A TRULY CHRISTIAN CAPTAIN.
The following is from the Army and Navy of March 26:— “There is a case on record of an officer resigning his commission on account of religious convictions against ‘blood-guiltiness.’ In January, 1825, Captain Thomas Thrush, R. N., an officer who had seen service in the great war and served afloat as a commander in that period, from 1806-9, in charge of H. M. S. Avon on the Jamaica station, resigned his commission ‘on the ground of the unlawfulness of war,’ at the same time publishing the fact and his views in a pamphlet entitled ‘A Letter to the King.’” When Captain Thrush was serving in the war, he may have professed Christianity, and boasted that he belonged to a “Christian nation.” But when the real and not the professed Christianity takes possession of the man, his conscience arouses him to the enormity of the sin of “blood-guiltiness.” He no longer looks upon the words of Christ, his Master, as something that can be interpreted into meaningless phrases. He hears and respectfully and literally obeys the divine instruction, “Put up again thy sword into his place; for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Matt. 26: 52.