Can the _duellist_, who had rather sheath his sword in the bowels of his brother, than stifle that which he calls an affront, can he be said to have this mark of his belonging to Christ? Now, what is the difference between the haughty duellist meeting his adversary with sword and pistol behind a hedge, and two kingdoms with their high-spirited regiments slaughtering one another in the field of battle? It is the difference that is between the murder of one man, and the murder of an hundred thousand. Now imagine the duellist _fasting_ and _confessing_ his sins to God to-day, because he is engaged to fight his brother to-morrow; fancy again the conqueror got into his closet, on his bended knees, lifting up hands and heart to God, for blessing his weapons with the death of his brother; and then you have a pictured in _little_ of great piety, that begins and ends the wars all over heavenly Christendom! What blindness can be greater, than to think that a Christian kingdom, can have any other goodness, or union with Christ, but that very goodness, which makes the private Christian to be one with him, and a partaker of the divine nature? Or that pride, wrath, ambition, envy, covetousness, rapine, revenge, hatred, and murder, are only the _works of the devil_, whilst they are committed by private, or single men; but when carried on by all the strength and authority, all the hearts, hands, and voices of a whole nation, that the devil is then quite driven out of them, loses all his right and power in them, and they become holy matter of church thanksgivings, and the sacred oratory of pulpits? Look at that which the private Christian is to do to his neighbour, or his enemy, and you see that very thing, which one Christian kingdom is to do to another. Now suppose a man, redeemed from his fallen nature, by Christ formed in his soul, and then he can no more be hired to kill men gloriously in the field, than to carry a dark lanthorn by night to a _powder-plot_. The temporal miseries which war carries along with it, wherever it goes, are neither to be numbered nor expressed. What thievery bears any proportion to that, which with the boldness of drum and trumpet, plunders the innocent of all that they have? And if themselves are left alive, with all their limbs, or their daughters unravished, they have many times, only the ashes of their consumed houses to lie down upon. What honour has war not gotten, from its tens and tens of hundreds of thousands of men slaughtered on heaps, with as little regret or concern, as at loads of rubbish thrown into a pit? Who, but the fiery dragon, would put wreaths of laurel, on such heroes heads? Who but he, could say unto them, _Well done, good and faithful servants_?