hushed congregation.

It was Mr. Egglestone's aim, in the beginning of the sermon he preached
that morning, to remind the soldiers of their childhood. "It is a
thought," he said, "which almost moves me to tears,--that all these hardy
frames around me were but the soft, warm, dimpled forms of so many
infants once. And nearly every one of you was, I suppose, watched over by
tender parents, who beheld, with mutual joy, the development of each
beautiful faculty. The first step taken by the babe's unassisted feet,
the first articulate word spoken by the little lisping lips,--what
delight they gave, and how long were they remembered! And what thoughts
of the child's future came day and night to those parents' breasts! and
of what earnest prayers was it the subject! And of all the parents of all
those children who are here as men to-day, not one foresaw a scene like
this; none dreamed that they were raising up patriots to fight for
freedom's second birth on this continent, in the most stupendous of civil
wars.

"But Providence leads us by strange ways, and by hidden paths we come
upon brinks of destiny which no prophet foresaw. Now the days of peace
are over. Many of you who were children are now the fathers of children.
But your place is not at home to watch over them as you were watched
over, but to strive by some means to work out a harder problem than any
ever ciphered on slates at school."

Then he explained to his audience the origin of the war; for he believed
it best that every soldier should understand well the cause he was
fighting for. He spoke of the compact of States, which could not be
rightfully broken. He spoke of the serpent that had been nursed in the
bosom of those States. He related how slavery, from being at first a
merely tolerated evil, which all good men hoped soon to see abolished,
had grown arrogant, aggressive, monstrous; until, angered by resistance
to its claims, it had deluged the land with blood. Such was the nature of
an institution based upon selfishness and wrong. And such was the bitter
result of building a LIE into the foundations of our national structure.
Proclaiming to the world, as the first principle of our republican form
of government, that "all men are created free and equal," we had at the
same time held a race in bondage.

"Neither nation nor individual," said he, "can in any noble sense
succeed, with such rotten inconsistency woven into its life. It was this
shoddy in the gar