Editorial March 27, 1920 Issue

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Frederick Dixon

The world, Hamlet declared, upon a famous occasion, was out of joint, and he went on to regret the despite which had made of him the instrument for its regeneration. Hamlet, as the world views him to-day, was not precisely calculated to restore order out of chaos, even from Elsinore to Poland. It is, indeed, in its reliance on men that the world has made one of its worst mistakes. Shakespeare, a giant in a company of giants, surrounded by such colossi as Bacon and Burleigh, Drake and Hawkins, Spencer and Ralegh, might almost be forgiven for the mistake, were it not that almost within his own day the world had been almost turned topsy-turvy by three unknown preachers with nothing but an idea amongst them.

Luther, an Augustinian canon, in a provincial German town; Calvin, a law student in Orleans; Knox, a Scots notary: these three men, poor, unknown, despised, had struck the spark, and fanned into flame the great religious conflagration of the Renaissance. And they had done this because, counting themselves as nothing, and taking their own lives in their hands, they had answered the covert threats of their enemies, contained in the contemptuous question, Where would they be in the face of those opponents' power and number? with the words of Luther himself, "Where? Then as now, in the hands of Almighty God." That it was which gave these men the power that kings and popes could not wrench away from them—a simple understanding of what Christ Jesus meant when he said, "The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise."

It was his clear understanding of this which caused the great philosopher out of Tarsus to write to the Church in Corinth, "Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called." The intellectually wise, the materially mighty, the socially noble, these were opposed to Luther, as they were opposed to Paul, in their thousands. What was on his side, and what is on the side of every man making his fight for Principle, is that physically impalpable force, described by another philosopher, centuries later, as, "The not ourselves which makes for righteousness." Now it is this very force which produces wars, not all wars, of course, but some perhaps of the fiercest. Christ Jesus put this quite emphatically when he said, "I [the Christ, Truth] came not to send peace, but a sword." Jesus' whole ministry was a perpetual war, war with the chief priests and the Pharisees; war with the scoffers in the death-chamber, and the hucksters in the Temple courts; war, finally, with the Roman governor, in the judgment hall. In this war there was plenty of plain speaking, and once, at any rate, a resort to physical force, on the great Teacher's part. He called the Pharisees whited sepulchers and a generation of vipers, he likened Herod to a fox, and he drove the money-changers and sellers of doves before him from the Temple. But he did all this without harm to himself, and with blessing to those whom he censured, because he saw so clearly the unreality of evil in the fact of the infinity of good.

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