CHRISTIANS AND WAR 3...

THE CHRISTIAN AND THE SWORD

Dear Father: In your kind favor of the 15th instruction, you tell me if what you have written on the use or abuse of the sword is not satisfactory, to feel no backwardness in saying so. As I before remarked, I fear the discussion of the subject through the "Signs of the Times" will be productive of alienation of feeling rather than good results. Truth may be revealed to some brethren, which is not as yet taught to others of us: it has been said:

"The men of mind are mountains; and their heads

Are sunned long ere the rest of earth."

CHRISTIANS AND WAR 2...

[Ed. We continue the series on Christians and war with the response from Gilbert Beebe's son William to his father's first letter.]

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR...

[Elder William Beebe, formerly of New York State, was residing in Georgia, and attending the churches of the Old School Baptist order there when the War Between The States began. (William was ordained in Georgia just after the war.) He served in the Confederate Army until captured by Northern forces and was imprisoned in Ohio. The following correspondence with his father, Elder Gilbert Beebe, was the results of his disagreement with a circular letter This refers to the Circular Letter of the Warwick Old School Baptist Association of June 1866 written by Elder Silas Durand titled, The Love of Christ the Bond of Perfectness. We will publish this article at a future date. from the Warwick Association upon the subject of brethren taking up arms against brethren. That this was then, and is now, a difficult subject can be seen from the excellent points made by both writers. They were father and son, fellow yoke servants with Christ, brethren in the church of the Living God, and yet abiding in nature under opposing and bitterly antagonistic governments. Men of lesser gifts, or lacking the long-suffering nature of their Redeemer might well have been much more vitriolic and mean spirited in their arguments. - Elder James Poole]