War turned Tilly into a fiend.  How cold and sullen and selfish it made Napoleon!  How grasping and greedy it made Marlborough!  How unscrupulous it made Clive and Hastings!  How stubborn and proud it made Wellington!  How vain and pompous it made Scott!  How overbearing it made Belle-Isle and Villars!  How reckless and hard it made Ney and Murat!  The dangers and miseries of war develop sternness, hardness, and indifference to suffering.  It is violence; and violence does not naturally produce the peaceful virtues.  It produces courage, indeed, but physical rather than moral,—­least of all, that spiritual courage which makes martyrs and saints.  It makes boon companions, not friends.  It gives exaggerated ideas of self-importance.  It exalts the outward and material, not the spiritual and the real.  The very tread of a military veteran is stately, proud, and conscious,—­like that of a procession of cardinals, or of railway kings.

So that when a man inured to camps and battles shines in the modest unconsciousness of a Christian gentleman or meditative sage, we feel unusual reverence for him.  We feel that his soul is unpolluted, and that he is superior to ordinary temptations.

And nothing in war develops the greatness of the higher qualities of heart and soul but the sacredness of a great cause.  This takes a man out of himself, and binds his soul to God.  He learns to feel that he is merely an instrument of Almighty power.  It was the sacredness of a great cause that shed such a lustre on the character of Washington.  How unimpressible the victories of Charlemagne, disconnected with that work of civilization which he was sent into the world to reconstruct!  How devoid of interest and grandeur were the battles of Marston Moor and Worcester, without reference to those principles of religious liberty which warmed the soul of Cromwell!  The conflicts of Bunker Hill and Princeton were insignificant when compared with the mighty array of forces at Blenheim or Austerlitz; but when associated with ideas of American independence, and the extension of American greatness from the Atlantic to the Pacific, their sublime results are impressed upon the mind with ever-increasing power.  Even French soldiers have seldom been victorious unless inspired by ideas of liberty or patriotism.  It is ever the majesty of a cause which makes not only great generals but good men.  And it was the greatness of the cause with which Gustavus Adolphus was identified that gave to his character such moral beauty,—­that same beauty which exalted William the Silent and William of Orange amid the disasters of their country, and made them eternally popular.  After all, the permanent idols of popular idolatry are not the intellectually great, but the morally beautiful,—­and all the more attractive when their moral excellence is in strong contrast with the prevailing vices of contemporaries.  It was the moral greatness of Gustavus which has given to him his truest fame.  Great was he as a military genius, but greater still as a benefactor of oppressed peoples.