"Oh, Thou immaculate, invisible, eternal and holy Being, the exudations
of whose effulgence illuminates this terrestrial sphere, we approach Thy
presence, being covered all over with wounds and bruises and putrifying
sores, from the crowns of our heads to the soles of our feet. And Thou,
O Lord, art our dernier resort. The whole world is one great machine,
managed by Thy puissance. The beautific splendors of Thy face irradiate
the celestial region and felicitate the saints. There are the most
exuberant profusions of Thy grace, and the sempiternal efflux of Thy
glory. God is an abyss of light, a circle whose center is everywhere and
His circumference nowhere. Hell is the dark world made up of spiritual
sulphur and other ignited ingredients, disunited and unharmonized,
and without that pure balsamic oil that flows from the heart of God."

When the old fellow got this far, I lost the further run of his prayer,
but regret very much that I did so, because it was so grand and fine that
I would have liked very much to have kept such an appropriate prayer for
posterity. In fact, it lays it on heavy over any prayer I ever heard,
and I think the new translators ought to get it and have it put in their
book as a sample prayer. But they will have to get the balance of it
from the eminent LL. D. In fact, he was so "high larnt" that I don't
think anyone understood him but the generals. The colonels might every
now and then have understood a word, and maybe a few of the captains and
lieutenants, because Lieutenant Lansdown told me he understood every
word the preacher said, and further informed me that it was none of your
one-horse, old-fashioned country prayers that privates knew anything
about, but was bang-up, first-rate, orthodox.

Well, after singing and praying, he took his text. I quote entirely from
memory. "Blessed be the Lord God, who teaches my hands to war and my
fingers to fight." Now, reader, that was the very subject we boys did
not want to hear preached on--on that occasion at least. We felt like
some other subject would have suited us better. I forget how he
commenced his sermon, but I remember that after he got warmed up a little,
he began to pitch in on the Yankee nation, and gave them particular fits
as to their geneology. He said that we of the South had descended from
the royal and aristocratic blood of the Huguenots of France, and of the
cavaliers of England, etc.; but that the Yankees were the de