120         Jewish Wars as Precedents for Modern Wars          [April,

   We now repeat the question :  By what strange perversion of
reason is it that the authorized wars of the Jews are appealed to
as a precedent for Christians, when, as a precedent, they so utter-
ly condemn the party that makes the appeal? There is not an
advocate for war now living, with any pretensions to Christianity,
who would justify in modern nations wars like some of those
waged by the Jews, or who would not justify now an appeal to
arms against such invasions and rebellion as they were forbidden
to resist; and yet, in the same breath, the Jewish wars are
appealed to as a justifying precedent. A more glaring incon-
sistency could scarcely be imagined. It is proof conclusive that
the Jewish wars are not yet understood-that the lesson they
teach has not yet been learned by the religious world.
   We must here remark, that we by no means wish to make the
impression that the Jews never repelled invasion nor suppressed
rebellion. They often did the former, and once, in the case of
the Benjamites (Judges xx.), they did the latter. This fact might
strike the mind of the objector as furnishing an offset to the argu-
ment which we have based upon their mode of dealing with other
invasions and insurrections. For example :  it might be urged
that the suppression of the Benjamite insurrection by the com-
mand of God, proves that insurrection was a sufficient cause for
war. But this would be to represent God as acting capriciously,
as permitting war at one time and forbidding it at another, when
the cause for war was in both cases the same. Such a representa-
tion is inconsistent with the character of God. Undoubtedly he
acted in both cases from some uniform principle, and the reason
of the difference is, that in the one case the justifying circum-
stance to which we have referred above was present; in the
other it was absent. This very diversity of conduct, therefore,
shows that neither the invasion nor the insurrection was in itself
the justifying cause for war.
   Neither, in showing that the Jews waged wars of extermination
which would be shocking to the moral sense of mankind at the
present day, would we intimate that their conduct in so doing is
really inexcusable. But our object is to show that the argument
in favor of modern wars, deduced from these facts, is fallacious,

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