d learned to respect for courage and devotion and dignity, the man who
had helped to bury his dead friend, to comfort and amuse his wounded
friend, and to advise his misguided friend in the guard-house; not the
one whose ill-timed ministrations he had learned to avoid. I understand
that the story of the chaplain who entirely forgot that he was to appear
at a review for the purpose of receiving a medal and delayed the entire
proceedings while he was sought for and found in his customary post in
the connecting trench, is absolutely authentic.

The man who could forget his denomination in his devotion to the great
common mission was the man whom the soldier learned to love and to trust
and who could do the most in the day of battle. The most popular tales
among the chaplains are the tales of unorthodoxy: The Catholic priest
who baptized a group of his men before action in a shell hole with water
which was not only unblessed, but I fear unsanitary, and who simply
referred to Philip and the Eunuch when reproved; the Methodist and
Baptist, and I think the Episcopalian, who in the absence of their
Presbyterian colleague, solemnly and quite illegally received a
youngster into the Presbyterian fold before he went overseas, and
confessed the next morning to the Presbyterian Board; the Wesleyan
chaplain in the British Army who carried a crucifix to comfort the dying
Catholics on the battlefield when no priest of their faith was near, and
who administered the last rites to them as best he could. There are
hundreds of such stories.

The appeal of any denomination as such, or of the Y, or the
corresponding societies of other faiths, as such, was always mistaken.
It was the united appeal of all the doers of good deeds which counted.
If we never knew before, we know now the truth of the fable of the
bundle of fagots. Personally, I believe the united drive for welfare
work last fall, during which Protestant, Catholic and Jew, and men of no
formal religion whatever, appealed from the same platform for the same
great purpose, was an event of the greatest importance in our nation,
and it will go ill with us if we forget the lesson that it has to teach.

The appeal must be not only disinterested, but it must be simple and
direct. This, and the careful selection of its personnel, had much, if
not most, to do with the extraordinary success of the Salvation Army.
There are times in a soldier's life when the sewing on of a button at
some vita