To Rule the World by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 10, 1914

To Rule the World

By C. M. S.

WAR is Satan’s answer to God’s purpose in this world. It is his version of the second table of God’s law. Jesus summarized that table of the law in these words: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Satan’s answer to that is to fill the world with the weapons of slaughter, the implements of war.

God’s purpose, as declared by himself and as demonstrated by our Saviour in his life and his teachings, is that love should rule, and that the motto of mankind should be the sacrifice of self in the service of others. He had to contend with the opposite principle among his own followers when they strove among themselves as to who should be the greatest in the Redeemer’s kingdom. Christ taught them that he who would be greatest should demonstrate his fitness for that place by making himself the servant of all. And he, in his own life, thus demonstrated his fitness as leader of the Lord’s hosts.

There are two policies now working themselves out in the world: on the one hand the policy of self-exaltation, self-service, and the desire to rule over others; and on the other hand the policy of self-surrender, self-sacrifice, and the desire to minister to others’ needs and others’ happiness. Those policies are personified in Satan and in Christ. Satan, in his rebellion against God, has trampled every precept of the decalogue underfoot. War, the incarnation of Satan’s character and purpose, has trampled upon the same precepts and defied the same law and marred and destroyed the living image of its Giver.

And what is it all about? The instigator of war has put it into the hearts of men to lord it over other men, to put other men and their aspirations underfoot and exalt self above all.

The trouble in this world dates from Satan’s entry into the Garden of Eden. God had given the world to man to govern under the benign sway of love. Satan, through falsehood and deception, defrauded man and usurped the rulership. Then he put it into the hearts of men to strive and to fight among themselves for that rulership. Every war of conquest is waged with that thought in mind—to obtain more “subjects,” to rule over more territory. Alexander declared to his Persian antagonist that the universe could not have more than one sun nor more than one sovereign. He proposed to be the military sun for this world, and to put all other military luminaries under his feet. But before his day the same purpose was seen in Babylon and Medo-Persia, and after him in Rome. The same purpose was

active in other governments and other rulers. Napoleon Bonaparte upset all Europe and drenched its soil with the blood of thousands in pursuance of that program.

The aspiration to rule the world has not yet been plucked out of the human breast. People and rulers alike still dream of national greatness and expansion more than of self-sacrifice on the altar of service to mankind. They think more of decisive Waterloos to crush their enemies than of tear-wet Gethsemanes and blood-stained Calvarys to save them.

This is not so much an indictment of mankind as of mankind’s great deceiver, who has given us bullets and bayonets in place of bread, hatred and malice in place of love, and graveyards and deserts in place of homes. This war of mankind against itself is the most inexplicable paradox of the ages. It had its inception in Satan’s ambition to dethrone the Almighty and make himself the ruler of the universe; and it will have its culmination in the destruction of Satan with the hosts of the deceived when sin and war are wiped out in the fires of the last day.

The hosts of Europe that are today piling each other in heaps of dead on blood-wet fields are the victims of that world-old ambition, the rulership of the world. We see their ambitions in their war songs and their national mottoes and popular purposes.

The German peasant, factory hand, merchant, and ruler sing with fervent enthusiasm the strains of this song: “Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles, ueber alles in der Welt!” which means, “Germany, Germany over everything, over everything in the world.” The same idea is in “Britannia rules the sea.” She rules more than the sea, and would not object to ruling much more of the world than she does. The same idea is dominant in Russia, handed down in the tradition that the destiny of the Slavic peoples is to rule the world. That is why Russia is today fighting the greatest war of her history to keep the small Slavic nations free from the control of non-Slavic rulers. It was Turkey’s ambition to rule the world, and she still looks upon universal dominion as a prize much to be desired, but now possibly beyond her reach. In spite of American democratic principles, many Americans were elated when the government took over the Philippines and when those islands became in a sense “our dependencies,” and their people “our subjects.” The Roman Catholic Church has always cherished and cultivated the ambition of world rulership, of ruling not only peoples but the rulers of peoples. In her maintenance of that attitude, unbelievers became heretics, and heretics became rebellious subjects, worthy only of death.

So that ambition is not the heritage or heirloom of any particular people. It is the heritage from Satan’s triumph over man, when he taught man to override the rights of others in striving for his own selfish ends. It is seen in every effort to unite church and state and place one set of men to rule over the religious convictions and the religious acts of other men.

This is all against the purpose of God and out of harmony with his character. His true servants do not strive for the mastery; they will not kill men in order to gain the mastery over other men; they will not seek to exalt themselves by crushing and trampling upon their fellow men. The Saviour of the world was the servant of the world, and his true followers will think more of serving others than of ruling over them. And when the insane folly of war has been wiped out of the world, they to whom the new earth is given will be they who have served others rather than they who have ruled others. The heaps of promising young manhood piled upon the plains and mountains and marshes of Europe, and the devastated homes and bitter heartaches of the people, are the toll humanity pays to the ambition of men to rule the world. How much better to wait God’s time for the restoration of the lost dominion! Those who so wait may share in a victory that is tangible and eternal, a victory that puts in man’s hands again the true rulership of the world once lost to and through him who is the instigator of war.

C. M. S.