War, in fact, is the natural penalty by which, under God’s constitution of the world, the evil passions of men punish themselves. We may take an example from the physical world. The earth under our feet is held together, and affords us a sure foothold, by virtue of certain physical and chemical laws which are perpetually at work in it, such as the law of gravitation and the laws of chemical attraction. They are always working silently, and it is by means of the incessant action of those laws that the whole face of the earth is maintained from day to day. But from time to time, from some causes which we do not yet understand, something occurs to disturb their ordinary peaceful course, and then by their own natural action they produce some tremendous convulsions, like earthquakes or the eruptions of volcanoes. So it is with the moral world of national and international life. It is maintained in peace and stability, as a rule, by the principles of mutual trust and regard, if not of love, which are at the root of social and political life; but if falsehood and jealousy and covetousness accumulate in some part of the world, there is sure, sooner or later, to be a terrible convulsion and a devastating eruption of “blood and fire and vapour of smoke.” War is thus the outburst, the visible embodiment, of the passions behind it, of the accumulated sins which nations and generations have been indulging. We look with horror on war and all its miseries, and justly so; but what we ought to look on with more horror are the sins and wickedness and passions of which war is the inevitable result. People say that war is wrong, and of course it is wrong that there should be war; but the wrong in it is not the actual waging of the war, not at least the using of the sword, in the Name of God, to assert right against wrong; that is the bounden duty of the lawful authority. Where the wrong lies is in the passions which make the war, and which compel men to resort to so terrible a vindication of righteousness.