the light burning brightly for him. And in those dark days when our
land trembled, and a million men from the north tramped southward and a
million men from the south tramped northward, and the columns met with
a concussion that threatened to rend the land asunder, there, in the
battle, midst the din and confusion and blood, women walked, angels of
light and mercy, not merely holding the cup of cold water to famished
lips, or stanching the life-blood until surgeons came, but teaching
soldier boys in the dying hour the way through the valley and beyond it
up the heavenly hills. These all fulfilled their mission and
"remembered those in bonds as bound with them."

This principle also has been and is the spring of all progress in
humanity and civilization. Our journalists and orators pour forth
unstinted praise upon the achievements of the nineteenth century. But
in what realm lies our supremacy? Not in education, for our schools
produce no such thinkers or universal scholars as Plato and his
teacher; not in eloquence, for our orators still ponder the periods of
the oration "On the Crown;" not in sculpture or architecture, for the
broken fragments of Phidias are still models for our youth. The nature
of our superiority is suggested when we speak of the doing away with
the exposure of children, the building of homes, hospitals and asylums
for the poor and weak; the caring for the sick instead of turning them
adrift; the support of the aged instead of burying them alive; the
diminished frequency of wars; the disappearance of torture in obtaining
testimony; humanity toward the shipwrecked, where once luring ships
upon the rocks was a trade; the settlement of disputes by umpires and
of national differences by arbitration.

Humanity and social sympathy are the glory of our age. Society has
come to remember that those in bonds are bound by them. Indeed, the
application of this principle to the various departments of human life
furnishes the historian with the milestones of human progress. The age
of Sophocles was not shocked when the poet wrote the story of the child
exposed by the wayside to be adopted by some passer-by, or torn in
pieces by wild dogs, or chilled to death in the cold. When the wise
men brought their gold and frankincense to the babe in the manger, men
felt the sacredness of infancy. As the light from the babe in
Correggio's "Holy Night" illumined all the surrounding figures, so the
child resting i