ld 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 home,
mother, wife, and sister, tired, disheartened, and tempt him to forget
his troubles in a momentary exhilaration, that burns only to chill and
to destroy! Evil angels are always active and indefatigable, and there
must be good angels enlisted to face them; and here is employment for
the slack hand of grief. Ah, we have known mothers bereft of sons in
this war, who have seemed at once to open wide their hearts, and to
become mothers to every brave soldier in the field. They have lived only
to work,--and in place of one lost, their sons have been counted by
thousands.

And not least of all the fields for exertion and Christian charity
opened by this war is that presented by womanhood. The war is
abstracting from the community its protecting and sheltering elements,
and leaving the helpless and dependent in vast disproportion. For years
to come, the average of lone women will be largely increased; and the
demand, always great, f