How It Looks to an Outsider.
—That Mr. Ambrose Bierce is a man of letters no one who knows him will dispute. But he is not a religious man. We should judge him to be at least an agnostic. But he, like many others of his ilk, does admire consistency, and can oftentimes see it with a clearness unknown to the religious man of perverted view. Mr. Bierce has had more or less to say of late, in common with many others, on war chaplains. In the Examiner of June 26, in referring to a paper which lauds the fighting parson, Mr. Bierce well says:— “Fighting is not the duty of a chaplain, and for my part I respect a good deal more the minister who does? My reason? O, that is very simple: it is that I am unable to imagine Christ fighting! To that ultimate test I subject the acts of all Christ’s ministers—for that matter all professed Christians. If any man of them can conceive a war so righteous that Christ would have armed Himself and actively engaged in its battles, cheering on His comrades and killing His antagonists, why, let that imaginative man go soldiering to the adequate gratification of his mind and heart; to me it seems that the world’s rough work is best performed by the worldly—that in the dismal extremity which we name war a Christian nation’s best hope lies in its sinners. The army chaplain is usually a conscientious and well-meaning, if somewhat narrow, man, having a demonstrable utility; but that he commonly has, or ever ought to have, a stomach for fighting is untrue.” And who that believes God’s Word will impugn Mr. Bierce’s standard of judgment. A true Christian nation would not go to war; that it does go to war proves a nation not Christian.