My immediate first impulse is to protest against the inquisitor and to
prefer the merchant who comes to offer me his wares. But when my
impressions are clarified by reflection, I begin to see that the
inquisitor, when he acts from a right motive, treats me as a man, as an
end in myself, and if he molests me it is from a charitable wish to save
my soul; while the merchant, on the other hand, regards me merely as a
customer, as a means to an end, and his indulgence and tolerance is at
bottom nothing but a supreme indifference to my destiny. There is much
more humanity in the inquisitor.
Similarly there is much more humanity in war than in peace.
Non-resistance to evil implies resistance to good, and to take the
offensive, leaving the defensive out of the question, is perhaps the
divinest thing in humanity. War is the school of fraternity and the bond
of love; it is war that has brought peoples into touch with one
another, by mutual aggression and collision, and has been the cause of
their knowing and loving one another. Human love knows no purer embrace,
or one more fruitful in its consequences, than that between victor and
vanquished on the battlefield. And even the purified hate that springs
from war is fruitful. War is, in its strictest sense, the sanctification
of homicide; Cain is redeemed as a leader of armies. And if Cain had not
killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by the hand of Abel.
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