Excerpt from Christianity and the War We give our own experience on the subject under consideration in the belief that it reflects the experience of a large number in the Christian community, and this with-5 out much regard to sectarian relations. We suddenly find ourselves without any matured principles to guide us in the most trying crisis in the history of the nation and we can recall instances in which, with more or less of explicitness, we have committed ourselves to a policy which a severe test assures us to be wholly inadequate. Hence the change of conviction and, to a much greater extent, of feeling which has come over us. We are free to confess that We have been in the habit of over-estimating the civilization of the age and the country in which we live. Years ago we learned from Gibbon what might be expected of barbarians. But we indulged the hope that the Goths and Vandals belonged only to the early time. We did not expect that an Alaric could come from the land that had given birth to a Washington. The humilia-a ting fact of slavery, of property in man, was indeed before us; and a class of teachers insisted with tolerably severe logic, that a man who would appropriate to his own use the unpaid toil of another, could scruple at nothing. But we had personal acquaintances among slave-holders, and knew that such. An inference, however conclusive as a matter of logic, was not just in point of fact. We could give the names of slave-holders who, aside from what is involved in the fact of being slave-holders, would neither lie, nor steal, nor do an inhuman act. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.