Still, military genius, however lauded and honored, is too often allied
with ambition and selfishness to secure the highest favor of
philosophers or Christians. It does not reveal the soul in its loftiest
aspirations. Men of a coarser type are often most successful,--men
insensible to pity and to reproach, whose greatest merit is in will,
nerve, energy, and power of making rapid combinations. We revere the
intellect of the Greeks more than that of the Romans, though they were
inferior to the latter in military success. We have more respect for
those qualities which add to the domain of truth than those which secure
power. A wise man elevates the Bacons, the Newtons, and the Shakespeares
above all the Marlboroughs and Wellingtons. Plato is surrounded with a
brighter halo than Themistocles, and Cicero than Marius.

[Sidenote: The general evils of war.]

War as a trade is unscrupulous, hard, rapacious, destructive. It foments
all the evil passions; it is allied with all the vices; it is
antagonistic to human welfare. It glories merely in strength; it
worships only success. It raises wicked men to power; it prostrates and
hides the good. It extinguishes what is most lovely, and spurns what is
most exalted. It makes a pandemonium of earth, and drags to its
triumphal car the venerated relics of ages. It is an awful crime, making
slaves of the helpless, and spreading consternation, misery, and death
wherever it goes--marking its progress with a trail of blood, and
filling the earth with imprecations and curses. It is the greatest
scourge which God uses to chastise enervated nations, and cannot be
contemplated with; any satisfaction except as the wrath, which is made
to praise the Sovereign Ruler who employs what means He chooses to
punish or exalt.