ul. And the men who warreth against the soul
must be resisted to the death.

***

We dare not appeal to Jesus Christ to cloak our shrinking from
sacrifice. No doubt His gentleness has been the wonder of history; but
His strength also summons us to be strong. For Jesus Christ was not a
quietist. His religion is not a mere hospital for wounded souls. His
place is among the strong of the earth. He faced the evil of this
earth unflinching in His resistance. "Woe unto you Scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites" is His denunciation of the oppressor; "Go tell
that fox" is His message to the tyrant. When we think of Him making
the whips, and falling, with holy anger in His eyes, on those who
desecrated the courts of the temple, overturning the tables of the
money changers, we know that the ideal of non-resistance is not His.

No doubt He laid it down as the law for the individual that he should
turn the other cheek; but He did not lay it down as a law that a man
should turn another's cheek to the smiter. What the individual can do,
the nation may not do. It no doubt is the duty of the Ruler to turn
his own individual cheek to the insulter; it is not his duty to turn
the cheeks of the millions over whom he rules to those who would smite
them, committing their children to shame and their homes to devastation.

No doubt Jesus Christ enjoined the law of forgiveness, but it was not
unconditional. "If he repent, forgive him," is His law, and until the
wrongdoer repents and ceases from his evil, it would be immoral to
forgive him. Duty demands that every means be used to bring the
evildoer to repentance; for only so is there a chance of his soul being
saved. It is manifest that Christianity is not a religion of
non-resistance to evil, but the religion of Him who Himself resisted
evil, and who resisted it even to the death.

Patriotism, therefore, demands that we resist even to the shedding of
blood. When a hostile army would destroy a nation, as in Belgium, it
warreth against the soul, and it is as Christian to kill as it would be
to shoot a tiger which leapeth out of the jungle to devour a man. And
that Irish soldier whose face in the hospital in Paris was irradiated
with joy when he was told that the enemy was put to flight and Paris
saved, and who died with that gladness in his face, died in the spirit
of Jesus Christ.

To say that the Founder of Christianity would not strike a blow for
home and kindred and truth i