10 countrymen are engaged in battle, these instinctive, involuntary feelings of sympathy are apt to control all other and higher ones, and a shout will go up at their triumph, whether they are in the right or wrong, which springs from no source honorable to us as men, whom God holds responsible by the bond of the image we bear, to applaud the right and condemn the wrong. The shout may mean nothing more than this, — only the outburst of instinctive feelings found alike among all men. We hope it is more. We trust even in the aggregate it is more. We know that with thousands it is more. But let us remember that these principles are as adequate to account for the acclamations of this time, as of any gone by. These considerations suggest a change of the question to a form which admits of a more definite answer, viz. : * III. What ought it to mean ? 1. In general, it ought to indicate the intelligent joy of moral beings over events which promise to aid the advance of God’s truth among men. Inasmuch as it does not, it is meaningless for good. Inasmuch as it is the expression of irrational feeling, stimulated by prejudice and passion, it is the harbinger of evil. War, considered as war, is an unmitigated curse. It is a state of things constituting the very antithiton, of heaven. It stands the most complete exponent of man’s moral degradation. The glory of war in itself is the glory of man’s brutal nature, and the measure of his fall from the image of God. Wars — whatever be their pretence — which have their origin in national hatred, lust of power, rivalry for glory, tend only to ruin. And whatever halo eloquence and song may have thrown
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