During a war, a whole people become familiarized with the utmost excesses of enormity – with the utmost intensity of human wickedness – and they rejoice and exult in them, so that there is probably not an individual in a hundred who does not lose something of his Christian principles by a period of war.

“It is, in my mind,” said C. J. Fox, “no small misfortune to live at a period when scenes of horror and blood are frequent…. One of the most evil consequences of war is that it tends to render the hearts of mankind callous to the feelings and sentiments of humanity.”

Those who know what the moral law of God is, and who feel an interest in the virtue and the happiness of the world, will not regard the bitterness and the restlessness of resentment which are produced by a war as trifling evils. If anything be opposite to Christianity, it is retaliation and revenge. In the obligation to restrain these dispositions, much of the characteristic placability of Christianity consists. The very essence and spirit of our religion are abhorrent from resentment. The very essence and spirit of war are promotive of resentment; and what then must be their mutual adverseness? That war excites these passions need not be proved. When a war is in contemplation, or when it has been begun, what are the endeavours of its promoters? They animate us by every artifice of excitement to hatred and animosity. Pamphlets, placards, newspapers, caricatures – every agent is in requisition to irritate us into malignity. Nay, dreadful as it is, the pulpit has too often resounded with declamations to stimulate our too sluggish resentment, and to invite us to slaughter.

And thus the most unchristianlike of all our passions, the passion which is most the object of our religion to repress, is excited and fostered. Christianity cannot be flourishing under circumstances like these. The more effectually we are animated to war, the more nearly we extinguish the dispositions of our religion. War and Christianity are like the opposite ends of a balance, of which one is depressed by the elevation of the other.

These are the consequences which make war dreadful to a state. Slaughter and devastation are sufficiently terrible, but their collateral evils are their greatest. It is the immoral feeling that war diffuses – it is the depravation of principle, which forms the mass of its mischief.

To attempt to pursue the consequences of war through all their ramifications of evil were, however, both endless and vain. It is a moral gangrene, which diffuses its humours through the whole political and social system. To expose its mischief is to exhibit all evil; for there is no evil which it does not occasion, and it has much that is peculiar to itself.

That, together with its multiplied evils, war produces some good, I have no wish to deny. I know that it sometimes elicits valuable qualities which had otherwise been concealed, and that it often produces collateral and adventitious, and sometimes immediate advantages. If all this could be denied, it would be needless to deny it’ for it is of no consequence to the question whether it be proved. That any wide extended system should not produce some benefits, can never happen. In such a system, it were an unheard-of purity of evil which was evil without any mixture of good. But, to compare the ascertained advantages of war with its ascertained mischiefs, and to maintain a question as to the preponderance of the balance, implies, not ignorance, but disingenuousness, not incapacity to decide, but a voluntary concealment of truth.

From Jonathan Dymond, War: An Essay (Friends Book and Tract Committee, 1880), 27–9.