If America is to be Pure, it Must Grieve at the Task of being at War

   When you go to war, you better go to war with a clean heart. If hate is your motive, or hate is in your cause, then it will mold you into a killer of men. Those who go to war, must be careful for their souls. They must not glory in the blood they spill, they must lament it, for, if they spill it any other way, they also spill the blood of Christ.
   So it seems to me.
   Oh, I stop and pause and think of a young Moses, who caught a slavemaster smiting a Hebrew. Moses looked this way, and then that way, and saw no one watching, so he killed the slavemaster, and buried him in the sand. Did Moses have anger in his heart and kill when a killing did not need to take place? Or did his killing of the slavemaster save the Hebrew? I like to think Moses killed the slavemaster as an act of love that saved the Hebrew from death. At any rate, I doubt Moses gloried in the death of the slavemaster.
   I do not know all. I may be wrong. Still, it seems to me hatred and war should not be mixed. They may seem natural companions, but that is the problem. They fit together so easily if you let them. Hatred of those you war with is natural, so guard against it.
   Hatred is the danger you must guard against if you go to war. If America is to be pure, if it is to be rightful in the words from its national anthem  ("When our cause it is just . . . "), then it must not revel in killing. It must grieve at the task of being at war.
   For those of you who are LDS, I think of the scripture in Alma 48, verse 23, saying:
   "Now, they were sorry to take up arms against the Lamanites, because they did not delight in the shedding of blood; yea, and this was not all -- they were sorry to be the means of sending so many of their brethren out of this world into an eternal world, unprepared to meet their God."