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Untitled Article
alt probability , be a large sum of wickedness , for which responsibility attaches somewhere ;—but a war can never be perfectly just on both sides , and what an amount
of crime does that nation run up that wages unjust war , especially if such war fee long protracted , and more especially if it be withal very sanguinary !— -A \ Var , however , that is just in its origin becomes unjust , whenever
extended beyond the limits , or continued beyond the moment prescribed by dire necessity . Wars ravaging all Europe , all the known world , and . filling up nearly the third part of the space of man ' s life , import peculiar malignancy , in one , or some , or perhaps all , of the belligerents . But every party justifies its own quarrel , and appeals to posterity to pronounce
upon the justice of its cause , and confidently looks to heaven for success * We are all thus deceiving ourselves : we fast fur strife , and , with feet swift to shed bloody we at once tread and pollute the
Christian sanctuary . Long-continued , widely « . extended and sanguinary war brings home to a people , how secure soever from the immediate , manual violence of hostility , some portion of its evils . Great Britain , for
instance , after righting tor nearly 20 years , no ~ w finds herself as far as ever from any one of the . objects she proposed to herself ' by war ; white at the same time she sees her
commerce gone , and with it the source of revenue to the government and of subsistence to the people . The evil has not yet got to jts
head ; / or taxation will go on ^ increasing in the same proportion that trade is decreasing ; and the sad consequences to individuals and ffoe public cannot be even conjee-
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tured . They are beginning to be feared—the people express their apprehensions in their devotions- — but is there nothing to reform anlongst us , and should we not carry our penitence as well as our supplications to the throne © f the Divine Majesty !
It is not meant that this country alone is criminal ; patriotism does not require us to stifle the wish that she were ! but it is for ourselves that we have to treat with heaven ; and will any man of reflection maintain that our
late wars have been all right in their origin , all right in their conduct ? Yet the moral wsong of war is an amazing complication of evil , demanding manifold retribution . Individuals , it may be pleaded , can do but little whether towards national good or national evil ; but the community is
composed of individuals ; and in the order of providence , individuals are responsible for the acts of a nation , — -they surfer in its adversity or enjoy its prosperity . Thre pretended insignificance of
individuals is only a cloak for indolence , or something worse : in a free state ' , the declared opinion and feeling of individuals ^ when for * tified by reason and humanity ,
must act powerfully upon the Government : but where , for these many years , have any individuals lifted up the voice of reason and humanity against the continuance or even the extension of war ?
Our silence has been a virtual concurrence with our government , whose measures ; therefore , in all their merit or demerit , we have made our own . In truth , we have breathed in impure air , till the vital sentiments of morality ( of public justice and charity , )
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lie / lections on the Fast Day * , § &
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1812, page 95, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1745/page/31/
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