CHAPTER I.
THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL BY FORCE HAS BEEN
PROFESSED
BY A MINORITY OF MEN FROM THE VERY FOUNDATION OF
CHRISTIANITY.
Of the Book "What I Believe"--The Correspondence
Evoked by it--
Letters from Quakers--Garrison's Declaration--Adin Ballou,
his
Works, his Catechism--Helchitsky's "Net of
Faith"--The Attitude
of the World to Works Elucidating Christ's
Teaching--Dymond's
Book "On War"--Musser's "Non-resistance
Asserted"--Attitude of
the Government in 1818 to Men who Refused to Serve in the
Army
--Hostile Attitude of Governments Generally and of Liberals
to
Those who Refuse to Assist in Acts of State Violence, and
their
Conscious Efforts to Silence and Suppress these
Manifestations
of Christian Non-resistance.
Among the first responses some letters called forth by my
book
were some letters from American Quakers. In these letters,
expressing their sympathy with my views on the unlawfulness
for a
Christian of war and the use of force of any kind, the
Quakers
gave me details of their own so-called sect, which for more
than
two hundred years has actually professed the teaching of
Christ on
non-resistance to evil by force, and does not make use of
weapons
in self-defense. The
Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt
how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty
for a
Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to
evil by
force, and had exposed the error of the Church's teaching in
allowing war and capital punishment.
In a whole series of arguments and texts showing that
war--that
is, the wounding and killing of men--is inconsistent with a
religion founded on peace and good will toward men, the
Quakers
maintain and prove that nothing has contributed so much to
the
obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the heathen, and
has
hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the
world,
as the disregard of this command by men calling themselves
Christians, and the permission of war and violence to
Christians.
"Christ's teaching, which came to be known to men, not
by means of
violence and the sword," they say, "but by means
of non-resistance
to evil, gentleness, meekness, and peaceableness, can only
be
diffused through the world by the example of peace, harmony,
and
love among its followers."
"A Christian, according to the teaching of God himself,
can act
only peaceably toward all men, and therefore there can be no
authority able to force the Christian to act in opposition
to the
teaching of God and to the principal virtue of the Christian
in
his relation with his neighbors."
"The law of state necessity," they say, "can
force only those to
change the law of God who, for the sake of earthly gains,
try to
reconcile the irreconcilable; but for a Christian who
sincerely
believes that following Christ's teaching will give him
salvation,
such considerations of state can have no force."
Further acquaintance with the labors of the Quakers and
their
works--with Fox, Penn, and especially the work of Dymond
(published in 1827)--showed me not only that the
impossibility of
reconciling Christianity with force and war had been
recognized
long, long ago, but that this irreconcilability had been
long ago
proved so clearly and so indubitably that one could only
wonder
how this impossible reconciliation of Christian teaching
with the
use of force, which has been, and is still, preached in the
churches, could have been maintained in spite of it.
In addition to what I learned from the Quakers I received
about
the same time, also from America, some information on the
subject
from a source perfectly distinct and previously unknown to
me.
The son of William Lloyd Garrison, the famous champion of
the
emancipation of the negroes, wrote to me that he had read my
book,
in which he found ideas similar to those expressed by his
father
in the year 1838, and that, thinking it would be interesting
to me
to know this, he sent me a declaration or proclamation of
"non-
resistance" drawn up by his father nearly fifty years
ago.
This declaration came about under the following
circumstances:
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