1^ a"^' o > % ■ .^ ^bv'^ nor the hour when, at last, your mind made up, you turned your back on home, forsook your place and duties as a citizen, and in a strange garb offered yourself to your strange vocation. Did you ever experience a sensation like that when you first real- ized that you were a recruit ? 4 THE RECRUIT. What a mystery seemed to you then the intricacy of mihtary movements. Should you ever become a soldier ? Would any amount of drill make easy, familiar, natural, the things you tried to do with such difficulty and conscious awkwardness ? What a marvel to you of the " awkward squad " was the dress parade, the manual, the movements by com- pany and by battalion ! Should you ever get your " facings," manage that " right-about," that " load in nine times," ever remember to keep that " left foot " always to the front ? Do you not smile sometimes as you look back at those first efforts, and wonder that you should ever have been so perplexed about that which has become as a second nature, now that you feel, as a young friend told me he did, as if you had never been anything but a soldier ? You have given yourself as a recruit in one ser- vice : I want you now as a recruit in another. It is a better service, its rewards are greater and more sure, its victories are more complete, and the peace that follows can 'never be broken. A better service ! How can that be ? I have entered the service of my country. I have given my all to her. I am pledged to stand by her even with my life. And my country! to the world, to me, she is the type of freedom. In her earliest days she proclaimed the great gospel of liberty. It is that which we of the army to-day proclaim anew, — that which we will establish once and forever, or we will die. Can I be in a better service ? THE RECRUIT. 5 Yours is indeed a noble service, but I ask you to enter a nobler. You have done well so far. I would ask you to do better. You have sacrificed much. I would ask you to sacrifice more. There is a ser- i'ice, — you know what one I mean, — and it wants recruits. Shall it not have you for one ? I know it is not an easy thing to be a soldier of the cross. I know that a great many men are deterred from enlisting under it by the difficulties which meet them at once, by demands so unlike those they meet in life, by duties so much more exacting, and bur- dens so much more heavy. Wlien men are asked to become religious, they almost always draw back. It seems too difficult. How shall they ever get those things, — faith, a habit of prayer, resignation to another will, a love for God, for Christ, a hope, a desire, for heaven ? Perhaps it is so with you. You hear men talk about certain beliefs, about certain results, about pleasure in certain exercises and du- ties, and you see, too, that they do not merely talk, but have in themselves, very prominent and strong, certain things you know nothing about. You would like to, but how are you ever to do it ? How shall you begin ? When you have begun, how are you to be at ease in such new work and society? Have you forgotten your experience as a recruit? While you merely looked on, it seemed impossible for you to master the intricacies of manual and evo- lution, but the moment you were in the ranks, No. 15. 1 * 6 THE RECRUIT. heartily at work on the problem, its solution began to come, and you were amazed to find yourself with such ease and rapidity advancing " in the school of the soldier." The recruit in this better service will have a like experience. Stand outside, merely look on, and nothing is more impossible, unreal. Enlist, set your- self at work heartily to learn. I do not say that the things of a holy life — experiences, powers, peace, which are the privileges of the mature Christian — shall at once be yours; but this, that the light begins to dawn, it fringes the horizon of your en- deavor, and perseverance will bring about and estab- lish the noon of unclouded attainment. The recruit will grow to the veteran. Do not say that you do not get ahead. Do not get discouraged. Do not throw down your arms. You have labored days at the manual, weeks at the bayonet-drill. You had to keep at it. You gained very slowly. Little by little, through patience, experience, discipline, you have got this facility of handling your arms and yourself. By these you have become a soldier of your country, and by the same things are you to become a soldier of the cross. And what are the things necessary to the soldier of the cross, which to the recruit seem so hard to attain ? 1. Faith. That is the first thing. The Saviour always asked for it first. If the man had it, then he THE RECRUIT. 7 went on to do the miracle, then he told him he was forgiven, then he assured him he was not far from the kingdom. He did not expect of him at once that complete faith which only a long experience gives ; but a belief in what he told him, and a pur- pose to do as he commanded. A thorough faith would in time grow out of that. Now it is a very simple thing, and not so very difficult, to have faith. Men have been made to think that it was some great mystery, and they must go through certain processes befoi*e they could have it. They were not to get it in any natural way, but by some strange, unusual methods. It was some- thing to be sent you, not something you were to get yourself But faith is a thing you have been having ever since you were born. You had it before you knew it, so soon as your mother's smile showed you that she was your dearest friend. You had it all the way through your childhood, in your parents, in your teachers, in your elders. Every day of life, in all your intercourse with men, you have been obliged to exercise it. You have it to-day in your commandei', in your cause. It lies at the bottom of all your doing in life, only you have not exercised it toward the great Unseen Being. All you want is to lift up the same feeling till it can lay hold upon God. You want to have the same trust, confidence, in Him that you had in your mother, that you have in man, only it needs to be without drawback, and 8 THE RECRUn'. multiplied by infinity. Even mothers with their dear love mistake, and men of noblest purpose some- times fail, but there is neither failure nor mistake with God. That is what you want to do at first, — to say Yiih all your heart, " Lord, I believe, help thou Jiine unbelief," that is, take every weakness out of my faith, and make it strong and complete. Then, when this is obtained, it wiU begin to work. You will find yourself gradually getting new light, new strength, new desires, dropping the habits and wishes of the old life, and putting on what the Apostle calls " the new man." Life after the Mas- ter grows from this as the fruit from the seed, and it obeys the same law, — first the blade, then the ea*/ then the full corn in the ear. 2. It is just so about prayer. Men shrink froDL it, do not know how to take hold of it, because they think it something one side, beyond all their expe- rience. But it is not so. They have been asking all their lives, and asking because they wanted, and expected to obtain by the asking. It is doing to God just what you used to do every day at home to your father and mother. Prayer is simply ask- ing God what you want, with the conviction that he will give it to you if it is best for you. That is just the spirit in which you asked at home. It is the simplest, easiest thing in the world. Many think they cannot pray unless they use precise and formal THE RECRUIT. 9 language, unless they are on their knees, or by themselves, or in a church, unless they use certain forms, and a certain length. It is not so. Did you ever repeat to your mother that httle verse which John Quincy Adams repeated every night through his long life, — " Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep " ? Do you remember the Lord's Prayer ? These two have probably been repeated more times than any other prayers. Every day God hears them from almost myriad lips, and blesses as he hears. These are not long or formal. No prayer that the Saviour offered was. What prayer could say more, or show a deeper love for man or confidence in God than his last, — " Father, forgive them ; they know not what they do " ? The Prodigal's prayer, — " Father, I have sinned, and am no more worthy to be called thy son"; the Publican's, — " God be merciful to me a sinner," — prove how unUke the formal prayers men deem it necessary to make are the effectual, fervent prayers that avail. All you need is to have a want, to feel that God can help you, to ask him, in the shortest, simplest way, anywhere, at any time. When you become an older Christian, prayer will become something more, lead you further, Hft you higher, than it can now. You know that is the law with everything. Aim fii'st at simple, brief peti- tions. Ask, nothing doubting. That is prayer. 10 THE RECRUIT. " Prayer is the simplest form of speech That infant lips can try; Prayer, the sublimest strains that reach The Majesty on high." 3. I suppose it will specially trouble you to do right, to turn away from old follies and habits and sins, and lead such a life as you know you ought to, as you know God requires. Well, that is a pretty hard thing to do, but not half so hard as you think, if you will only be in right down earnest about it. Earnestness is half a battle. The determination to conquer is half the victory, and if it be true, as the proverb says, " It is the tlrst step which costs," then the other half is the easier. I think I have one piece of advice which may possibly help you. Don't undertake too much at once. Don't expect to overcome all the wrong in you at a dash. Understand that it is going to be a long work with you, — a life-long work, — and begin deliberately and to go on resolutely. Do as you would in a siege. Make your approaches, establish your parallels, start your sap, trust in little steady gains, rather than in assaults. I should say that the best thing you could do would be to form a general resolve to quit all old wrong ways, and grow into all good ones, and then pay special attention to some one at a time. Get it thoroughly out of the way and then go to the next. For instance, if you are a profane man, take hold of swearing first. "Watch yourself in every other du-ection, but let THE RECRXTIT. 11 your first, special attention be given here till the habit is gone. So you will see some gain. You know it is better to concentrate your fire than to scatter it. If a man once sees a habit fairly down, something definite done, he takes courage. He finds out what he can do, and presses on to further victories, while a general purpose of reform, or an equal attack on all his sins at once, will show, and probably make little real gain. This is the way in which I would advise you to begin, no more expecting to be an accomplished Christian at once than the recruit expects to be an accomplished soldier at once. Gradually, and through patient effort, the better life will grow upon you, and these things which, seem now so strange, so difiicult, will become easy and familiar. There is one grand help to this. When you first enlisted I dare say you bought a manual — Casey, perhaps — and set yourself down to make yourself a soldier by studying that. What a hopeless task that was ! You could hardly do the simplest thing by it. But after you got into the ranks, and had some little experience, you went back to your Casey, and it was a new book and a great help. The Christian recruit will find a similar experience. If he sits down with his Bible, and expects to study himself into a Christian, he will grow gray and make no advance. The Saviour teaches better. He says, " If any will do his will, he shall know of the 12 THE RECRUIT. doctrine " ; that is, let a man set to work to do what is right, and that very effort will explain to him his duties, — not doctrines, the tenets of a creed, but the things to be taught him, the great demands of life. Every man finds it so, — that doing strangely explains and simplifies the Divine Word, and that he can go to it from his own experiences, however crude, and find that a very lamp to his feet which, prior to his experience, had been only darkness. So do not expect reading your Bible to make you a Christian ; do not expect merely your own efforts to make you a Christian ; but work and read, work and pray. Let the book help your effort, let the effort help the book, and you will find these two working in harmony, each supplementing the other, together making that power which shall ransom you from the thrall of evil, and elevate you into the coveted, holy life. Have, then, no despair. Have patience ; toil, wait. The soul that is but a recruit to-day shall receive reward as the conquering veteran hereafter. Army Series.] [No. 16. A FEW WORDS WITH THE CONVALESCENT. BY JOHN F. W. WARE, BOSTON: AMEEICAN UNITAKIAN ASSOCIATION. 1864. A FEW WORDS WITH THE CONVALESCENT. Sick Friends and Dear Friends: — I have a long time wanted a quiet talk with you, for I cannot help thinking much and often of those quiet, brave, and patient men I have so many times seen in the hospitals, — suffering not only from dis- ease and wounds, but from the absence of home and all its endearments and comfort, — things which the best-regulated hospitals, the most faithful attend- ants, the most skilful surgeons, and all the marvel- lous forethought and liberality of government, the Sanitary Commission, and other less and nameless charities, cannot supply. I have thought you needed some special home word of comfort and cheer. I have waited for some one else to speak it. I cannot wait longer. If sickness be hard to bear, very much harder is tliis condition of yours, — the neutral ground be- tween sickness and health, the long, dreary inter- val which stretches so uncertainly and with hope * A FEW WORDS WITH often deferred between the subsiding of disease and the going out to Ufe again. There is a power in active disease which soon convinces a man that it is useless for him to struggle, that his best wisdom is quietly to submit, and let disease have its way. He is held down to his bed ; his doctor, his nurse have him under subjection. He cannot rebel. He must obey. Besides, the sick man soon becomes recon- ciled to his bed. It is the only relief to his languor or his pain. He comes to say of it what Sancho once said of sleep : Blessings on the man who in- vented a bed. But convalescence is a different thing. Active disease has passed away, and the hope of health has taken its place. The doctor has ceased his medicines, the bed is no longer our one place of abode. We are beginning to move about. Other people lose much of their interest and sympathy, for danger is over. Their thought is no longer de- tained by our condition. They turn to something else. We are left to ourselves, to our own resour- ces. At the time we want and should prize atten- tions we are deprived of them. Weakened in mind, as body, we become easily depressed. We chafe at the lagging hours. We constantly put ourselves back by our efforts to get forward. We become peevish, discontented, unreasonable, despondent, un- comfortable to ourselves, uncomfortable to those about us. Our peculiar natural infirmities come out THE CONVALESCENT. 5 with exaggerated power, and show now the tyrants they really are. We do not get much charity. Our best friends find it hard to get along with us, and our convalescence drags its slow, unhappy length along, the body weak and weary, the mind not yet adjusted to its balance, the heart sick with its hopes deferred, the whole man a discomfort to himself, and a puzzle or a plague to those about him. He must be a very rare character who can pass through the tedium of convalescence with honor and self- respect. If all this be true of ordinary convalescence, — convalescence at home, surrounded by all its cares and loves and protections, — how much more true must it be in the army hospital, where each man is only one of a crowd, where each is separated from the sympathy and consideration of home, where whims and weaknesses and ill-temper can have little attention and less forbearance, where all the discomfort of his position is aggravated by absence, and that sickly yearning for home, itself worse than disease. Now do not think that this state of yours is not recognized by friends at home. It is not one they can reach or do anything directly for, but if there be anything in sympathy, anything in appreciation of service, anything in pity for suffering, anything in good-will and prayer, you have them all. They ai*e not things tangible to the sense, it is true, as the 6 A FEW WORDS WITH delicacies are which find their way to your sickly appetite sometimes, or the tender look, word, act you long for; but they are the tribute, the genuine, generous tribute, of warm hearts, — all that the cir- cumstances will allow us to give and you to receive. Men who judge of everything by their senses may call all this nothing. But it is not so. The unseen forces are the most vital and effective. They are the powers behind the act. These sentiments keep you before our thought ; they keep us not only alive to the demands, but the sufferings of the hour. They cannot remove every pain or delay, prevent all mistake or abuse, give you what home only can ; but there is not a hospital ward in the land where their influence is not felt, nor a wounded soldier on the field that they do not reach. "What is this blessed, all-embracing charity of the Sanitary Com- mission, — not omnipotent, indeed, but almost omni- present, — Avhat are lesser associated and private charities, but the expression of feelings which per- vade the homes and the hearts of the land ? "What are they but the combining together and bringing to your relief of those unseen things which men are apt to scoff at and consider as merely feelings and words, but thus, by their fruit, become tangible and blessed things. Thi'ow off, then, the despondency which is so apt to settle upon the convalescent because he thinks himself out of the pale of sympathy. It is not so. THE CONVALESCENT. 7 Never were men so surrounded and embraced by the holiest sympathy as you ; never did charity so beautifully exemplify the sweetness and the breadth of her spirit ; never did the wealth and good-will of a people so overflow as to-day it does toward you, as it will till this " cruel war is over," and you are again in the old homes, filling your old places there, and felt again as neighbors and citi- zens, — soldiers no more. You are heroes to us, as well as those who lie on the field of honor. You are soldiers and men, and all suffering of the hos- pital, as of the field, is hei'oic. It is true, and shame that it should be true, that there are some who are so wholly led away by the sound of things that they do not recognize your service or feel for your need. It is true that some are daz- zled more by rank than by merit ; that the accident of a wound is more to them than the fact of a dis- ease ; that a dainty officer on crutches, or with an empty sleeve, will carry their applause, while the sick private may want the merest decencies of charity. Shame that it should be so ; yet there are such men and women, and only now, in a New England town, the whole neighborhood turned out to welcome a wounded officer, while a poor, sick soldier, of the same town, returning by the same train, was permitted to crawl away by himself to his home, and die there two days after. Myself, I once met on a crowded steamboat a gaudily dressed 8 A FEW WORDS WITH Zouave, in uniform that had never seen the smoke of battle, upon costly crutches, with a ball through the fleshy part of his leg, the observed of all ob- servers, the recipient of flattering attentions from all around him, while a poor, dying private, the most pitiable of sights, told me that in all that crowd he had been indebted to the help of a woman to get his valise on board ! Yes, such things are. Believe me, they are not common. They are the exception. The real men and women of the land, those whom you would value, are not deceived by the fiction of rank or show. They do not gaun-e and dole their charities that way. The real in- terest, the true love, the reliable judgment of home, centres upon her braves wherever they are, what- ever their condition, their rank, their suffering. Cheer up, then, and do nothing to forfeit the good- will and the earnest sympathy of home. The general spirit of cheerfulness pervading our hospitals has been a frequent matter of comment and surprise. I have found it the same every- where. But the very men who were cheerful in bed, or in the earlier stages of recovery, become despondent as the long, dull weeks roll on with their wearing monotony, while they make no sub- stantial gain. I do not wonder at it. It is hard when one is at home, and has everything done for him, to keep up the tone of the spirit It is hard to feel the active w^orld in which you have had a THE CONVALESCENT. 9 part, in which you have taken part, passing on, ab- sorbed in its pursuits, while you are laid by as a useless thing, your place filled, yourself forgotten. But this is inevitable, and it is not manly to yield to any despondency. That is a feeling which must be guarded against. It is a terrible, an insidious foe. It strikes at your manhood. It saps your courage and your self-respect. It lets you down, it degrades you in your own eyes. It tempts, it leads you into forbidden things. You become morose and peevish, unreasonable and complaining. Our homes are flooded with reports that have come from men in this condition, doing a gross injustice to the kindly efforts of those about them, making the home unhappy, and casting suspicion on the purest chari- ties, and threatening to stop the source of supply. One of the worst forms this spirit of despond- ency assumes, and one you must guard specially against, is the loss of self-respect. It is all over with a man when it comes to that. It is no use for him to hope or to contend. In losing that he loses all. He is like the man who loses his grasp at the brink of a precipice. His fall is inevitable and fatal. God gave us as an instinct, a saving power, this self-respect, and we should all guard it as his gift and our hope of salvation. I know how it is with you. You left home with high hope. You were going to do something for your country, but here you are. You can't get home, you can't go 10 A FEW WORDS WITH back to the field, you can't get well. Very dis- couraginfj it is, indeed. The people about you don't realize how discouraging it is. Government can't stop to think about it, surgeons and nurses have no time for you. They only see diseases in the flesh, — disease in the spirit is not within their province. Strangers do not think much about you. Their sympathy is with the sick. The chaplain does something, and kind, thoughtful people do what they can by sending you books and other means of occupation. But these are after all only pebbles against the swell and sweep of the deep, dark current, which the gloomy, lengthening days only make deeper and darker. Every true man and woman feels how hard it is for you, and thanks God that they have not such a discipline. But, hard as it is, don't give up your manhood. Hold on to your self-respect. Do not stoop to anything as a present relief which will afterward make you ashamed. Do not desert any principle, do not yield to or form any bad habit, but summon all your courage, — courage which has stood you in such good stead in many a trial hour before, — and resolve to bear patiently till the brighter hour comes. Some of the saddest things I have seen in hos- pitals have been the signs that weary convalescence was telling on the men in this way, and they wei'e losing heart. I have seen men out on leave, stas- THE CONVALESCENT. 11 gering toward the hospital again, — sick men, wounded men, crippled men. It was a sad, sad sight. It said that they were losing self-respect. For is there anything that takes that pearl of price from a man quicker ? That which makes a drunk- ard's case so hopeless is that you have no self- respect to work on. It is clean gone. I have seen many sad sights in my day, but I think no sadder than a man, in a uniform which showed him to be an American soldier, dnmk. I cannot help a cer- tain respect for that uniform wherever I meet it, and the more I respect it the moi-e am I grieved when I see it disgraced. I know that another thing troubles you. You feel that you are privates, and the manner of your officers and of some foolish persons, and the needed discipline of service, leads you to think that a pri- vate, especially a sick private, is of no account, a useless encumbrance every one would be glad to have well out of the way. I want to assure you of one thing. It is the private soldier for whom these im- mense hospitals all through the land have been con- structed, — for whom the Sanitary Commission, with a wisdom the world never dreamed of before, is toil- ing, for whom a charity that never slacks is giving, for whom the busy hands and hearts of the women and childi-en of the land are daily and hourly not only working, but saving. Your officers do not al- ways enough consider what we never forget, — that 12 A FEW WORDS WITH the private in this war is a man from the home, al- ways their equal, often their superior. If they abuse their authority, as they sometimes do ; if they are cruel in their neglect, and make you trouble by their ignorance ; be sure the home knows it and remembers it, and when their brief authority is over, and they are on the simple level and equality of manhood again, all this will return with fearful usury upon them. Try to bear all to-day. You have trials and privations, hardship, and sometimes injus- tice. But keep a good heart. The man who bears up, works his way through things that break the man who gives up. It is hard to be laid aside, to feel that the neglect of company officers deprives you of your pay, and your families of their support, that the strange de- lay in the department deprives you of your fur- lough or discharge. It is hard even to suspect that you are considered of no moment, now that you can no longer serve. All this we at home know and realize. But it will never do for you to lose your just pride, your brave heart, — never do to give up. You are soldiers. You bear the scar of service. The disease, the wound, the disability, is a badge of honor. Every true heart recognizes it. You have borne up under the trials and disasters of the field. With indomitable will you have overcome the diffi- culties before and about you. You have not quailed under the call of duty. Why quail now? Why THE CONVALESCENT. 13 lose heart ? Why not be as brave, as persistent ? The end is as desirable as the victory upon the field. The end is to keep your manhood, your in- tegrity, to keep from slipping into the power of low things. Camp and field have made you heroes. The hospital must not make you recreant and cow^ ard. You see by what I say that I have no idea that the uncomfortable things attending convalescence must be tamely submitted to. I cannot agree with a wise friend of mine, who says " that one of the chief duties of a sick-room is to forget duties, lay aside responsibilities, and so rest the will. We are not under law in sleep, nor are we in sickness." I think we are imder law in sickness. The sick- room, the hospital ward, has its duties. Not the gravely sick, it is true, can be held to much duty, to none of the old duty of active life, but the period of convalescence — the most trying period of sick- ness — has its duties, and they should not be evaded. You must summon yourselves to the discharge of them. It is no excuse that they are hard. No good soldier urges that in health, when any duty or any superior commands. He obeys. The hardness is a stimulant. So much the better soldier is he if he succeed ; so much the greater honor. No good soldier should hesitate now. The duty of obedience is as great. The thing at stake is as vital. His own comfort, character, self-respect, are concerned. 14 A FEW WORDS WITH Let him lose these, let him be poltroon, let him yield, go back from the hospital to the field or the home a poor, pitiless, abject, spiritless man, and all the honor he may have got on the battle-field is of little avail. Patient waiting is perhaps the hardest thing a man ever does. It is many times the only thing he can do. It is the only thing many of you can do. "What good will it do for you to fret, to rebel, to kick the pricks ? An inexorable necessity compels you to wait. It will not let you act. You are bound hand and foot. There is no help for it, — nothing you can do. Your wisdom is to wait quietly. Suffering friends ! in all your suffering remember the oversight, the watchful care of the good Father. He doeth all things well. Not a sparrow falls with- out him. Fear not, despair not. Through this way may you enter your glory. The glory that comes of man fades, but the glory of God is perennial. Though men desert and decry you, though they withdraw sympathy and charity, though the love of home grow cold, and you become forgotten, outcast and alien, yet will not He cast you off, while you accept his burden and bear his yoke. But home and all honorable men will never do that. They still cherish and hope and pray for you. Disap- point them not. Keep fast by your integrity. Main- tain your manliness. Bear as patiently as you have THE CONVALESCENT. 15 done nobly, submit as obediently to God's will as of old to your general's command, and it must end well with you. You may never come to health of body here, but you must come to health of soul, which shall make all right in the hereafter ! Army Series.] . [No. 17. THE RECONNOISSANCE. BY JOHN F. W. WARE, B O STON: AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION. 1864. THE EECONNOISSANCE. What a queer word that is ! How do you pro- nounce it ? I don't find any two men together who pronounce it the same way. It is one way in the army, where you know what the thing is, and it is another way at home, where the word rather con- fuses us about the thing. What was the need in having the thing called that way ? Why can't we, who have a good, masculine, hearty native tongue of our own, stick to it, and not go about the world over beating up and engrafting foreign words and phrases, and treating them with a little more defer- ence than we do our own ? I believe in loyalty to my mother tongue as fully as in loyalty to my mother land. General Dix has been much ap- plauded because he gave the order to shoot any man who should haul down the American flag. I ^vish somebody had the power to give such an order against any one who hauls down the American lan- guage. Is not a language a part of, does it not represent, nationality as well as a flag ? What an absurdity it is to be obliged to call one of our most 4 THE EECONNOISSANCE. stirring songs, wliich was written and intended to be national, by that outlandish name, Viva r Amer- ica ! Was there ever a greater insult to the good sense, the patriotism, of a people ? I marvel that it has been so silently submitted to. I don't care to lose the tune, but I hope we shall some way be rid of the words, or that part of them at least. I go for the language^ as well as " the jiag, of the free." "Well, never mind the word. It has a meaning, and a good meaning. It is a thing of use, and great use too, especially where one is in the ene- my's country. What would become of that general who should not make a reconnoissance one of his frequent duties ? How could he advance securely, fight successfully, or even stand still safely, other- wise ? He must know the character of the country before and about him, — its roads, its streams, the lay of the land, its capacity to support ; he must know the number, the position, the disposition, of his antagonist ; he must be wary and quick to un- derstand his movements and his resources before the inevitable advance and attack are made. I take it that an army may fight ever so well, but if nothing is known of the character of the foe in front, or the character of the ground to be fought over, the chances are that it cannot fight success- fully. There must ever be some other element of success in a battle beside courage. THE RECONNOISSANCE. & Now let us apply tWs morally. I do not quite like to say, what I suppose some would say readily, that the soul of man is in an enemy's country, be- cause I believe we are always and only in God's country, — the country of our best Friend. But I will say that in this country the soul is at war. It is beset with foes. It is held in leaguer. It is in great peril. Its whole life has got to be struggle. It must have the utmost vigilance, the most stead- fast com'age, the most wary prudence, — any and every quality or virtue which a soldier needs to have or to exercise in presence of an enemy. These alone, however, will not avail. "We need something more than these powers within us. Shut up to themselves, in the attitude, with the will, of attack or defence, they can do little. We are like men cooped up in an isolated fortress on the top of a rock or on an island in the midst of a sea. "What we need is, to know something of our surroundings, to find out what there is outside of us, what we are to meet, and how we are to meet it. How shall this be done ? By a reconnoissance A man must know something of the world he goes into before he goes into it. He must not trust merely to his imagination, his dream, of it ; he must not imagine himself to have a power none has had, and be able to assume and hold a mastery over it. He must know something about it, its lures and pitfalls ; not only that he has a strong Ko. 17. 1 * 6 THE RECONNOISSANCE. and wary enemy, but wherein his strength and power lie. He needs to know something of his foes before it will be any way safe to measure strength with them. And this a man is apt not to do. He has all sorts of wise things said to him, all sorts of friendly warnings, but he generally guesses he is as wise as anybody, as capable of caring for himself as they are. He repels the overtures of experience, and in all confidence marches out to the combat before him. He does not deny that it has difiiculties. He expects resistance. He believes he shall have hard blows, and many of them ; that only through fidel- ity and fighting he shall win. But he does not doubt that he shall win. In imagination he sees himself, after every struggle, crowned victor ; and there comes his trouble. In the over-confidence of ignorance, into an unknown world, with the best purposes, he goes, only to find that his purposes avail him little ; that his expectations were the ver- iest impossibilities ; that the rude, sharp, combined assault of temptations whose wiles and powers he did not know are more than a match for him ; that they have not only bruised and beaten and van- quished, but have mortified and discouraged him. I have seen the criticism made by an officer of high position, that the battle at "Williamsburg was a battle fought without a reconnoissance. I should say, upon general principles, that the objection was THE RECONNOISSANCE. 7 valid ; while I am sure that in life to undertake anything of moment without a first survey and study of the ground before would not only be folly, but likely to be fatal. The merchant does not embark in a venture without understanding the market. The manufacturer determines the character of his fabric by the character of the demand. The farmer plants as he knows his soil will yield, or as con- sumption requires. Every right, successful action in active life is determined by forethought, inquiry, judicious observation, and a calm balancing of all the varieties of information that can be had ; and it is just as much more important that this should take place in our moral and religious life as our moral and religious life is more important than the life of business. As he would be set aside as an unwise man who should plunge into the world of affairs with reckless ignorance and indifference to all facts, as success in his case could only be a happy blunder, so must he be held unwise who shall pre- sent himself in the life of duties, temptations, trials, ignorant of, indifferent to them, while no blunder can save him. Rightly to live, surely to pass through this world, wisely to discharge all obliga- tion, to win now peace and one's own self-respect, and hereafter peace with God's approval, can only come tlu-ough a constant fore-looking and out-look- ing. No advance without it. A man omits, de- spises it, at his peril. Another thing is essential to a recomioissance. 8 THE RECONNOISSANCE. The Saviour expressed it when he said, " Or what king, going to war against another king, sitteth not down and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand." It is not the ground to be fought over, or the number and disposition of the hostile force only, but your own ability to meet that force, which needs to be known, which forms a vital part of this duty. "Without it you cannot make a suc- cess. It was an old saying of heathen philosophy, " Know thyself." It has been repeated in both Testaments. It is a maxim we learned at school. "We wrote it in our copy-books. It has been urged upon us by the experiences of life. Like many good things, we pay little heed to it ; and a great many of us grow up knowing all about our neigh- bors, but nothing about ourselves. Now, if a man is self-ignoi-ant, he may just ws well give all up. "What can he do ? He will be getting into difficulty all the time. He will be just where he ought not to be. He will do just what he ought not to do. When he ought to fight, he wiU run ; and when he ought to run, he will stay and tiy to fight, and get whipped for his blunder. The way men get into these moral exposures which make such trouble is, that they over-estimate their ability to resist them. They put themselves where there is no need of their being ; they court expo- sures which they might just as well avoid. Temp- THE KECONNOISSANCE. 9 tations do not come to us so much as we go after them. That is the way a man becomes a drunkard, a gambler, or any bad thing. Ignorant of himself, he will reply to your warning, " Just as if there was any danger ! " He will not try to avoid, he will seek it. When you hear a man say that, set him down as one who has neglected to reconnoitre, and be sure disaster will visit his presumption. The Apostle said many true things, and uttered many needed warnings, but nothing more true or more needed than when he said, " Let any man that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." Is it not the great fact and trouble in the life of many a man, that all the way through he puts liimself, through ignorance of himself, in the way of temp- tations that God never meant for him, that God would save him from, which he is no way prepared to cope with ? The bravado with which many go out into life, with which many pass through life, is strikingly in contrast with the true bravery of him who, by calm, careful, thorough survey, is always found at tlie post of duty, equal to every emer- gency, and conqueror in every assault. It is the self-confidence of self-ignorant Peter, not the quiet, consistent courage of the wise and humble Master. Two things let me add about this duty. First, let it he frequent. Some men think it does harm to examine ourselves too much, that it makes mor- bid and discourages. Surely it will not so affect any hearty, earnest, brave man. Why, the essence 10 THE RECONNOISSANCE. of life is to know one's self. What the old heathen pjiilosophy said, and both Testaments repeat, must be true. All life proves it. You can't do any- thing sure without a thorouglily posted self-knowl- edge. Not the self of last year or last week is the one you want to know, but the self of to-day. So you must make the inward reconnoitring a frequent thing. Do it every day, so as to be sure that you know just where you are, just what your strength, just what your weakness, so that you can detect any growing folly, strengthen any struggling or threatened virtue. The good general " feels " the country he is in often. To-day's report is not neces- sarily true of to-morrow. He is on the alert to corroborate or to correct by fresh experience his former decision. He will not attack by last week's report, nor will he trust to the defence based upon past information. He knows that a foe is active, wary, fruitful in expedient, and that he is always in new danger. It must be so with you. Of what use for you to know yourself thoroughly to-day, all about your dangers and exposures, to settle your defence, post your guards, strengthen your weak points, if you are going to leave them to them- selves, and take it for granted that the work is done once for all, and that you are henceforth safe ? Is not our enemy always busy ? Are not our moral moods, habits, cravings, temptations, al- ways changing ? Are we not in danger to-day from one thing, next week from another, and does THE BECONNOISSANCE. 11 not every change of condition, employment, com- panionship, change the character of our exposure ? "We can only be safe by constant inquiry into our moral and religious condition, by a daily feeling of these enemies so thick about our soul's way, a daily knowing of our souls themselves, to see what heart there is in them for their never-ending, ever- shifting warfare. It is the reconnoissance insures the safety, secures the victory to the soldier, and self-knowledge it is, under God, which gives safety and victory to the soul. Then always make your reconnoissance in force. Do not half do it. Put your whole manhood into it. Do not be afraid to know just where you are, just what you are, the worst as well as the best. Face your weaknesses, your temptations, your dan- gers, your sins. Know them, brand them, expel them. Don't wince or shrink or shirk. Don't allow any skulking. Drag out the secret thing. What is the use of asking God to cleanse us from secret sins, if we are going to shut our eyes to them ourselves, or persist in hugging them ? Do not, as some, draw back when the search reveals what you do not like to see. Keep your eye open, your heart single and brave. A half-advance is about as bad as a full retreat. It reveals nothing of real value, increases your reluctance to search again, encour- ages your bad habits and desires ; the evil things in you get to feel that, however much parade and bluster you may make, you will never be in earnest, 12 THE KECONNOISSANCE. and will grow more and more exacting and secure ; and you will be tenfold more their slave in the ind. When, therefore, you reconnoitre, let it be in force, with all your mind, and all your strength, and all your heart. Plutarch says, in his Life of Caesar, that " he was, above all men, gifted with the faculty of making the right use of everything in war, most especially of seizing the right moment." Was not this the true secret of his success, — he was always on the alert, knew all about his foe, all about his own resource, and was ready at the right moment to strike the right blow? With us the golden moments slip. We all have them given us, but they seem as lead as they pass away, because we are not alert, not watchful, not ready. The moment comes to do. God calls. The opportunity of victory is given. We might be heroes, — more than conquerors. The moment passes, the opportunity, the privilege, and a deeper, more hopeless darkness shuts upon us. God has been faithful. The neglect is with our- selves. We did not know the hour nor ourselves in it. Would you be to your soul what CjEsar was to Rome, — better, far better, would you partake in the power and victory of Christ, — know thor- oughly, by constant inquiry, both the world and your own soul. Such knowledge is wisdom above price. Army Series.] [No. lb. THE REVEILLE. BT JOHN F. W. WARE. BOSTON: AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION. 1864. THE REVEILLE. Here is another of the words which has not a home look. It is another interloper. I hear sol- diers even pronounce it differently. They do not seem quite sure about it. It does not come out square and honest, as a home word would. And we poor civilians make terrible work with it. We don't know what to call it. I was amused, the other day, at a history of the word canteen. It was originally tin can, and was good Saxon. The French got hold of it, turned it round, gave a French accent to it, and it became can-teen. Some wise man, hunting up a foreign word to annex to his mother tongue, found and laid hold of this, with- out asking any questions ; and so the poor exile got back again, but so disguised that his own knew him not. "What do you think about reveille ? How do you like it ? Not very well, I suspect, especially after a long march, a hard fight, a day in the trenches, or a turn at picket. I do not believe it is any pleasanter for a soldier to be waked than for any 4 THE REVEILLE. other man ; and one of the things in camp life that has impressed me most is the turning out of the men in the morning. It did not give me a very \dvid impression of individual happiness, or of the collective dignity of an army. But, like many unpleasant things, it is not mere- ly necessary, but wholesome. It breaks rudely in upon needed repose, delicious slumber, and precious dreams, interposing the stern reality between you and that so coveted intercourse with home that comes to one in sleep, or that utter oblivion of care and pain and danger which is so essential to the soldier. It comes unwelcomed, but it comes to rouse you to that for which you live, — to toil, to peril, to duty. It gives you reality for dreams ; it brings you back to life, and the work of life ; and, however unpleasant the act at the moment, how- ever reluctantly you answer the demand, I suppose it to be with you as with every true man, — once fully awake, you would not lie down to sleep again if you could. I do not know anything that a man wide awake more wonders at than the feeUng of aversion and dread with which he, a few moments before, shrunk from rising. There is nothing that has any worth, vigor, life, but, from time to time, needs rewakening. It seems as if continuous activity were impossible. There are seasons when everything lags, sleeps. We have action, great and wonderful, and then re- THE KEVEILLE. 5 action, as great and wonderful, — energy, and ther lethargy, — as if the vital powers exhausted them- selves, and required a rest, and the renewal that comes only of suf^pended labor. It is so in nature. The vigor of summer is succeeded by the sleep of winter, and before we can have harvest again there must be the reveille, at which she rouses herself and puts on the drapery of new life. It is so in the history of the world's progress, the development of the I'ace, either intellectually, mor- ally, or politically. History is just that, — the record of the swings of the pendulum between labor and repose, — and her grand epochs are the sound- ing of the reveille, which starts men from their tor- por, and sends them out reinvigorated to new exer- tion and greater victory, to the onward march of civilization and of life. Not only Judiea, but the whole world, had been in a terrible stupor, the whole religious life overlaid and lost sight of in base superstition and dead forms and trifling cere- monies, when a clear, short, sharp cry came sound- ing down the valley of the Jordan, " Repent, re- pent ! " and John, in his wild, desert garb, startled the slumbering people into expectation and prepa- ration for Him the latchet of whose shoes neither he nor we yet are worthy to unloose. It was a world's reveille. — The name and power of Christianity had all been absorbed by the Romish Church. It was the usurper of every human right. It was a despot No. 18. > * 6 THE REVEILLE. such as the world had never seen. It chained, not men's bodies, but their souls. It robbed them of that which was most precious, — right to their own opinions. It walled up the kingdom of Heaven, then opened a little postern gate, and if you would pay the priest, and acknowledge the infallibility of the Church, and recognize the Pope as Christ's vicegerent, you might be admitted. Under this terrible thrall men's consciences, as their hopes, slept. But the monk Luther startled the sleepers. The reveille was sounded, and with no uncertain sound. Men everywhere sprung up at it, alert, delighted, recognizing it as the call to life, for which they long had sighed ; and the power of the Church was broken, and Protestantism born. I remember that after one of those earlier terrible fights at the West — was it at Fort Donelson ? — a writer tells us that when he woke in the morning he could see no signs of an army about him, but, so far as his eye could reach, only long, low mounds covered with snow. Then suddenly the morning drum, the quick roll, the reveille ! and every mound of snow sprung into the air ; the snow-wreaths feU away, and revealed the full-armed, ready soldier. Weary with their struggle, they had sunk to slum- ber as they stood, and the night storm had wrapped them in its mantle. So it has seemed to me that waking cry of Luther startled the sleepers from cold, deathlike slumber, and revealed them to them- THE REVEILLE. 7 selves and to the world as stiU men, fuU-armed and ready. — The history of to-day gives us another illustration. Our fathers, with pain and privation, had founded a grand republic, with a corner-stone called liberty. To us that had become little more than a name and a boast. It was an inheritance only, a dower from the past. It was like a family picture, or a silver cup, valuable asT a rehc, good as an heirloom, but of no use to-day. So we denied our birthright and slept, — slept as no seven sleep- ers of fable could, — basely as well as deadly. Bat hark ! The reveille ! It is a solitary gun booming over the waters on a quiet spring morning ; and as its missile crashes against the sacred wall that en- closed the sacred band beneath that sacred flag, we, new-born as a nation, roused, sprung to our feet, to arms, — all recreance gone, ready to dare, to do, to die ! Along the wild mountain-passes, through the narrow defiles, of troubled Scotland, when the foe pressed, the swift runner bore the lighted torch, some unspent foot snatching it from his weary hand and speeding it on, till answering lights from craggy heights showed the clans awake and mar- shalling for the fray. So, pulsed over the throb- bing wire, from State to State, from town to town, from home to home, the tocsin sounded, which you received as a summons to your manhood and your loyalty, and have answered with your devotion. Of all the grand awakenings since John's warning 8 THE REVEILLE. cry, I read none so grand as this. It touched a deadlier torpor; it broke through social, political trammel ; it made men hear the word of God ; it turned back the foul torrent of corruption ; it gave the true meaning and emphasis to the word liberty ; it enfranchised a race down-trodden, despised, cursed as race never was, which to-day stands shoulder to shoulder with the proudest blood of our proud civ- ilization, and with it lays and cements the stone of the new comer. BuUd well on that, noble friends ; stand to your ranks, and strike till every shackle and disability fall ; and I think there shall rise a statelier edifice than any builded by human hands, at whose shrine all oppressed may find asy- lum, whose dome shall bear as its top glory, brighter than within the tabernacle of old, the Shechinah of the Divine presence. As we pass from childhood — which is nearer to heaven than many get again — into the life and temptations of youth and manhood, we settle into indifference at least, as regards things pure and holy and of good report. We swing from inno- cence to indifference. As we get on in life, this indifference hardens into something more positive, — a dislike, a rebellion, if not an unbelief. It is virtually the language of the grown men of the land, as it was of the king's servant in the para- ble, " We wUl not have this man to reign over us." The love of God is not in our hearts, nor is his law the law of our lives. THE REVEILLE. 9 It oftentimes is not a very distinctly marked con- dition that ensues. We are respectable, trusty men still. There is something that keeps us from being very bad. "We have self-respect, and self-interest too. Men find no special fault with us. We do "well enough for their purposes. Between this state and that of the hardened sinner there is every pos- sible gradation. From all this, the least as the greatest, men need to be roused. I think it is better and truer to say they need to rouse themselves. They must not wait for the reveille to come from without, but sound it themselves through all the turns and secret places of their own being, — sound till the whole man is up. The whole tenor of the Gospel is this way. The Apostle cried, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise, and Christ shall give thee light," — the gift after and because of the sleeper's own act. So with Christ in his miracles ; — " Stretch out thy hand," " Rise, take up thy bed, and walk," " Go wash in the pool of Siloam," — the thing de- sired comes after the action of the sufferer. So with God in his grace. You may think of excep- tions, and exceptions to rules are always striking ; but the rule is, that man shall toil, pray, have faith first, and then, as consequent, as in some sense a reward, God's help and blessing. It is not first the harvest and then the spring, first the ripe fruit and then the sowing of the seed, nor is it 10 THE REVEILLE. first a full Christian experience and character and then the means for reaching it. The children of light should be as wise as children of the world, who know that means must precede ends. There are very many who spend their time waiting for God to act upon them ; who expect to be wrought upon, taken by force out of their sins, and made saints ; who stand and listen for some startling word out of heaven ; and so they wait unclean and unhealed as that man at Bethesda who waited years for somebody to put him into the healing water, instead of putting himself in. I do not believe that God will work a miracle on a soul to save it. It must rouse itself from stupor by the means patent and available to every one. That is the first step toward salvation. It does not need any machinery of church or priest, the passing through any cast-iron, formal experience, but a real, stirring self-rousing. You cannot do this aU at once. You may de- cide at once, you may begin at once ; there may be a marked change, as a crisis or epoch, to your existence, which you wiU always date from ; but a true awakening is not like that at the drum-beat or bugle-call, but a thing of time. I think there is the mistake of revivals, and the weak point in individual experiences, which result so much in harm to the Church, and harm to the man. Men are taught to regard conversion as a sudden thing, THE REVEILLE. 11 to expect it to be like the voice at night which sent the young wonderer to the equally wondering Eli. To use the military phrase, they think it is to be " right about face, march J' If they have no such experience, they think they are lost, though they may be earnestly striving to please God all the while ; if they have, they think it is enough. But the first start of the sleeper is not his complete waking ; the first impulse of a startled soul does not secure it in the strength and virtue of the Christian. It is this which makes the after effect of " revivals," " conversions," so bad, which makes so many backsliders. They have not been thor- oughly awaked ; they have only tossed uneasily in their sleep ; when the pressure was off, they have slumbered again, probably more deadly than before, with the chances increased that they do not thor- oughly awake till the great reveille shall sound. The great duty, then, is not only to awake thor- ouglily, but to keep awake. As the hymn says, " Awake my soul when sin is nigh, And keep it still awake." You may wake ever so thoroughly, but if you are going to drop off again, — if you are to be after that kind described in the parable of the sower, who have no root, who become offended, choked by cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches, — you might as well not wake at all. What good 12 THE REVEILLE. the drum-beat, if, after your morning parade, you are going to sleep again, instead of passing the day in active, vigilant duty ? It is the keeping awake ■which is to make you serviceable as a soldier ; it is the keeping awake wliich is going to make you serviceable as a Christian. If you will do that, rouse yourself at the call made, and pray God ever for strength to keep awake, — if you will be alive to duty, vigilant against evil, doing always every- tliing you possibly can to make yourself a better man, preparing by fidelity in the lower service of this hfe for a loftier service in the life beyond, — you will accomplish the great purpose of your war- fare here, and can depart with that honest self- approval which the Apostle had, — "I have fought the fight, I have kept the faith ; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day : and not me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing." " Arise ! it is the Master's will : No more his heavenly voice despise; Why linger with the dying still ? He calls : arouse you, and arise ! No longer slight the Saviour's call: It sounds to you, to me, to all. Army Series.] [No. 19. EALLY UPON THE EESEEVE! BY JOHN F. W. WARE. BOSTON: AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION. 1864. EALLI UPON THE RESERVE! Skirmishers ! the enemy presses you. He is stronger and more alert than was supposed. He is in force, on your front and flank. You are exposed every way. The danger is imminent. The con- flict is against you. You cannot stand. Hark ! The bugle ! What does it say ? Retreat ? No. " Rally upon the reserve ! " We are deployed as skirmishers in the great life- battle. We do not go into the conflict in battalions or by divisions. We do not stand shoulder to shoul- der. We cannot touch our comrade by the elbow. We go against the great allied powers of evil singly. It is our single arm against the combined foe. The man next us, — the nearest, dearest friend we have, cannot help us. He has his own work. He has his post. He is under orders to hold it, as you are to hold yours. He cannot think of you. He cannot help you. His duty lies in front. You are alone. He is alone. Every man is alone. Not in solid column, not as a huge force, a combined humanity, may we hurl ourselves against the old, hoary pow- No. 19. 4 RALLY UPON THE RESERVE ! er3 of sin, but as we can singly. "We are as skir- mishers in this great strife. The enemy presses. We have struggled long, some of us well, some but indifferently. The day is far spent. We are worn with its heat and its toil. We have stood our ground as well as we could. But the enemy gains, and we begin to falter. The fight is fearful in front, and there are symptoms that the flank is turned. There have been dropping shots upon the right and the left, and a fresh pressure in front. What sliall we do ? Retreat ? That were ignominious, that were to lose all, that were to sur- render the cause as well as ourselves, that were rec- reance to duty and to God. Shall we fight on ? To what good against such odds ? Hark ! A bugle-call ! What does it say ? — " Rally upon the reserve ! " Yes ! rally upon the reserve ! That is it. Vain to run, vain to fall back, vainer still to contend sin- gle-handed. '■^ Rally upon the reserve!" We are saved ! What is this reserve to which the imperilled soul may fly, and find so sure a succor ? Do you not know ? Can it be other than God ? One strange mistake men make, — and they have persistently made it from the beginning, — is in the attempt to do God's work without God. This life- duty of ours is not a something that man sets him- self about ; neither do human governments, or laws, or society. Our work is of God, — your work, my RALLY UPON THE RESERVE work, every man's work. We never in any way get divorced from that. He sends us into the world ; He marks out our duty ; to Him we are to report. And what a blessed thing it is for man that he has a God to fall back upon. It is that, — God with man, which has made every great success since the world began. Caesar did not make a great success, nor Alexander, nor Bonaparte. They fought without God ; they fought against God. Worldly men and thoughtless reckon them the great men. They call them conquerors. They say their names are im- mortal. Can you show me to-day anything either of them did ? Where are the empires they founded at such cost of treasure and tears ? What good thing, dying, have they bequeathed mankind ? The humblest man who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before is rightly called a benefactor. Were they benefactors ? Bonaparte himself could say, that in a half-century a half-page of genei-al history would be all that would be given to him, while the name of Jesus would continue to grow greater and brighter. And yet what were Christ's victories, and which, dying, seemed most likely to leave a name and a power behind ? Napoleon lived for himself. He neglected for his own eternal good what he never would have neglected in a battle. He had no reserve. God was not with him. Jesus lived for God. God overruled all adverse things in his life. He could always, did always, fall back 6 RALLY UPON THE RKSERVE ! on Him. God was the never-forgotten power be- hind. So Ms defeats became victories. Angela crowned him Lord of all. Every real work, everything which has survived the shock of centuries, everything which has bene- fited man has been because the worker recognized the need and sought the help of God. He had al- ways God as a reserve, in every doubt and duty and ti-ouble. And God aided him to do better and wiser than he knew. How striking this truth is in the Scripture. Moses did not lead out the children of Israel from their bondage, and shape his wise laws in their behalf and rule them in their barbarous and re- bellious wanderings of himself alone. You see him going to and fro between the mountain and the peo- ple. He shapes the law and moulds the multitude as Grod wills. " Thus saith the Lord," is invariably the authority for his act. In every perplexity and peril he looks to Jehovah. David, though he did many sinful things, always came back in lowliest pen- itence to his allegiance, and leaned on God, his rod, his staff, his shield. Paul's bonds, scourgings, im- prisonments, persecutions, were made light through the strength that he derived from God, while his whole life long Jesus never attempted anything without seeking the blessing, without acknowledging the aid, of his Father. See liim at the Temptation, when the Devil presses him with every cunning wile ; see him when the powers of hate and dark- RALLT UPON THE RESERVE! 7 ness have compassed him, and, betrayed by a disciple, denied by a friend, deserted by all, he stands at the tribunal to receive the fatal decree. Does he stand alone, or is there some great reserve of power he- hind by which he is sustained, through which he conquers? In him, in eacli and all, you see, not men self-dependent, self-sufficient, but conscious of, and using, that reserve which God in his infinite love and mercy vouchsafes to all. He is ever ready to help those who seek help of him, to be that all- Bustaining, all-conquering power by which a human soul is made more than master of the wiles that beset him. Just as much must you and I iu the work we have to do in life lean upon God. That work is not to be done without God. He places us here. He marks out our duty. To him we must report. It will not do to leave him out of the account, to go on living just as if there were no God and no account to give. Many men do that. What do they make of hfe ? Good merchants, farmers, sol- diers, successful enough as men count success. But these do not make life. They are only certain oc- cupations of life, a use of certain powers or facul- ties. Life is what the soul is, the part of man that cannot die, the part that is called up and questioned by and by. Men who are without God do not live. They miss all the higher quality and power of life. They miss all of that more abundani life which Jesus 8 RALLY UPON THE RESERVE said he had come to bring. God is the centre and source of all life, — of the soul as of the tree, the ocean as the star. In him we live and move and have our being. > " Man's business is to seek His strength in God alone, — And e'en an angel would be weak Who trasted in his own." I dare say some of you may have been trying the experiment of living without God. You have not seen what he had to do with your life. You have got along, you think, very well vdthout him. But has it been so very well, after all ? Are you not, in your serious moments, in your troubles, when great questions rise, when conflicting duties harass, when temptations press, when parting and pain and grief come, conscious of weakness ? Do you not wish you had some ready, near, sufficient power to rely on, — some reserve that, when your own abil- ity is exhausted, you can confidently go to ? Every man wishes that. At times every man feels out toward help, gropes after a stafi" of sup- port, a something that shall encourage or hold him up, and be to him what he is conscious he cannot be to himself In camp you know something of this. There are allurements, temptations, about you strangely powerful. There are dangers constantly threatening you, some of them wholly new, unlike those you were exposed to at home, while the old KALLl JPON THE RESERVE! 9 ones get a new power from your changed conditions. There is, beside, the longing for home, and anxiety about those you love. You cannot bear these alone. God has not made you so that you could. The temptations will overcome your integrity, dangers fill you with apprehension, the thoughts of home eat the manly courage out of your hearts. Your com- rades can do nothing for you. It is little use to go to the chaplain. He may give you a little re- lief, a moment's comfort ; but he does not and cannot help you to bear, to overcome. Nothing of man can : and there is our terrible mistake ! Our re- serve — the power greater than ourselves — is not in these things in which we are so apt to seek it. The man who gets drunk thinks he can take the pledge. That is his reserve. He falls back on that and feels himself secure. His friends take courage. The gambler, the liar, the licentious man, fortify themselves in like manner. AU men trying to reform themselves seek help from some person, circumstance, change, the thing outside themselves, the crutch, the staff that supports, not the vital power that heals. It will not do. No man is safe so. It is still the power of man, or something less than man, on which he leans. The power of God is the only sure reserve. With that behind him every man is safe. " Man is naught, is less than naught; Thou, our God, art all in all." 10 RALLY UPON THE RESERVE ! The same thing man in every relation and condi- tion, however exalted, however humble, always needs. We only do not see the need in our com- mon daily duties because we have become so well satisfied with leaving the God-power out of our daily lives. They might be so grand, and we let them be so low ! Jesus Christ lived to show what life is, and no man lives except as he has that which was in Him who said, " I can of mine own self do nothing," and who showed, under every duty and in every trial, that he was not trying to stand alone, but looking back toward, leaning upon, a Divine strength. Do not you do anything less. God is to be found of any who will honestly seek him, and to be known by any who honestly try to love him. He is not a great power away off, too much occupied in great things to care for little ones, but he counts every hair, sees every sparrow that falls, and is most at home in the heart of the most childlike believer. He is our first, best, constant friend. He is the reserve on which every luiman soul in its want and peril may fall back and be secure. INIen may go on for a long time in seeming prosperity and become confident and self-exultant, like skirmishers, elated at their little gain, pushing forward into the very arms of the waiting, wary foe. That will be the moment of disaster unless the wise commander have near and ready a reserve, in time to check the onslaught and roll back the assault. So, the time comes to every man — it comes again and again to most — EALLT UPON THE RESERVE! 11 when trials, dangers, temptations, crowd upon and would crush him. They are apt to find him self-con- fident, presuming upon the past power or gain, — without a reserve. It is the 'presumfption that con- quers the man rather than the temptation or the trial. But let these come to one who has a reserve of faith in God, who has not, at the emergency, to feel about, if haply he may find Him ; let them come to one who has a consciousness of His nearness, and His wUling support. Pressed, weary, faltering, he will quit every lesser support, the reeds that bend and break ; he will rally upon his reserve, — God, — and be safe. You know that in no one thing does a general more surely show his skill than in the selection, the position, the handling of his reserve. It must be Buificient, it must be well disciplined, it must be near, it must be easily moved. At any moment it may be needed for the sternest duty. The fate of the day, of a cause, of a people, may hinge upon it. Many a defeat has been disgraceful because the re- serve was too far away, was not ordered up at the right moment, or proved not the stufi' for the crisis hour ; many a struggle, that long hung trembling in the balance, has been turned to decisive victory by the fi-esh squadrons marching to the front, re- lieving the shattered and weary columns. You remember how Waterloo was won. And every conflict of yours may be a Waterloo, — a decisive victory, if God is near. 12 RALLY UPON THE RESERVE! In the great life-battle we all must wage, it be- comes us never to overlook the fact of probable dis- aster, however brave and self-assured we may be, if we have not a near, sufficient reserve in God. Make him as your " next of kin," — the Friend be- fore all friends, to whom you not only may go, but do go for light and strength and guidance always. Then in the crisis hours, — the moments when the powers of iU all seem mustered, the moments wliich decide the weal or woe of years, the good or the bad of all time, the joy or misery of Eternity, — you wiU have no fear, no anxious searching, no painful wait- ing or doubt, but God with you and in you, the power beyond all powers, the reserve to insure you victory. " My God with me in every place 1 Firmly does the promise stand, On land or sea, with present grace Still to aid us near at hand. If you ask, ' Who is with thee ? ' God is here, — my God with me ! " My God for me ! I dare to say, — God the portion of my soul ! Nor need I tremble in dismay When around me troubles roll. If yon ask, ' What comforts thee? ' It is this, — God is for me. *' In life, in death, with God bo near, Every battle I shall win. Shall boldly press through danger hepft, Triumph over every sin I ' What ! ' you say, ' a victor be? * No, not I, but God in me! " Army Series.] [No. 20. MUSTERED OUT! A FEW WORDS WITH THE RANK AND FH^E, AT PARTING. BY JOHN F. W. WARE. BOSTON: AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION. 1865. MUSTEEED OUT! Well, friends, the war is over, ended as every loyal man knew it would end. Tlie good cause has triumphed. There is no more any rebellion. Se- cession is dead. It has no resurrection. Through your patient fidelity it is that peace returns, , and though our maidens come not with songs and dances out to welcome you as warriors, though we may not manifest that exuberance of joy you may have hoped to witness and we had hoped to feel, — for the shadow of a great woe is upon us, — our hearts go out to you with deep, unspoken gratitude. You have saved the Republic. You have restored its integrity. You have effaced the one spot upon its fair name. Your toil, your blood, the blood of the brave who have fallen, are the seeds of the new civilization. The night is passed. The day dawns. The war is over, and you are mustered out! Ah! Low you have longed for the time, — in weary march, in comfortless bivouac, in pitiless storm and cold, on exposed picket, on the bed of the hospital ! Through the years, it has been the day-dream and No. 20. 4 MUSTERRD OUT ! the night-dream. Hope has drooped as it diilayed, the whole heart grown faint, and it has taken all the loyalty and all the manhood sometimes to carry you on bravely. Now the end is come ; the war is over. You are mustered out ! How the tidings have made glad the dear old far-away home, — the home you left so sadly, the home that has been so true to you, the home that has been your memory and your hope, your guiding and your guardian an- gel ! How the good wife has grown yoiing again under its charm ! how wild with impatience are the children become ! how eloquent is ihe dear face of the mother with its alternate sn./l^j and tear ! how pride swells up in the heart o- the father, — pride that he speaks not, but keej j there ! how brothers and sisters long to clasp j da once more ! O the wealth of love and joy that throbs for and waits "you in those homes whose long and patient and wasting agonies only the good God has witnessed, whose silent martyrdom, witL -ut monument or record, he has accepted and bk sed. Joy. joy in the farm- house ! joy, joy by thi hillside ! joy, joy in the city ! joy, joy east and \vt -t, through the whole land ! The terror is over. The war is at end. Sweet peace is come, and the loved ones are coming, — mustered out ! Thank God ! Thank God, too, that you have lived until now ; thank God that you have had part in this great work of regeneration. Comrades have MUSTERED OUT ! 5 fallen. The green sod covers some of the noblest and best. There are homes not to be made glad as youi's, which shall watch and wait and listen in vain,- — homes sad and dark and dreary, to whom the peace-anthem is as a funei'al dirge. Their loved ones come not back again. They haxe been " mus' tered out ! " In the years that are gone I have ventured to tell you a tew things that I thought might help you in camp and in hospital. I feel it a shame to my manhood that I have not been bodily with you, wliile I thank God that some words of mine have found their way out to you in proof that I have been with you in spirit. There are a few things I want to say to you now, for I want you to make the going home a thing of as much joy as those waiting for you expect it to be. The mere excite- ment and sensation of return will quickly be over. That kind of gladness is fleeting. The novelty with them and with you will pass. Life cannot wait, and treat you as guests. You go back to live, to fill old places of duty, to take up old responsibilities, to become again husbands and parent?, neighbors and citizens, and every one expects more of you in every sphere because of the discipline and experience of your service. We are all looking for a new order of manhood to spring out of the war. We expect to find you ennobled, and we trust that the joy of return and of meeting is to be increased and made 6 MUSTERED OUT ! perfect and perennial by the fidelity with which you shall take hold of duties, new and old. Now it is not going to be easy to set yourselves down in the old places, to the old tasks. Soldier life has been a life of excitement, of change and un- certainty. It is a very unnatural life, and in order to become used to and bend yourself to it, you have had to give up some things that belong to a man. The soldier is made at the expense of the man. You must now resume your manhood, get yourselves back to the old attitude, and learn to accept and to work under the old, and somewhat tame, conditions. I suspect it is a terrible time of trial for the soldier when he has got through seeing his friends and tell- ing his story, and he ceases to be the one centre of interest, and wakes to the sense that he is only the ordinary man he used to be, with the ordinary de- mands of life upon him. It is something of a shock, followed by a weary disinclination to take hold of anything, a morbid, restless desire for the wild, ex- citing life he has left. That is a crisis to test and try your manhood. Once pass that, and the rest is comparatively easy ; yield to it, and it is the first step in the breaking up of all persistent and useful habit and labor. Let me beg you, as you value your own happiness and that of those who love you, to resist with your utmost power this temptation. Do not give it any time to grow upon you. It will require a little real courage and patience. Go to MUSTERED OUT ! 7 worh at once, and by work keep at bay the busy devil, who may still annoy, but cannot conquer yoil. Take rest so long as you really need it, and it is healthy. Beyond that, rest not a moment at your peril ! I think it is going to be somewhat difficult for you to resume charge of yourselves. It is a strange and complete change that the routine of the army works. No one, who has not witnessed it, will be- lieve how quiokly a man, brought under command and compelled to do as otlier men tell him, loses the desire and the faculty to do for himself, and submits to the decision of the merest stripling, provided he be a military superior. It is strange what power there comes to reside in a shoulder-strap. Why, men who have been leaders in church, and society, and politics, at home, in the army have lost, through habit, the ability or the will to care for themselves in very simple things. It is really sad to see how army discipline has had the power of crushing out the individual. And yet this is, to an extent, a necessity. The individual must be sunk, must be held back, or there is no army. At first, our army was little better than a debating-club. Every man wanted to talk, to give opinion ; no one wanted to obey, and so, disaster. At last, it became a thor- ough-working machine, — a compact unit under one mind, and then, victory. Implicit obedience is tlie one law, and men held under command, knowing 8 MUSTERED OUT ! that the command must be obeyed, living and mov- ing, day by day, upon other men's decisions, lose, not only the habit, but, it would seem, the power, of acting for themselves. Surgeons have told me that they had to watch their men just like chil- di'cu ; officers have spoken in surprise at the matters brought to them, such as no one, at home, would think of asking advice about. Again and again have I encountered this helplessness, in ways some- times ludicrous : as when, in a strange city, at mid- night, a perfectly sober soldier begged for my escort lest he should be robbed of his pay, which he showed me. You, probably, are conscious of this in your- selves, — or have, at least, seen it in others. Not a few fear that peace is to let loose upon the land a horde of men in whom this habit of implicit obedience has destroyed self-respect, — who have become so enervated by years of unquestioning obedience as to be unable to resume care over themselves. This is a very lamentable prospect, and deplorable indeed would it be if they who have broken the bonds for others were, by that act, to be themselves enslaved. I will not, I cannot, believe it. What you want, is to be conscious of, and set yourselves to recover from, the false position in which war has placed you. As citizens, you must resume the habit of self-mastery which, as soldiers, you have laid aside. It was your privilege, your pride, before the war, to think, to act, for yourselves. MUSTERED OUT to call no man master, to believe in your own su- premacy. Even a little too self-willed, self-confi- dent, you were. That was your characteristic as Americans, and, though it has its drawbacks, that has made America ; and I am not going to believe that you who went out great, strong, self-reliant, self-respecting men, are going to come back to us all broken down in integrity, puny, and weak, and helpless. I do not share the fear, but I put you on your guard. If your service have taken anything of your self-reliance or self-respect, see to it at once. No man can do anything if his self-respect be gone, or even impaired. No man has any reliance if he cannot rely on himself. I am one of those who have always felt that the mere fighting is the least of the dangers into which secession has plunged us. That has required a cer- tain class of courage, called out and established one phase of national manhood. Peace has always its dangers and trials, and this peace has many, both new and grave. Our country enters a new career. For the first time she is really a nation, a power in and to herself, as well as a power recognized among the peoples of the earth. The root of death that was in her, whose fibres penetrated and pervaded every part of her system, is cut up, plucked out, cast away. It is a new history she is to make. To-day opens the grandest chapter in the annals of peace, — the record not of the profession, but the fact of liberty. 10 MUSTERED OUT I " Sounding and glittering generality " no more, it has been graved by the point of the bayonet so as the ages cannot destroy it, that the assertion that " all men are born with certain inalienable rights " is a truth indisputable and immortal. Glory he to God! But the truth must not be left alone, it must not be blazoned upon banners and monuments, and, backward-looking, time must not tell of it as of a thing once established. To be the immortal thing it is, you, and we all, must watch it, forward it, live it, — not make free others, but be free ourselves ; and there is a great and grand and imperative work, in the days of reconstruction, to be done in this di- rection. The mere truth will not make free, but we must work out freedom by the truth. I feel that there are sore hours of travail before the Re- public yet, but I look with hope still to you, and whatever selfishness of party and trick of poUticians may endeavor, in your hands should be the great conservative power to uphold and protect that for which you have so suffered. " Mustei'ed out of the service " is not mustered out of duty. Duty is life's demand and life's toil. Nobly have you stood up to the duty of the hour. Never had country juster cause to be proud of her eons, — never had sons more cause to exult in their country. Out from the darkness has she issued in- to a marvellous light, — out from her shame is she come into abounding glory. Under God you are MUSTERED OUT ! 11 her saviours. Safely through these perils, He, by you, has brought her. But your work is not yet done. Mustered out of her service you are, not yet mustered out of Ilis ! The great, broad dcinaiid of God, which is Duty, is still upon you. Every man is wanted. All things are to be made new. The era of reconsti-uction is come, — reconstruction, that beginning in the man shall spread till it reach and leaven the law and the life of the nation. It is a new day, and you must go back to the old home not so much to resume the old life as to assume a new one, — deeper, broader, higher, nobler, truer, freer, — a life of firmer root and grander aspiration, to be checked by no timidity or compromise, or half at- tainment, but to press on till soul and nation, rid of every thrall, stand out in the power and glory, and honor and immortality, God gives His perfect things. I hope to see the government — or better, the people — up to the mark of its duty toward all of you who have so suffered as to be cut otf from the ordinary, active pursuits of life. I wish Congress would sanction the wearing of the old corps badges by all, so that we may recognize you that are whole, as well as you that are maimed, when we meet you. As to the wounded, the crippled, the sick, I do not want it to be recorded of this genera- tion that its heroes, having given their best to it, were rewai'ded with the alms-house, or were left to 12 MUSTERED OUT ! beg or compelled to steal. I want the nation to be just. I do not ask it to be grateful or generous. The demand is one of simple justice. Every one who has been honest and brave and temperate and long-suffering, — who can show in his body the mark and badge of his service, who cannot care for himself, — I want to see made comfortable at the nation's charge, not supported as a burden and an idler, but in some way that shall keep up the tone of his manhood, give him adequate occupation and foster his self-respect. It is a project worthy the immediate and the broadest thought of the wise. I trust that the right thing in the right way will be planned and done at once, — something grander than England or France has conceived, something wor- thy of ourselves, of the cause and of you, which shall elevate the recipients while it ennobles the donors, — some grand, all-embracing, nationalinstitU' tion, branching from a centre out into every State, dedicated to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the martyr. I want to see no unmeaning stone raided to him, no bronze or marble, no over-endowing of his family, — but a monument that shall pass to the generations, a witness of the nation's justice to you, a nation's respect to him. The seed of liberty God gave the fathers they planted and watered, and the water wherewith they watered it was blood. It had wilted in a dry and arid soil. It needed water, — and again the water is MUSTERED OUT ! 13 blood, — blood so costly, so dear, so abundant, that we have shrunk again and again, and cried " How long, O God, how long ! " The fair young boy, the grave, gray-haired man, the humble private, the trusted leader, they are gone, and, as crowning our holocaust, — alas that it must be ! — our great- hearted, loyal, loving President. What a baptism that we knew not of must this our cause be bap- tized with ! How goodly and how grand the noble martyr host who in this great conflict have been mustered out. Friends, farewell! Life is yours. Let life be duty, — then, when mustered out of the service here, like those who have honorably fallen in the struggle, you shall be mustered in at the calling of the new roll in the new kingdom ! il - Jl.3 0. ^^-^^ "^.^ ^^" '^Z •^■■"^^^ %.^ ^^ 'o V ^^-^^ o ^^ .-. ^^ ' ^°-^^. •^0^ .-^o. .^* ^^ ^ -^^ * ^^ o V .0 ^°V ". -^^0^ 4 O V^ .L*^ • .<^ ^0- "-^-^^ >^ o I* •^ DOBBS BROS. LIBRARY BINDING S^ iO-r. >. ^ «?^ * ♦ ST. AUGUSTINE • /}y , I- /S^m FLA. ^ "i