Admitting the affirmative part of the question, we may observe that as in ecclesiastical affairs Bishops are intrusted with a Catholic, or general power; so kings, besides the care of their own immediate states and subjects, may be regarded as protectors of the human race. The best argument, on the negative side of the question, against the justice of such wars, is the sufficiency of the divine omnipotence to avenge its own wrongs. Yet the same may be said of other offences. For the Deity possesses sufficient power to punish them, although he leaves them to the sentence of human tribunals. Some will urge and maintain that other kinds of offences are punished only in cases, where others are uninjured or endangered by the commission of them. On the other hand, it may be said that men punish not only offences, which directly hurt others, but even those, which affect them indirectly, as suicide and other similar crimes. Although religion is a concern between the soul of man and his Maker alone, its influence on human morals is of no inconsiderable importance. So that Plato had reason to call it the bulwark of authority and law, and the bond of every thing venerable in social order and discipline. Every false opinion in divine things, says Plutarch, is pernicious, betraying itself in the disorders of the imagination, wherever it takes root, and springs up into action. So that Aristotle reckons the care and support of religion the first of public concerns. This is a truth applying not to any particular state, but to all governments, and to human society in every shape. An avowal which Xenophon makes the characteristic of a great and wise prince, attributing to Cyrus a declaration of his firm persuasion that the more his subjects feared God, the more obedient he should find them to his laws, and the more attached to his person. But once remove the motives of religion, says Tully, and you destroy faith, the intercourse between man and man, and justice the most excellent of all virtues. The opinions of Epicurus afford a sufficient proof of this: for in banishing the providence of God from his system, he made justice nothing but an empty name, springing from human conventions, founded on self-interest, and restraining men from the commission of crimes by no other principle but that of fear. But there is a wider sphere, than the internal welfare of independent states, on which religion operates. In the separate society, which every kingdom, state, or country forms within itself, the place of religion may occasionally be supplied by the influence and execution of municipal laws. But in all the transactions of the great community at large, where civil laws are silent, and tribunals give way to the decision of the sword, the law of nature and of nations, founded upon the fear of God, and obedience to his will, is the standard of right to which Kings and Sovereign states appeal; a violation of which is regarded as a violation of the divine law.