Address on War by Alexander Campbell

Alexander Campbell is a revered figure within what American Church History calls the Restoration Movement. It is a movement that seeks unity among those who call themselves Christian and places the Bible as its sole guide for local church praxis. Alexander Campbell is known as a man who studied the scriptures night and day. He debated and debated with just about anyone over a host of topics and Bible doctrines. In his life and writings he sought to bring Christians as well as the Church in line with Bible teachings/doctrine. Thus it is interesting that his man who is known for his study of God’s Word offered up his thoughts on war in his day and time. What follows is an address that was delivered at Wheeling, Virginia in 1848. It was placed into the US Congressional record on 1937 during a session of Congress. The address is as follows:

Ladies and gentlemen, has one Christian nation a right to wage war against another Christian nation?

On propounding to myself, and much more to you, my respected auditors, this momentous question so affecting the reputation and involving the destiny of our own country and that of the Christian world, I confess that I rather shrink from its investigation than approach it with full confidence in my ability to examine it with that intelligence and composure so indispensable to a satisfactory decision. With your indulgence, however, I will attempt, if not to decide the question, at least to assist those who, like myself, have often and with intense interest reflected on the desolations and horrows of war, as indicated in the sacrifice of human life, the agonies of surviving relatives, the immense expenditures of a people's wealth, and the inevitable deterioration of public morals invariably attendant on its existence and career. If with Dr. Dick, of Scotland, we should put down its slain victims to the minimum of 14,000,000,000; or with Burke, of Ireland, at the maximum of 35,000,000,000; or take the mean of 24,500,000,000, what imagination could picture all the miseries and agonies inflicted upon the slain and upon their surviving relatives and friends? And who could compute the wealth expended in the support of those immense armies whose butchered millions can never be exactly computed? If Great Britain alone, from the revolution in 1688 to the overthrow of Napoleon in 1815, during her 7 years' wars, occupying 65 years of 127, expended the sum of L2,023,000,000 - more than $10,100,000,000 - sum much more easily expressed than comprehended by even the most accomplished financier - how can we compute the aggregate expenditures of all the battles fought and wars carried on during a period of some 5,000 years? Yet these millions slain and these millions expended are the least items in its desolations to the mind of an enlightened Christian philanthropist. When we attempt to reflect upon one human being in the amplitude and magnitude of his whole destiny in a world that has no limit and also survey the capacities and susceptibilities of his nature according to the Christian revelation, how insignificant are the temporal and passing results of any course of action compared with those which know neither measure nor end. How important, then, it is that in investigating a subject whose bearings on society arithmetic cannot compute nor language express we approach it with a candid and unprejudiced temper and examine it with a profound and concentrated devotion of our minds to all that history records, philosophy teaches, and religion enjoins.

But, before entering upon the proper examination of this question, it may be of much importance to a satisfactory issue that we examine the terms in which it is expressed. More than half the discussions and controversies of every age are mere logomachies, verbose wranglings about the terminology of the respective combatants; and more than half the remainder might be compressed into a very diminutive size, if, in the beginning, the parties would agree on the real issue, on the proper terms to express and define them.

As public faith or commercial credit, founded upon an equivocal currency, on its exposure suddenly shrinks into ruinous dimensions, at once blighting the hopes and annihilating the fortune of many a bold adventurer, so many a false and dangerous position, couched in ambiguous terms, when pruned of its luxuriant verbiage, divested of its captivating but delusive elocution, and presented in an intelligible, definite, and familiar attitude, is at once reprobated as unworthy of our reception and regard.

On comparing the literature and science of the current age with those of former times we readily discover how much we owe to a more rigid analysis and a more scrupulous adoption of the technical terms and phrases of the old schools, to which the whole world at one time looked up as the only fountains of wisdom and learning. When submitted to the test of a more enlightened criticism many of their most popular and somewhat cabalistic terms and phrases have been demonstrated to be words without just or appropriate ideas, and have been "nailed to the counter" as spurious coin; others, however, like pure metal in antique forms, have been sent to the mint, recast, and made to receive the impress of a more enlightened and accomplished age.

The rapid progress and advancement of modern science is, I presume, owing to a more rational and philosophical nomenclature and to the more general use of the inductive system of reasoning, rather than to any superior talent or more aspiring genius possessed either by our contemporaries or our immediate predecessors.

Politics, morals, and religion - the most deservedly engrossing themes of every age - are, in this respect, unfortunately, behind the other sciences and arts cultivated at the present day. We are, however, pleased to see a growing conviction of the necessity of a more apposite, perspicuous, and philosophical verbal apparatus in several departments of science, and especially to witness some recent efforts to introduce a more improved terminology in the sciences of government, morality, and religion.

To apply these preliminary remarks to the question of this evening, it is important to note with particular attention the popular terms in which we have expressed it, viz.:

"Has one Christian nation a right to wage war against another Christian nation?"

We have prefixed no epithet to war or to right, while we have to the word "nation." We have not defined the war as offensive or defensive. We have not defined the right as human or divine. But we have chosen, from the custom of the age, to prefix Christian to nation. The reasons for this selection and arrangement of terms shall appear as we proceed. Keep Reading . . . .