on, encouraged by success, into retaliatory aggression, on the rights of the aggressor. Bentley's version of the Greek philosopher's saying is to the point: "What would rid the world of injuries ?" was asked of Solon. "If the

I

bystanders would have the same resentment with those that suffer the wrong."

It is asked at p. 9 of the "Dialogue," "Why are there Bill Sykeses in the world?" Broadly, because it is not made more worth their while not to be so. Many causes may favour, many might check the growth of such; but among the latter would not, surely, be the feeling that rapacity and violence could be indulged in with impunity.

Alpha's answer at p. 11 reveals the inherent weakness of the concession-theory: for "locking up" the recalcitrant would hardly square with the literal yielding to every request, elsewhere insisted on. And, again, how would you lock up, say 500 determined armed ruffians who had taken a fancy to control you and yours? If they refused to be locked up, and use their weapons in plundering the country, buffeting the men, and violating their wives and daughters, how do you stop that without having recourse to arms and resisting to the death? And on the other hand, suppose you yield, would submission convert the 500 ?

All security, in fact, depends upon ultimate appeal to force; and the laws which yield security from individual violence, rest upon it. Between yielding our rights to aggression, and the moderate but firm defence of them, even by force if necessary, but respecting the rights of others, the agreement is this—that if either rule were universally adopted, if such adoption in the first case be not a contradiction, injustice would disappear. But there is impediment to either being adopted universally, and at once-and the difference between them is, that in the meantime, the class adopting the latter rule can grow gradually, and exist in the face of the rapacity which it repels; while the other would never admit of a nucleus forming itself, but be devoured up by ruffian rapacity long before it had succeeded in converting it.

And the theory of just defence of your own and other's rights has this advantage over the contrary; that it best provides for that voluntary self-sacrifice which Christianity calls for, by maintaining free agency to offer it, and repelling the control of an alien and corrupt will. Free agency is the condition of all Christian action, and it is the Christian's duty to maintain it. His liberty is God's gift, as precious as life itself, if not more so; and it is his duty to defend it to the death, and this in his own case-but for his country, it is a hundred-fold his duty.

And this leads me to the vexed topic of war. Here I must be allowed to express the difficulty I have ever felt in making out the ground on which some very good Christians stigmatize the soldier's calling as unchristian. In the Scriptures I find no authority for the notion, and am pretty clearly of opinion that it was alien to the convictions of the early Christians. In the New Testament itself, passing over the soldiers before the Baptist, where he censured not their calling, but exhorted them to conscientious discharge of it; and passing over the Centurion, whose servant Christ healed, and of whom he said he had "not found so great faith, no, not in Israel;" but without one word of censure on his calling, we come to Cornelius, the "Centurion of the band called the Italian" (Acts x.), where we have full account of the man, and his acceptance with God, and his baptism, and detail of the Apostle Peter's scruples in the matter, but not a word suggestive of the man's profession as a soldier being in the way.

For my part, I believe that the early Christians had no suspicion of the soldier's calling being inconsistent with Christianity. Nay, next to the slaves, I suspect, no one class contributed more largely than the legionaries to swell the Christian ranks. Men so frequently face to face with death as soldiers and sailors, where keeping clear of pro

fligacy, have been always found open to serious impressions, and the superstitious turn of the Pagan soldiery would rather help than hinder their aptitude for better things. One thing is clear, that the new faith made progress among the simple soldiery. And in Constantine's enterprise of establishing Christianity as the religion of the empire, a grand lever was the support of his Christian legionaries.

In truth there is, it appears to me, but little ground for saying that war itself is necessarily unchristian. War is always indeed a calamity, but, in those that are responsible for it, it is a crime or a duty according to its necessity and its cause; while, as to the individual soldiers, themselves, each has his sphere of duty, utterly irrespective of the justice or injustice of the war itself. War is an evil, but not unmixed, affording scope, like all other conditions in this sublunary world, for its appropriate virtues, and temptations to its incident vices. Fearful and rough in its working, it is not more soul-killing than the besetments of peace. The heart that is right will find a clear footing through the highest turmoil of a soldier's life. Havelock was as much with Christ throughout his career as the Quaker in the counting-house.

War is an evil, but not the worst evil. The subjugation of a free people by a foreign despot were worse than the war by which they avert it. The war waged by Judas Maccabeus delivered the Jews from an infinitely worse evil. Tell and the Swiss patriots had hardly rid themselves of Austrian tyranny, or maintained their own freedom, without war. William the Silent had not delivered the Netherlands on the principles of William Penn; nor, on sheath-sword theory, had the Devonshire worthies grappled with the big galleons of the Armada. Even the Thirty Years' War, with its desolation of Germany, left a legacy more than worth the sacrifice, in leaving freedom of

thought to Protestant Germany. But for Gustavus Adolphus and his doings in those days, the Concordat had not been confined to Austria in these.

Such are my sentiments on some of the points on which you have requested them. Would they had been briefer; but such is the letting out of water, and of ink. Yours most truly,

W. G. T. B.

X.

PROVERBS AND THEIR TEACHING.

ROVERBIAL wisdom, is, indeed, a sort of wisdom, but of a very special, not to say narrow, kind. A proverb or maxim, unlike a principle, is no guide of life, underlying the whole course of it, but rather a sort of ejaculatory caution —a “hilloa, look out ahead" sort of thing-which requires as much wisdom to profit by as would suffice to dispense with it.

Their specialty is seen in the counterpart character of most of them, showing them to be rather pointed against extremes of divergence in life's course, to the right or left, than actually marking the line itself. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" points against the overtendency of some to risk present good for the sake of great, but uncertain, advantages. "Nothing venture, nothing have," on the other hand, points against the opposite extreme of those who will leave nothing to uncertainty, and set their faces against risk of any kind—a notion which, pushed to its utmost, would stop all enterprise, even the healthiest, and bring life to a dead lock.