ncholy must
be broken by an effort of religion and duty. The stagnant blood must
be made to flow by active work, and the cold hand warmed by clasping
the hands outstretched towards it in sympathy or supplication. One
orphan child taken in, to be fed, clothed, and nurtured, may save a
heart from freezing to death: and God knows this war is making but too
many orphans!

It is easy to subscribe to an orphan asylum, and go on in one's
despair and loneliness. Such ministries may do good to the children
who are thereby saved from the street, but they impart little warmth
and comfort to the giver. One destitute child housed, taught, cared
for, and tended personally, will bring more solace to a suffering
heart than a dozen maintained in an asylum. Not that the child will
probably prove an angel, or even an uncommonly interesting mortal. It
is a prosaic work, this bringing-up of children, and there can be
little rose-water in it. The child may not appreciate what is done for
him, may not be particularly grateful, may have disagreeable faults,
and continue to have them after much pains on your part to eradicate
them,--and yet it is a fact, that to redeem one human being from
destitution and ruin, even in some homely every-day course of
ministrations, is one of the best possible tonics and alteratives to a
sick and wounded spirit.

But this is not the only avenue to beneficence which the war opens. We
need but name the service of hospitals, the care and education of the
freedmen,--for these are charities that have long been before the eyes
of the community, and have employed thousands of busy hands: thousands
of sick and dying beds to tend, a race to be educated, civilized, and
Christianized, surely were work enough for one age; and yet this is
not all. War shatters everything, and it is hard to say what in
society will not need rebuilding and binding up and strengthening
anew. Not the least of the evils of war are the vices which a great
army engenders wherever it moves,--vices peculiar to military life, as
others are peculiar to peace. The poor soldier perils for us not
merely his body, but his soul. He leads a life of harassing and
exhausting toil and privation, of violent strain on the nervous
energies, alternating with sudden collapse, creating a craving for
stimulants, and endangering the formation of fatal habits. What furies
and harpies are those that follow the army, and that seek out the
soldier in his tent, far from