THE

ADVOCATE OF PEACE.

MAY AND JUNE, 1861.

PROOFS OF PROGRESS IN PEACE.

America has led the world in two of its grandest movements since time began. She has experimentally proved that an enlightened and religious people can govern themselves, making their own laws, and appointing their own men to execute them. And she has shown, that Religion needs no aid from the State, and that the State can safely give equal protection to all sects and parties of Christians. Most of a century has rolled away during which she has held up, to the eyes of mankind, these sublime truths. The full effect cannot be known.

This day she is displaying before the astonished nations another and even sublimer lesson, viz: that a nation may be dismembered revolutionized, without the shedding of blood. For months we have been in the midst of a revolution, while business, though checked, is not stopped, and a mighty people confine themselves to arguments and persuasion. Never before has a nation passed peaceably through such a struggle of conflicting sentiments and interests. Never has a portion of a nation given such provocations, without the central power resorting to military measures.

How it enobles our estimate of man to see a great and powerful nation, badgered and robbed by a faction, or fraction of its people, and yet remain calm, conciliatory, kind. Representatives from the disturbed section have been allowed to sit in the national councils, and utter provoking, denunciatory and treasonable sentiments, avowing them

selves the while to be foreigners, and irrevocably disconnected with the nation! Commissioners from the revolted district have been allowed to visit the Capitol, urge their "claims" upon the Chief Magistrate in person, threaten all sorts of violence, if decisive measures are taken to preserve the Union, and return to their homes without arrest. Never, on this earth, has it been thus before!

Let what may happen, a new lesson, august and lovely, has been given to the world. Many weeks of excitement and provocation have glided by; but our streets exhibit nó squads of recruits, no tocsin calls our free men to arms. Instead of this, what do we see? A PEACE CONGRESS! Day by day is considered every asserted grievance, and debated every proposed remedy. There have men of opposite views given each other a patient and respectful hearing, and at length united in proposing a peaceful settlement, embracing mutual concessions.

Whether the proposed mode of settlement be good or bad, sufficient or insufficient, the glorious truth remains, that the nation, instead of rushing to arms, took this mode of proceeding. A large gain is secured, a glorious example set. The public ear has become accustomed to the term, "Peace Congress;" and passion has had time to subside. But lately, such arbitrations after fighting have been always resorted to, and commissioners have made peace, while generals could not. Now, we set the world an example of employing peace commissioners before fighting. Presently, the day will come when national contentions, like private ones, will be settled without fighting! Henceforth the "Peace Society" will no longer be graciously let alone by civil and religious magnates, as a harmless collection of kind-hearted dreamers, but will stand high among the great benevolent institutions which aim to procure the triumph of true religion in the earth.

There is hope now, that the States which have united in a new ( ́onfederacy, will be allowed to proceed, and form a government in their own way. If they should find that secession was a grave error, and seek to return, another Peace Congress can determine whether to reunite or not, and, if to re-unite, on what terms. Our children will be as capable of making wise arrangements as we are, and more so, as they will act in view of facts and events which we now cannot foresee. Why should we resort to brutality and blood, forbidden alike by Christianity and common sense? Why attempt to force a union, and thus withdrawing the noble lesson we have been holding forth, make ourselves both abhorrent and ridiculous? We may ravage the Cotton States, and leave them with little else than orphans and widows, mourn

ing over burnt homes, and blackened fields; but will this make "Union?" Will this remove any grievance, quiet any apprehension, or settle any dispute? Will it not be necessary, after inconceivable damage on both sides, to appoint commissioners, and have another "Peace Congress "?

Let every child in America pray for peace. It is the great want; and, if we can reach the end of these difficulties without a fierce, protracted war among ourselves, we shall teach a lesson of incalculable value to the whole world, the lesson that there is no real need of war in any case.

INCIDENTAL BEARINGS OF THE PEACE CAUSE.

Our readers are well aware that the mass of Christians practically ignore the claims of our cause to their active support. Right or wrong, the fact that they do so, is undeniable; and at every turn do we meet it as a quiet but very effective obstruction to our progress. They all profess to be friends of peace, as much so as anybody, but refuse or neglect to do anything for it. If we ask them to give either money or labor, to preach or pray on its behalf, they are ready with some excuse or other that proves how little they know or care about it. They seldom betray any active hostility-most of them are too indifferent for that; but, while acknowledging the excellence and vast importance of our object, they plead either that there is no need of any special efforts for its accomplishment, or that they are in truth laboring for it by their support of the gospel at home, and its spread among the heathen. They tell us they are now doing all they can in other and more effective modes of usefulness, from which they cannot withdraw to spend their energies or funds in a cause from which so much less is to be expected for the ultimate welfare of mankind.

Now, we are far from calling in question the motives of those who honestly reason in this way, as there is clearly room for a conscientious diversity of opinion here; but for the sake of all the great enterprises in which Christians of different denominations are engaged, both at home and abroad, for the recovery of a lost world to God, we think they ought all to examine, with far more candor and care than they have yet done, the bearings of the Peace movement upon these various enterprises of Christian Benevolence and Reform. They form perhaps the chief glory of the age in which we live; and we deem it wrong for

those embarked in them to overlook what is so essential as Peace confessedly is, to their own steady progress, and their final complete triumph.

The subject has a reach too vast for a satisfactory discussion in a single article. We propose calling attention to it ere long in a series of articles, designed to show how important and indispensable is the cause of Peace to the success of all enterprises of Christian Benevolence and Reform. We fully believe, 'and trust we shall be able to prove, that it is the grand pioneer and auxiliary of all such enterprises; that its support, in one way or another, is quite essential to their success; that its defeat, or only partial failure, must put them all back on the great dial-plate of the world's progress; that without peace, revivals of religion must cease, and the various enterprises of Christian benevolence, as well as those of reform, will all be arrested, paralyzed or seriously crippled. Peace, indeed, is the great desideratum of the age and the world, the hinge of almost everything good; and in no other way can either money, labor, or influence be expended to better purpose for the glory of God, or the highest temporal and spiritual welfare of mankind, than in a wise, zealous support of this cause.

Glance at a single aspect of this argument. Forty-five years ago, the friends of Peace started our cause in this country; and, by God's blessing upon perhaps $100,000, or more, spent here in its prosecution during this period, there has been formed a public sentiment, chiefly in the Free States, that sufficed, for a time at least to hold us back, in the face of a most provoking rebellion, from the nameless evils of a civil war. It was a deliverance due mainly to the influences diffused for nearly half a century by our cause. Had the North been like the South, where very little has been done to change the war habits of past ages, we should all have plunged at once into a death-struggle from which we could hardly have hoped to escape without ages of strife and blood-shed whose evils no imagination could foresee or fully conceive. Had Christians as a body done their whole duty to this cause from its start; had the press and the pulpit, the church and the fireside, the leading influences of the land, rallied all along to its steady, resolute, untiring support; had there been spent in its prosecution only the thousandth part of the money and moral power worse than wasted already in the rebellion now in progress, the terrible evils now upon us would never have come. Could such a result have been reached, what arithmetic could compute its importance to the various enterprises of Christian benevolence and reform, to the prosperity of our land, to the welfare of the world?

MR. COAN'S LETTER.

G. C. BECKWITH, D. D., Sec. of Am. Peace Soc.

MY DEAR BROTHER:-It is always pleasant to remember the cause of peace. It is a joyful exercise. It is God-like, Christ-like, heaven-like. It calms the soul, makes it reasonable, prostrates its baser passions, exalts the good, teaches moderation, forbearance, forgiveness, love. It is blessed to think of "the Prince of Peace"; to set him always before us; to contemplate his gentleness, his meek and lowly heart, his stainless life, his gracious words 'Learn of me; take my yoke; love your enemies; feed them; bless them; blessed are the peace makers-that ye may be the children of your Father in heaven.' Is it not good and comely to meditate on this theme? Will it not transform us, making us "peaceful, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy, having compassion one of another, pitiful, kind, forgiving one another in love, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven us?

How soon we catch the image of the object we contemplate. So Christ's pure and peaceful image, by a steadfast and admiring contemplation, becomes ambrotyped on the soul. "We all, with open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory as by the spirit of God."

What is more to be desired than that all Christians should be disabused of false reasoning and false principles on the subject of war; that they should get rid of the spirit of retaliation and revenge; that they should understand the import of the assertion-" Vengeance is mine"; that they should have confidence in the protecting power of goodness and love; that they should dare to copy the example and to follow in the footsteps of "Him who, when he was reviled, reviled not again"; that they should listen to the teachings of Him who said, 'see that ye resist not evil-put up thy sword-love your enemies-do good to those that hate you.' Why is it that these simple, sublime and heavenly truths, illustrated and enforced as they are by the life and death of their Divine Author, should be so misinterpreted, misunderstood, misapplied and nutralized in the minds and lives of professed Christians? They are so plain that a child may comprehend them, and so distinct that "he may run who reads them "and the way" I am the way "-is so open and so straight, that "the way-faring man, though a fool, need not err therein."

But the whole subject has become mystified by sophistry, complicated by human reasoning, and darkened and obscured by human passions. Pride, ambition, envy, jealousy, cupidity, fear, contempt, hatred, revengethese are some of the elements which kindle the fires of war, and none of them are from above. All are "earthly, sensual, devilish." So long as these baleful fires burn only outside of the church, we have nothing to fear holy martyrs would soon quench them. Our chief danger is when our