Quaker non-resistance makes a stronger claim than clerical exemption
The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians
The Quaker declaration to Charles II, dated 1660 in Quaker faith & practice 24.04, rejects outward warfare for any purpose. It grounds that rejection in the unchanging spirit of Christ, which cannot forbid war at one moment and authorize it at another. The declaration therefore articulates a principled Christian objection to war, rather than mere timidity or an exemption for a particular vocation. The corporate testimony, inspected in the online fifth edition.
This matters to the logic of Chesterton's catalogue. Christians who prohibit war and Christians who wage it can disagree about what Christianity requires. Their coexistence does not by itself make a critic self-contradictory: a critic might distinguish a professed precept from its violation, or one Christian community from another. Chesterton's sharper allegation—that the same sceptics alternately treated both extremes as Christianity's defining expression—would require their actual words. His unnamed agnostic manual is not identified here.
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