into the field to preach to the men in their camps, to circulate among them religious newspapers and books, as well as other reading of a moral and instructive character, to visit and converse with officers and men, and hold religious meetings with them, to minister to their spiritual as well as physical wants when suffering from sickness or wounds, furnishing either from its own stores or those of the Sanitary Commission such clothing and delicacies as were needed, and endeavoring to lead them to Christ as the only ground of comfort and trust. It has undoubtedly accomplished great good by its efforts; and though some of its volunteer delegates have exhibited a zeal which was out of proportion to their knowledge, and have compelled the Commission to rely to a greater extent than was at first intended upon paid agencies as the most permanent and reliable, its course has been in general marked by the highest beneficence, and has resulted in turning many to righteousness. Of its receipts it is impossible to speak with exactness, but they are understood to have reached nearly a million of dollars in money, and somewhat more than that amount in books, pamphlets, papers, hymn books, stationery, clothing, and food and delicacies for the sick. The American Bible Society, the two national tract societies, the several missionary societies, and most of the denominational publishing societies, have contributed very large amounts for the circulation of Bibles and religious books and the support of missionaries and colporteurs in the army and navy. In the aggregate, the appropriations from these societies somewhat exceed seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. There has been contributed for the relief of the freedmen, and for the maintenance of teachers and others to instruct them, more than half a million of dollars. For white refugees, for the most part unionists from the southern states, who have been deprived of all that they possessed by the infuriated rebels, and often have seen their earthly protectors murdered before their eyes, more than three hundred thousand dollars. have been collected. The claims of the suffering operatives over the sea, reduced to starvation by the non-exportation of cotton, appealed strongly to the sympathies of our people, who saw with admiration that these brave sufferers remained their stanch friends, while the aristocracy and moneyed class in Great Britain were, with strange inconsistency, avowing their preference for the rebels; and from our ample stores of grain, breadstuffs to the value of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars were sent to the Lancashire sufferers, and one hundred and twenty thousand more to Ireland. While there has thus been poured into the treasury of benevolence, for objects connected with or growing out of the war, the vast sum of fully two hundred and fifty millions of dollars, a larger amount than has been expended upon Christian missions during the present century, it is a matter for thankfulness that at the North every cause of religious or intellectual progress has been greatly prospered. An unusual number of new churches have been erected, church debts extinguished, the salaries of clergymen almost universally increased, the treasuries of missionary, tract, and Bible societies abundantly replenished, and new enterprises of philanthropy undertaken; the orphan, the widowed, and the indigent liberally cared for, and our institutions of learning more liberally endowed than in thirty years before. The amounts contributed by private donors for the endowment of colleges in the northern states since the commencement of the war exceed five millions of dollars. But grand and noble as is this outpouring of a nation's treasure for the maintenance of a just cause, and the perpetuation and advancement of a civilization which is its best birthright, there is a higher and nobler sense in which the philanthropy of our people has been displayed. The bestowment of money, even in such vast sums as those we have noticed, although it may have gone to the extent of partially impoverishing those who have given it, is yet inferior in value as a gift to that consecration of personal service, or that relinquishment of all that made life valuable, for the sake of our national life. The instances where this has been done at the bidding of a sublime patriotism by those who have enlisted in the army to serve the national cause, and if need be to lay down their lives for its sake, leaving home, children, friends, and all that made life blissful, are numberless; but it is not of these particularly that we propose to speak. There is and necessarily must be something of romance, of chivalry, of heroism in the conception we all form of the battle-field; and the scarred and war-worn veteran, as he returns to his home, finds no little cause for innocent self-gratulation as he "fights his battles o'er and tells how fields were won." But there are those, and many of them, who from almost the beginning of the war have devoted their whole time, and often at great personal inconvenience, to the labor of preparing food and clothing for the sick and wounded, or to the drudgery of superintending the forwarding of it to the general and field hospitals where it was needed. There are others not less heroic, who amid all the discomforts and inconveniences of the camp or the general hospitals at advanced posts, have ministered faithfully to the sick and wounded soldiers, often amid scenes intensely painful and distressing, and in too many instances have fallen victims to diseases contracted in their ministrations. Others still, compassionating the condition of the unfortunate Africans, suddenly set free from a life-long bondage and utterly ignorant of what was before them, have reduced the chaos of disorder to perfect system, and by arranging them in orderly households, organizing schools for their instruction, and leading them on step by step to a higher life, have fitted them for their new duties as free men. Others still, on hospital transports on the waves of the stormy Atlantic, or exposed to death from the stealthy attacks of guerrillas on the rivers of the West, have bound up the wounds and medicined the maladies of war's victims. And yet others, on those bloody battle-fields where hurtling shot and screaming shell fell fast and thick, have toiled patiently to stay the fast outflowing tide of life and to bring back the desperately wounded to the consciousness of existence, sometimes even when the columns of our armies were retreating past them, and the surgeons had already fled. Of the actors in those heroic deeds, some were clergymen, men occupying high positions in their respective denominations; others were physicians of high reputation, lawyers of extensive practice, or merchants whose ships floated on every sea. By far the larger proportion, however, were women, many of them members of families of the highest social position in the northern states, refined, cultivated, and winning in manner, and all or nearly all of them had left homes where they were tenderly cherished and surrounded by every luxury, to encounter, without murmur or complaint, the privations and discomforts of life in the camp or in the hospitals of the border. It has been remarked by one who has himself been a prominent actor in this great work of active philanthropy, "that this war has been worth all that it has cost, both in blood and treasure, for the ennobling and elevating influence it has had on the women of our land." Thousands who before the commencement of the war were leading lives of frivolity, with no lofty aim, no fitting mission to purify and elevate their natures and convince them of the blessedness of an existence of usefulness, have found in the duties they have assumed in the hospitals, the aid societies, the ministering to the wounded at the front, or the civilization and elevation of the freedmen, the very stimulus which has given life its highest zest, and filled the aching void in their hearts. There has doubtless also been developed in the minds of these gifted women, with more or less distinctness, the feeling that this conflict was one in which they had a special interest; that the contest was one between the civilization of the North, with its lofty and almost chivalrous regard for the rights, the elevation, and the progress of woman in all fields of noble and holy endeavor, and the civilization of the South, with its utter disregard of womanly purity, its brutalization of the women of the servile race, its degrading lusts, and its denial of all true womanly culture of brain or heart. Impressed, consciously or unconsciously, with this conviction, the women of the North have made the costliest sacrifices, and have accomplished the most heroic deeds ever recorded of the sex in the world's history. The dwellers in the mountains of New England, who, by hoarding their scanty earnings and the severest thrift, have managed after weeks and perhaps months of toil to make a hospital shirt, à quilt, and a pair of socks for some wounded soldier in the hospital, (their own loved ones who had volunteered for the war meantime lying low in soldiers' graves at Bull Run, or Fredericksburgh, or Stone River;) the poor lone sister in northern New York, who twice a month made a toilsome journey of twelve miles on foot to procure from an aid society clothing to make up for the hospitals; the school-teacher at the West, who, abandoning her position as principal of the female department of a large city school, gave her services for year after year without compensation in the management of a soldiers' aid society; the fair, accomplished ladies, moving in the highest circles of society, who day after day for three years and more have gone amid winter's snows and summer's heat to their work of procuring, preparing, and forwarding hospital supplies, as regularly as the banker or merchant goes to his daily business; the refined and cultivated women who at Cedar Mountain, at Centerville, at Antietam, at Fredericksburgh, at Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga; at Gettysburgh, at Morris Island, amid the burning sands; at Belle Plain, and Fredericksburgh, and City Point, and in the vast temporary hospitals, have toiled night and day with a zeal which knew no weariness, and a skill which fully met every emergency, in those ministrations of love and mercy to which so many thousands of our brave men owe their lives; and those other heroic souls who at Hilton Head, and Beaufort, and Fernandina, at Vicksburg and Milliken's Bend, at Helena and at New Orleans, have trained the children of the freedmen and taught their mothers all womanly virtues and housewifely skill; all these, and others too many to be even reckoned by classes in our enumeration, are deserving of a record which shall transmit their names to the latest history. Many daughters have done virtuously, but these have excelled them all. In this personal consecration of so many of our noblest spirits to the work of a holy philanthropy, we see grounds of hope for the triumph of a grander and more self-sacrificing Christianity in the future. The order of Beguines, the predecessors of the Sisters of Charity, had its origin in the necessities and sufferings of Europe in the time of the crusades; the order of Sisters of Charity was called into existence by the exigencies of the wars of the continent in the sixteenth century; the first great development of modern Christian missions in Europe was one of the results of the French Revolution. The development in this country of that "Inner Mission" founded in Germany by Wichem and his coadjutors within the last thirty years, which has for its objects the education of the ignorant and degraded, the reformation of the vicious, the improvement of prisons, the care of the sick, and the presentation to the sorrow-stricken, the wearied, and the woe-worn, the consolation of the religion of Christ, is des |