d fatigue and watchings and toils of
camp-life with an eagerness of zest which they had never felt in the
pursuit of mere pleasure, and wrote home burning letters that they never
were so happy in their lives! It was not that dirt and fatigue and
discomfort and watchings and weariness were in themselves agreeable, but
it was a joy to feel themselves able to bear all and surrender all for
something higher than self. Many a poor Battery bully of New York, many
a street rowdy, felt uplifted by the discovery that he too had hid away
under the dirt and dust of his former life this divine and precious
jewel. He leaped for joy to find that he too could be a hero. Think of
the hundreds of thousands of plain, ordinary workingmen, and of
seemingly ordinary boys, who, but for such a crisis, might have passed
through life never knowing this to be in them, and who courageously
endured hunger and thirst and cold, and separation from dearest friends,
for days and weeks and months, when they might, at any day, have bought
a respite by deserting their country's flag! Starving boys, sick at
heart, dizzy in head, pining for home and mother, still found warmth and
comfort in the one thought that they could suffer, die, for their
country; and the graves at Salisbury and Andersonville show in how many
souls this noble power of self-sacrifice to the higher good was
lodged,--how many there were, even in the humblest walks of life, who
preferred death by torture to life in dishonor.

"It is this heroic element in man and woman that makes self-sacrifice an
ennobling and purifying ordeal in any religious profession. The man
really is taken into a higher region of his own nature, and finds a
pleasure in the exercise of higher faculties which he did not suppose
himself to possess. Whatever sacrifice is supposed to be duty, whether
the supposition be really correct or not, has in it an ennobling and
purifying power; and thus the eras of conversion from one form of the
Christian religion to another are often marked with a real and permanent
exaltation of the whole character. But it does not follow that certain
religious beliefs and ordinances are in themselves just, because they
thus touch the great heroic master-chord of the human soul. To wear
sackcloth and sleep on a plank may have been of use to many souls, as
symbolizing the awakening of this higher nature; but, still, the
religion of the New Testament is plainly one which calls to no such
outwar