he responsibilities that
were thrust upon him. Not so with Frederic the Great, and the marshals
of Louis XIV., with the exception of Turenne: war seemed rather to
develop their worst qualities. It usually makes a man unscrupulous,
hard, and arrogant. Military life is anything but interesting in the
usual bearing of Prussian officers. In our own Revolutionary war,
generals developed pride and avarice and jealousy. War turned Tilly into
a fiend. How cold and sullen and selfish it made Napoleon! How grasping
and greedy it made Marlborough! How unscrupulous it made Clive and
Hastings! How stubborn and proud it made Wellington! How vain and
pompous it made Scott! How overbearing it made Belle-Isle and Villars!
How reckless and hard it made Ney and Murat! The dangers and miseries of
war develop sternness, hardness, and indifference to suffering. It is
violence; and violence does not naturally produce the peaceful virtues.
It produces courage, indeed, but physical rather than moral,--least of
all, that spiritual courage which makes martyrs and saints. It makes
boon companions, not friends. It gives exaggerated ideas of
self-importance. It exalts the outward and material, not the spiritual
and the real. The very tread of a military veteran is stately, proud,
and conscious,--like that of a procession of cardinals, or of
railway kings.

So that when a man inured to camps and battles shines in the modest
unconsciousness of a Christian gentleman or meditative sage, we feel
unusual reverence for him. We feel that his soul is unpolluted, and that
he is superior to ordinary temptations.

And nothing in war develops the greatness of the higher qualities of
heart and soul but the sacredness of a great cause. This takes a man out
of himself, and binds his soul to God. He learns to feel that he is
merely an instrument of Almighty power. It was the sacredness of a great
cause that shed such a lustre on the character of Washington. How
unimpressible the victories of Charlemagne, disconnected with that work
of civilization which he was sent into the world to reconstruct! How
devoid of interest and grandeur were the battles of Marston Moor and
Worcester, without reference to those principles of religious liberty
which warmed the soul of Cromwell! The conflicts of Bunker Hill and
Princeton were insignificant when compared with the mighty array of
forces at Blenheim or Austerlitz; but when associated with ideas of
American independence, and t