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the regiment. Between the brief pauses of loading and firing, the men could hear the sharp commands of the Confederate officers, "Load and fire!" It was the mouth of hell or gate of heaven for many of them.

The men shivered and thrilled. It was appalling, yet it was glorious-to be living this minute and possibly dead the next. That was their situation. Officer after officer, soldier after soldier, was struck and heard no more on earth. The wounded moaned and cried for water; the living-well, some tried to pray; some shut their eyes and shivered as the shells came crashing through; the crackling of the flames consuming the Chancellor house were clearly heard. What did they feel or fear, those men being slaughtered score by score? What visions of eternity, on the dizzy edge of which they were, flashed up in their souls! What did death mean? Wait till you are there to know.

But in that regiment being rapidly thinned by the shells of the Confederates, I remember a man and his conduct. He was first corporal, and dressed the company on the right. Tall he was and goodly to look upon, a farmer's lad from Pennsylvania. We heard a voice, strong, clear, serene, confident; we looked, and then on the right of the company, sitting upright, firm, while all of us lay down flat, we saw the corporal. His face was cold, a smile played over his features. He was so cold, so serene. He seemed to be looking away beyond the enemy's lines to something we did not see-to be utterly indifferent to the death-dealing shells. Here is what I heard from this corporal amid the carnage of the battle: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble; therefore will we not fear though the earth be removed and the mountain carried into the depths of the sea. For the Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge." The voice and prayer of this corporal silenced many an oath, stifled many a groan, and nerved us to stand it out as no shriek of fife or battle-drum

had ever done. What made our corporal the man he was,

at peace in battle, with a smile upon his lips in the jaws of death? It was this: he was a God-fearing lad, reared in an old Covenanters' meeting-house. When the day came to show the stuff men were made of, it was the man with this fear of God in his soul, and no other fear, that put us all to shame and showed us how to die.

Note 109.

JOHN R. PAXTON.

MORAL LAWS THE SOUL'S GUIDE.

years

Ir is said that the dusty droughts which once in a few dry up the grasses, grains, and flowers, and make a garden land a desert, are Nature's beneficent resort; that the earth, being thus ridden of all her moisture, the sunshine and air may enter the labyrinth, and remake by their new agencies those cells to which the roots of the verdure will descend in the subsequent years, and over that desert of one summer there will wave seven summers of richer harvest. In the history of morals and religion there comes a similar phenomenon in each group of years. Something called a public calamity spreads over country and home, making a desert of what was yesterday a paradise. But if we assume that the chief end of man is the attainment of a noble character, then what are these calamities but hours in which the great human world is stripped of its vanity, that its soul may lie open to the air and sunlight of a kind God, coming in the music of laws for which the soul was made, and without which it is hopeless poverty. These sublime laws of life ought to lead us to feel that grand must be the ideal destiny of man when Christ has flung down beneath Him such laws of ascent, pointing to the perfection of heaven. If the ladder which sprang up before Jacob in his dream, pointing up to the stars, with angels on its steps, was any hint to him and all who read the dream that there is a world above this, then these laws of human action, so lofty, and bringing

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a consciousness so sweet, should seem as it were a ladder with angelic spirits upon the steps, waving their hands upward and pointing out the destiny of the soul.

DAVID SWING.

Note 110.

REVERENCE FOR LAW.

(Revised and arranged.)

ONE of the greatest evils arising from our form of government, is disregard of law and lack of reverence for constituted authority. Under a popular government this is to some extent inevitable. There, caste distinctions are obliterated: the barriers to preferment thrown down: no sentiments of majesty gather round the bench: no venerable traditions of kingship invest the executive chair. Thus it happens that vast monopolies, entrenched behind immense, aggregated capital bid defiance to legal restraint: that legislatures become the breeding-ground of corruption: that city governments grow venal: that undoubted criminals by indirection and bribery secure acquittal: that charges of dishonesty in public station are unregarded; and that rampant evils excite no more than trivial mention, and stalk abroad unpunished. Sooner or later we shall learn that the only safety is in honoring order, upholding justice, and revering law.

But emergent hours do come when the breaking of the law becomes justifiable: and when setting aside the letter of the legal enactment would be the truest obedience.

An event, illustrating this fact, is said to have occurred when the great obelisk brought from Egypt was erected in the square of St. Peter's at Rome. Tackle had all been arranged for the difficult and perilous task. To make all safe, and prevent the possibility of accident from some sudden cry or alarm, a Papal edict had been issued, promising death to any man who should utter a loud word while the

It

work was in progress. When the day arrived all Rome was abroad. The streets were gay with flags and costumes; while hurrying crowds of women and children, students and priests, idlers and beggars, surged up to the square. As the monolith began to rise the populace closed in. The square was crowded with admiring eyes and beating hearts. Slowly that huge crystallization of Egyptian toil and skill rose on its base. Five degrees! Ten degrees! Twenty! It stops! No matter! No voice! Silence! It moves again. Twenty-five degrees! Thirty! Thirty-one! stops again. Now there is trouble! The workmen pause at the windlasses. The engineers look at each other trembling, and then turn to watch that quivering, hanging mass. Among the crowd silence! Silence everywhere! Obedience to law! Suddenly from out that breathless throng rang a cry clear as an archangel's trumpet: "Wet the ropes!" "Wet the ropes!" The crowd turned to look. There, tiptoe on a post, in a coarse jacket, his eyes full of prophetic fire, and his whole figure wild with irresistible emotion, stood a workman of the people! His words flashed like lightning and struck. From the engineers to the lowest servant that lawless cry had instant obedience. Water was dashed upon the ropes. They bit fiercely into the granite. The windlasses were manned once more; and the obelisk rose to its place and took its stand for centuries!

Law never suffers when it is broken in emergent hours like that.

ENNOBLING RECOLLECTIONS OF THE REVOLUTION.

Ir has been usual in speaking of the Revolution, to give a history of the wrongs endured by our fathers: but we have prouder and more ennobling recollections. They are to be found in the spirit displayed by our fathers, when all their petitions had been slighted, their remonstrances despised, and their appeals to the generous sympathies of

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their brethren utterly disregarded. Theirs was that pure and holy spirit of devoted patriotism which never quailed beneath oppression, which braved all dangers, trampled upon difficulties, and taught them to be faithful to their principles and to their country true.

There is, however, one characteristic of the American Revolution, which, constituting as it does its living principle, its proud distinction, and its crowning glory, cannot be passed over in silence. It is this: that our Revolution had its origin, not so much in the weight of actual oppression, as in the great principle, the sacred duty of resistance to the exercise of unauthorized power.

Other nations have been driven to rebellion by the iron hand of despotism, the insupportable weight of oppression, which, leaving men nothing worth living for, has taken away the fear of death itself, and caused them to rush upon the spears of their enemies. But it was a tax of three-pence a pound upon tea, imposed without right, which was considered by our ancestors as a burden too grievous to be borne. And why? Because they were men who "felt oppression's lightest finger as a mountain weight"; and "judged of the grievance by the badness of the principle." This was the same spirit which inspired the immortal Hampden to resist, at the peril of his life, the imposition of ship-money: not because, as remarked by Burke, "the payment of twenty shillings would have ruined his fortune: but because the payment of half twenty shillings or the principle on which it was demanded would have made him a slave."

ROBERT Y. HAYNE.

"DE PEN AND DE SWOARD."

THE "Colored Debating Society," of Mount Vernon, have some very interesting meetings. Happening to pass through that place a while ago, I was invited by a friend to accompany him to one of the "debates." The object of the argument