BISHOP WALLIS ON THE WAR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11987, 9 June 1902, Page 7

BISHOP WALLIS ON THE WAR.

— ' » ■■■ ■ V'"i /■ ; ; WAS IT JUST OR UNJUST? FOUGHT WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS AND HUMANITY. £ B IJLEOBAJTH.— OWN COBRESrONDENT.] II „ ' Wellington-, Sunday. 5 To-day rejoicings for peace look place in ' ;. a Il the churches. Bishop Wallis was the preacher at St. Paul's. He took for his .' ' text Revelations xix. 11, "In righteousness He doth judge and make war." Bishop Wallis, in the course of his sermon, asked the question, Had the war .'•'. been just or unjust, right or wrong? . Could they who had met together that day say it'was a war in which they ought to" have prayed for aid to Him who in righteousness judges and makes war? The question was asked for two chief reasons. The first was that the verdict of all Christian Europe had been decisively 1 against us. He made allowances for the foul slanders which had been circulated 1 against our army; he made allowance again for the the natural jealousies of disappointed rivals for supreme power, Jet we could not help pausing when we \J reflected that there Mas no European Ration but had condemned the war as an unjust war, a cruel war, and a selfish war. The voice of Christendom had spoken before. In the time of the Crusades, in one voice the cry had gone up, "It is God's will." Now the nations had Haid. "God wills it not; it is the devil's war, not God's war." Again, the people whom we had been fighting had not been like those whom we fought in the times "of the Crusades. The Boers were our brother Christians, but resembling more the old Puritans than our people, who ;i-'| sang psalms and hymns in the hour of defeat, and in the horn of victory, to God to rise and deliver his righteous people from the yoke of the oppressor. He (Bishop Wallis) was reading the other day the journal of a French general in the Boer army. He found frequently the entry: "Sunday, no work." As he" read that he thought of that most distressing passage in our wars against the Maori people. The most disastrous passage in all these wars was that which recounted how one morning the Maoris, who had been taught to worship God, and who loved to pray to and praise Him, thinking that the nation which was warring against them held the Christian faith like themselves, and would never take any action on that day, held a service, and were in the middle of their devotions when our army rushed the pa and burned the houses to the ground. Could we wonder at those Maoris ceasing to believe, and that many of them —thank God, Hot —had returned to heathendom ? And what about the Boers ? Had we made it easier for our fellow Christians to believe in Christ, or had we been preaching not God's .* Gospel but the devil's? He believed, and he believed all present believed, that God had given us this war to fight, ami that we had fought the battle with righteousness and humanity. He did not himself lay any stress on the fact that the Boers had commenced the war by invasion of British territory. That seemed to him rather a pedantic question, because when men were standing stripped ready to fight,' it was of little moment to ask who started the fight. But when he thought of the origin of the war, of the long and anxious deliberations which had preceded it, nobody could say that we were anxious to start it, and of the end of the war, when terms were offered, which the most irreconcilable of our enemies could accept without compunction, he. asked himself. Does this look like men fighting a selfish battle, doing not God's work, but the devil's ? Or again, when they thought of the course of the war, and the manner in which the British had treated their prisoners and the women and children, they must admit that never in the course of his- ' tory had there been so much gentleness and care for others. One instance of cruelty and brutality stood out. but that had'been swiftly punished. We had conducted this war as Chistians. The majority of those who had taken part were under no obligation to do so, and no war in history had taken place in which the noblemen of our race had pushed forward into the ranks tc I take part in the war as they had in this case. Was that like God's work or the devil's work ? In the hour of distress no craven spirit bad exhibited itself. There had been ' no diminution of generosity, and nobody had been superseded without first a full and careful inquiry. In adversity or prosperity we had not lost our heads, and the motive which • chiefly actuated us in this colony was that it was our duty to stand by our brothers, .who were suffering unjustly, and by the ': Empire ; and though we could have remained at peace in our own rocky little island. God helped us to play the part of brothers taking part in the sacrifices of the whole family, and that would greatly comfort them in the retrospect of what must ever be a question which had to be answered. " Was it right or . wrong ? Did you play the part of a true Christian man or woman in this war '.'"