As peace is essentially the end of that great corporation called the state; it follows that the justice by which its foreign and domestic policy must be regulated, is not that strict or absolute justice spoken of above, but that temperate or conciliatory equity, which is alone applicable to the concerns of men. The maxim, "a thousand years' wrong cannot constitute an hour's right," if applied to civil jurisprudence, would introduce interminable confusion, hardship and misery in the affairs of private life, and if applied to constitutional and international law, would lead to perpetual anarchy at home, and to endless, exterminating war abroad.
The Christian religion, as it comes from God, is eminently social--hence it abhors the principle of absolute or inexorable right, whether applied to civil or public law--hence the Christian state, or the state animated with the spirit of Christianity, is in its tendency essentially pacific.
This pacific policy of the state, however, so far from excluding, necessarily implies the firm, uncompromising vindication of its rights and interests, whether at home or abroad; and the repression of evil doers within, or a just war without, is often the only means of attaining the object for which the state was constituted--to wit, the maintenance of peace. On the other hand, the revolutionary state, or the state where, in opposition to existing rights and interests, new rights and interests are violently enforced; and where, in subversion of all established institutions, new institutions, conceived according to abstract and arbitrary theories, are violently introduced; the revolutionary state, I say, is, from its nature and origin--no matter what form it may assume--necessarily driven to a course of iniquitous policy--to disorganizing tyranny within, and to fierce, relentless hostility without.
Against the pacific character of the Christian state, the bloody wars of Charlemagne with the Saxons, the Crusades of a later period, and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are commonly objected. In the course of the work, to which this memoir is prefixed, the reader will find these several objections victoriously answered.