Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/60

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24
ESSAYS OF WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER

those of a warrior towards outsiders and of tribal brotherhood towards insiders. "The duty of living in harmony and peace, of avoiding evil-speaking, of kindness to the orphan, of charity to the needy and of hospitality to all, would be among the prominent topics brought under consideration" at the annual assemblies.[1]

We have now found a peace of the house, of the sanctuary, of religion, of the market, of women, of the popular assembly, and of the king, all of which were legal and institutional checks upon war and an introduction of rational and moral methods in the place of force. Let us see next what has been the relation between religion on the one side and peace or war on the other.

Those who perform the rites of worship towards the same ancestors or the same gods come into the same cult-group, but no religion has ever succeeded in making its cult-group into a peace-group, although they all try to do it. The salutation of members of a cult-group to each other is very generally "Peace," or something equivalent. Quakers call themselves "Friends" and always have a closer bond to each other than to the outside world. Such a peace-group is only an ideal for all who profess the same religion; in most of the great religions down to the seventeenth century, dissenters or heretics were always treated with great severity, because it was thought that they would bring down the wrath of the ghost or the god not only on themselves but also on the whole community. The New England Puritans had this notion that the sins of some would bring down the wrath of God on the whole. Religion has always intensified ethnocentrism; the adherents of a religion always think themselves the chosen people or else they

  1. Morgan, L. H.: League of the Iroquois, 190; Hale, H.: Iroquois Book of Rites, 32.