100 years ago in The Record
Sunday, June 3, 1917
To young people at the start of a war, “there is something exhilarating and contagious in the stir and excitements of the hour,” a Troy pastor preaches today.
“The city aflame with bunting, the crowds standing in front of the bulletins, men in khaki passing and repassing in our streets – are incidents which appeal powerfully to the imagination of youth, and lift prosaic life into the realms of the unreal and the romantic.”
For older folks, those who can remember the SpanishAmerican War of 1898 or the Civil War of more than fifty years ago, “there is something terribly familiar in this sight of the nation stripping itself for conflict. To that older generation there is nothing novel, nothing romantic about these sights and sounds. Every movement, every step from day to day, is charged with a sinister reality.”
Rev. Edgar A. Enos of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church takes his text from St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, in which the apostle enjoins “obedience and loyalty to the state and to those civil powers that are ordained of God.” Paul’s message was “never more timely than now,” Enos says. The U.S. declared war on Germany on April 6. Enos’s subject is the duty Christians owe their governments in wartime. “Why should we speak of these things in church?” he asks rhetorically.
“And I answer: Since the state is divine, and since its rulers and governors are the ministers of God, ‘sent,’ as the apostle says, ‘by Him for the punishment of evil doers and for the praise of them that do well,’ the war in which we are now involved brings home to every Christian man and woman ethical considerations which can not be disregarded.”
The most important consideration, Enos argues, is the unconditional obedience citizens owe the government.
“Although our government is democratic in its form, guaranteeing a large measure of liberty in the matter of speech and action … nevertheless, when the die has been cast, and the country finds itself on the battlefield, actually engaged in the discharge of a difficult and dangerous duty, it is but a plain requirement of Christian morals that all mutterings and criticism should be silenced, and that sympathy and co-operation should be the universal notes of Christian citizenship.
“As to the righteousness of the war, the absolutely disinterested character of the motives which have actuated the general government in all its negotiations and demands from the beginning until now – I do not see how there can be two opinions.”
America’s war “is a righteous one, humane and merciful and therefore just and honorable.”