A Still More Terrible Thing.

The taking of human life under any circumstances is an awful thing. To read of men being shot and stabbed, of human bodies mangled and bleeding in the streets, or kicked to one side as though they were dogs, is horrible; yet no description can equal the reality. So we say that people do well to shudder as they read of wholesale slaughter. But fearful as the massacres in Turkey may have been, there is something to which we do not see anybody’s attention specially called, which is still more shocking, so much more shocking that there can be no comparison. What is that thing?—it is the almost universal cry for vengeance, the demand for war,—for more killing,—that has issued and is still issuing from the lips and pens of professed followers and ministers of Christ. We do not wish to call attention to any individual, but only to the thing, and therefore we shall not give the names of those whose utterances we quote.CDFW 2.2

One man, who shows his strong religious sentiments by the statement, “We want a leader filled with the Holy Ghost, whose only fear is to displease God,” writes thus to a leading religious journal:—CDFW 2.3

Sir, I am the father of a family, but my sons and I are only waiting the call to go out. In God’s name let us raise an army of volunteers, and wipe out the awful stain upon our fair island home of accomplices in crime, and sweep the old murderer and all his tribe into the sea.CDFW 3.1

Another person, a woman, a regular correspondent of the same religious paper, quotes the story of two English captains who received some Armenian refugees on board their ships in the Bosphorus, and then when the Turks demanded the refugees, hoisted the British flag, upon which the Turks went away. Then she says:—CDFW 3.2

How fervently one wishes for a moment that they had fired upon our flag! It would have been the signal for instant war!CDFW 3.3