I own that I personally cannot but recognize that upon this view certain wars appear to be not only inevitable but justifiable, as partaking of the nature of national police operations. I cannot, therefore, regard all war as wholly and unmitigatedly blamable, although I can hardly imagine any war which does not both come from evil and lead to evil. Again, there are treaty obligations requiring us in certain cases to take up arms for the protection of weaker nations, from which we could not suddenly recede without a breach of national good faith. It surely does not become us, in our zeal for peace, to make light of, or overlook, such considerations as this. They should, I think, in the first place lead us to abstain from sweeping generalizations, and from blaming those who are ready to lay down their lives in obedience to their country’s call and in our defence, or the defence of the oppressed in other countries; while yet we resolutely maintain our own obedience to that higher authority by which we have, as we believe, been taught a better way—a way incompatible with outward strife—of giving our lives for the common weal. We should be very careful how we call that a wicked action which a good man may honestly do in obedience to his own sense of duty; we should be still more careful lest, while professing to take higher ground, we do in fact fall far short of such men in our lives; but we must, for all that, be faithful to the light we have. And, in the second place, it seems to me that the true inference from the consideration of the complicated conditions of international affairs is that the time is not yet ripe for the assumption of all offices of public authority by thorough-going Christians. Our place surely still is mainly to leaven, not to govern, the world.