Jesus proclaimed a new society towards the close of his mission.  Before his time, nations belonged to one or several masters and were their property like so many herds.  Princes and grandees crushed the world with all the weight of their pride and their rapacity.  Then Jesus came to put an end to this extreme disorder.  He came to lift the bowed heads and to emancipate the slaves.  He taught them that they are equal before God and are therefore free in regard to each other, that no one has any intrinsic power over his brothers, that the divine laws of equality and liberty are inviolable, and that power, rather than being a right, is a social duty, a service, a kind of bondage freely accepted for the welfare of all.  Such is the society that Jesus established.

Is that what we now see in the world?  Is that the doctrine that reigns on earth?  Has it conquered the Gentiles?  Are the rulers of nations the servants, or the masters, of their people?  For eighteen centuries, generation after generation passes on the teaching of Christ and says that it believes in it.  But what change is there in the world?  The nations – crushed and suffering – are still awaiting the promised liberation, not because Christ’s words were untrue or unreal, but because the people either did not understand that the fruits of the teaching must be secured by an effort of their own will, or because, numbed by their humiliations, they did not do the one thing that brings victory: they were not ready to die for the truth.  But they will awaken; something is already stirring within them; they have heard a voice that cries: “Salvation draws nigh.” Lamennais

To the glory of humanity, t must be said that the nineteenth century tends to approach a new path.  Humanity has learned that laws and tribunals should exist for nations and that, because they are accomplished on a larger scale, crimes committed by nations against nations are not less hateful than crimes committed amongst individuals.  Quetelet

All men are one in origin, one in the law that governs them, and one in the goal they are destined to attain.  Your faith must be one, your actions one, and one the banner under which you contend.  Acts, tears, and martyrdoms, form a language common to all men and which all men understand.  J. Mazzini

No, I appeal to the revolt of the conscience of every man who has seen, or made, the blood of his fellow citizens flow.  It is not enough that one single head should carry a burden as heavy as that of so many murders; as many heads as there are combatants would not be too many.  In order to be responsible for the law of blood that they execute, it would be just that they should at least have understood it.  But the best organizations that I advocate would in themselves be only temporary; for I repeat once more, that armies and war will only last a while.  Notwithstanding the words of a sophist, which I have elsewhere controverted, it is not true that war, even against the foreigner, is divine.  It is not true that the earth is thirsting for blood.  War is accursed of God, and even those men who make it have a secret horror of it.  The earth cries to heaven praying for fresh water in its rivers, and for the pure dew of its clouds.  Alfred de Vigny

Men are easily coerced and made to obey, and mutually deprave one another by those two habits.  Here stultification, there insolence, nowhere true human dignity.  V. P. Considerant

If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.  Frederick the Great

Two thousand years ago John the Baptist, and after him Jesus, said to the people, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand.  Bethink yourselves (μετανοέω) and believe in the Gospel.”  (Mark 1:15)  “And if you do not bethink yourselves, you will all perish.” (Luke 13:5)

But men did not listen, and the destruction foretold is already near at hand, as men of our time cannot but see.  We are already perishing, and therefore we cannot close our ears to that means of salvation given of old, but new to us.  We cannot but see that besides all the other calamities that flow from our evil and irrational life, military preparations alone and the wars resulting from them must inevitably destroy us.  We cannot but see that all the practical means devised for escape from these evils are and must be ineffectual, and that the disastrous plight of nations arming themselves one against another must continually become worse.  Therefore, the words of Jesus apply to us and to our time more than to anyone else or to any other time.

He said, “Bethink yourselves!” – that is, let every man interrupt his work and ask himself: “Who am I?  From where have I come?  And what is my vocation?”  Having answered these questions, let him decide, according to the answer, whether what he does is in accord with his vocation.  It is only necessary for each man of our world and time (each man acquainted with the essence of the Christian teaching) to interrupt his activity for a minute, to forget what people consider him to be – emperor, soldier, minister, or journalist – and to seriously ask himself who he is and what is his vocation, and he will at once doubt the utility, rightfulness, and reasonableness of his activity.  “Before I am emperor, soldier, minister, or journalist,” every man of our Christian world should say to himself, “before all else I am a man.  I am an organic being sent by a higher will into a universe endless in time and space, where, after staying in it for an instant, I shall die and disappear from it.  Therefore, all those personal, social, or even universal human aims, which I set before myself and which are set before me by men, are insignificant because of the brevity of my life as well as the illimitability of the life of the universe, and should be subordinated to that higher aim for the attainment of which I am sent into the world.  That ultimate aim, owing to my limitations, is not understood by me but exists (as there must be a purpose in everything that exists), and my business is to be its tool.  My vocation therefore is to be God’s workman, fulfilling His work.”  And having understood his vocation in this way, every man of our world and time, from emperor to soldier, cannot help seeing with different eyes the duties that he has taken upon himself or that others have laid upon him.

“Before I was crowned and recognized as Emperor,” the Emperor should say to himself, “before I undertook to fulfill the duties of head of the state, I promised by the very fact that I am alive to fulfill what is demanded of me by that higher will which sent me into life.  I not only know those demands but I feel them in my heart.  They consist, as is said in the Christian law, which I profess, in submitting to the will of God, and in fulfilling what it requires of me, namely, that I should love my neighbor, serve him, and do to him as I would wish him to do to me.  Am I doing this by ruling men and ordering violence, executions, and most dreadful of all – wars?

“Men tell me that I ought to do this.  But God says that I ought to do something quite different.  And therefore, however much I may be told that as head of the state I must order deeds of violence, the levying of taxes, executions, and above all war – the killing of my fellow men – I do not wish to, and cannot, do these things.”

And the soldier who is commanded to kill men should say the same thing to himself, and so should the politician who deems it his duty to prepare for war, and the journalist who incites men to war, and every man who has put to himself the questions of who he is and what is his vocation in life.  And as soon as the head of the state ceases to direct war, the soldier to fight, the politician to prepare means for war, and the journalist to incite men thereto – then, without any new institutions, devices, balance of power, or tribunals, that hopeless position in which people have placed themselves not only as regards war but as regards all their other self-inflicted calamities will cease to exist.

Strange as this may seem, the surest and most certain deliverance for men from all their self-inflicted calamities, even the most dreadful of them – war – is attainable not by any external general measures but by that simple appeal to the consciousness of each individual man which was presented by Jesus nineteen hundred years ago: that every man should bethink himself and ask himself who he is, why he lives, and what he should and should not do.