Excerpt from The Biblical World, Vol. 48
While these words are being written, the nation is on the brink of w'ar with Mexico. When they arc read, hostilities may have begun. If so, Christian people in the United States, like those in warring Europe, will be testing the sincerity of their professed loyalty to Jesus.
A state of war does not disprove the existence of a moral order. In this we must still live, and to it we must still give our allegiance. Military exigencies do not permit us to repudiate the ideals of Jesus. A nation at war ought relentlessly to question its own motives and ambitions, its own past and its desired future.
War in Mexico, if it be regarded as a phase of international police service, will be both defensive and vicarious. For years we have refused to intervene because we did not believe we were justified in intervening. Whatever the future may have in store for us, we have the record of this much self-restraint under unbelievable provocation.
That all our past dealings with Mexico have been beyond reproach we do not need to argue. We ask neither justification for our mistakes and our wrongdoings nor praise for our patience. What we have written, we have written. The future must pass judgment. Let the nation without sin present the first protest.
The immediate duty of every Christian who is loyal to the ideals of peace is to separate peace as a world-policy from police duty thrust upon us by conditions we have not controlled and, despite national patience, could not control.
Jesus never condemned national self-protection.
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