Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-evaluation (review)

50Quaker History the standpoint of the general reader. Interest is usually in the principals and in the locale of a story, rather than in the address of its transmitter. Who would think of looking under "Aloha State" for stories of Catharine Shipley, who lived most of her life in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, or expect to find an anecdote of Elijah Coffin under "Land of Enchantment" ? More serious objection can be made with respect to the material included and the style of its presentation. Some of the items are neither anecdotal nor humorous, nor would they qualify as folklore. Moreover, some thirty of the anecdotes have been previously printed in a well-known American anthology of Quaker anecdotes. It is fair to say that, almost without exception , they are told more felicitously, and usually with more Friendly turns of phrase, in the previously published book. A still more serious objection is that these stories are here offered as "true stories about Friends." Doubtless most of them are true, but certainly some of them are not.The author cites one story as apocryphal (the John Woolman item on page 33); the Friend involved in the "humble servant" anecdote on page 89 has denied its authenticity; an item on page 93 has been variously ascribed to Cromwell Barnard and to John Whitall, and is improbably true for both. But the worst lapse of all is the letter ascribed to Cotton Mather, in which Friends are referred to as "heretics and malignants" and William Perm is described as a "scamp." This letter has been cited repeatedly in Quaker literature as unauthentic (viz, this Bulletin, I, 89; III, 148; VIII, 43; XI, 51; XXXVI, 43; XXXVII, 95; and XLIII, 56). So it seems strange, as well as discouraging at this late date, to have it again presented by a Friend as a true story about a Friend. Much of the material succeeds, as the author hopes, in giving some suggestion as to certain characteristics of old-time Quakers. Most of the anecdotes are amusing, and some of them are funny. They show that Friends can smile, if less frequently chuckle, at their own limitations. But the pleasure to be derived from perusal of this volume is lessened by the fact that, having been privately published, it has suffered seriously from lack of editorial oversight. Pennsylvania State UniversityMaurice A. Mook Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-evaluation. By Roland H. Bainton. New York and Nashville : Abingdon Press. I960. 299 pages. Illustrations. $4.75. Fifteen years ago, during World War II, Professor Bainton of Yale published in Social Action, a magazine of the Congregational Christian Churches, a schematic analysis of the attitudes towards war held by Christians of various persuasions at different times in history. He distinguished three basic attitudes, which emerged in roughly chronological order: pacifism in three varieties (legalistic, pragmatic, redemptive); the "just war" argument, which sanctions participation in a particular war on the ground Book Reviews51 that justice lies clearly on one side; and the attitude of the "crusade" which requires participation as a religious duty on the ground that the war is not only just but holy. In his new book he has filled out this outline with almost encyclopedic comprehensiveness, extending his lucid analysis backward into Hebrew and classical antiquity and forward into the postHiroshima era, in which he finds a promising new variety of pacifism, "a pacifism of prudence, based on the desire of survival," emerging (pp. 248-249). The expansion of scale, the profusion of learning, the inclusion of many sub-varieties of the three basic attitudes, make this a highly instructive and useful book. Perhaps inevitably, the sharp outlines, the clear pattern, of the earlier sketch become blurred: I missed, for example, the useful distinction among the three varieties of pacifism and particularly the emphasis on the "redemptive," which somehow in this book becomes merged on pages 82-83 with the "pragmatic," and then virtually disappears from view. But whatever is lost is lost in a good cause—the setting of religious pacifism, such as that of Friends, in its full context of divergent Christian attitudes towards war. In his last two chapters...