the Spirit of God continuing to bless the preaching of the word, the whole land had been possessed-the earth had been the Lord's, and all the kingdoms of this world had become the kingdom of our Christ. Though it tarries now, that vision shall come; and to Him whose hand is not shortened that it cannot save, nor his ear heavy that it cannot hear, be the prayer offered till the answer come, "Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, and in the days of old."

12

XI.

CALEB.

IT is not the quantity, but the temper, of the metal which makes a good sword, nor is it mere bulk, but a large measure of nervous and muscular force, which makes a strong man; and in accordance with the saying of Napoleon I., that "moral is to physical power as three to one," the wars of all ages have proved that success in battle does not turn so much on the multitude as on the morale, on the numbers as on the character, of the troops.

The triumph of the Prussians, for example, in their brief but bloody contest with Austria, and in their more recent victory over France, was due less to the superiority of their arms than of their education, intelligence and religion; under Providence, these, not numbers or the needle-gun, turned the fortunes of the campaign. To the same or similar moral causes Oliver Cromwell owed his remarkable success. Fanatics or not, right or wrong in their religious and political views, his troops were thoughtful men, of strict and even severe manners, within whose camps there was little swearing, but much psalm-singing-soldiers who, if they did not, because they could not in conscience, honor the king, feared God. It was from their knees in silent prayer, or from public assemblies held for worship, those men went to battle, who almost never fought but they conquered, bearing down in the shock of arms the very flower and pride of England's chivalry. By heroic deeds which history records, and John Mil

ton sang, and all denominations of Protestant Christians agree in admiring and approving, the valleys of Piedmont teach the same lesson. Strong were their mountain fastnesses; the dizzy crag they shared with the eagle; the narrow gorge, where, with a roaring torrent on this side and a dark frowning precipice on that, one brave man, spear in hand, or with boys and women at his back to load the rifles, could hold the pass against a thousand. Yet the salvation of the Waldenses did not lie in "the munition of rocks." To the morale which endured three centuries of the cruelest persecution, turned every rock into a monument, faced death on every meadow and gave to every village its roll of martyrs, was chiefly due the illustrious spectacle of a handful of men defending their faith and country against the arms of Savoy and the persecutions of Rome. It was this which braced them for the struggle, and repeatedly rolled back on the plains of Italy the bleeding fragments of the mighty armies that invaded their mountain homes.

So long as we cannot dispense with locks and keys to protect our goods from thieves, nor with police to preserve our persons from assault and our homes from housebreakers, it is vain to hope that we can dispense with the means of protecting our country from those who, though dignified with the names of conquerors, are nothing else than thieves and murderers. Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, differed from the felons we send to prison or consign to the gallows only in that they plundered not houses, but kingdoms, and on bloody battle-fields, strewed with the bodies of mangled thousands, committed not solitary but wholesale slaughter.

But while we may justify a standing army, I would like to ask what Christian man can justify those arrangements which, in so many respects, convert it into a standing immorality. This is a subject within our sphere, as Christians and patriots, to notice. We have here an enormous evil, which every lover of God and of the souls of men and of his country should seek to amend. I

know few things that call so loudly for reform as the unfavorable circumstances in which we place our soldiers, so far as regards especially their highest, their moral and religious, interests.

CALEB'S FIDELITY.

Fidelity is one of the first properties of a soldier; and it were well that every good cause, and especially that of Christ, could boast of such fidelity as gallant men have often shown in the ranks of war. Mere boys have bravely carried the colors of their regiment into battle, and to save them from falling into the hands of the enemy they have been known, when they themselves fell, to wrap them around their bodies and die within their encrimsoned folds. An incident more heroic still occurred on one of those fields where Austria lately suffered disastrous defeat. When the bloody fight was over and the victors were removing the wounded, they came on a young Austrian stretched on the ground, whose life was pouring out in the red streams of a ghastly wound. To their astonishment, he declined their kind services. Recommending others to be removed, he implored them, though he might still have been saved, to let him alone. On returning some time afterward they found him dead-all his battles o'er. But the mystery was explained. They raised the body to give it burial, and there, below him, lay the colors of hist regiment. He had sworn not to part with them; and though he clung to life and tenderly thought of a mother and sisters in their distant home, he would not purchase recovery at the price of his oath and the expense of a soldier's honor-" he was faithful unto death."

There was nothing in Pompeii, that most weird and wonderful of all cities-" city of the dead," as Walter Scott kept repeating to himself when they bore the shattered man through its silent streets-that invested it with a deeper interest to me than the spot where a soldier of old Rome displayed a most heroic fidelity. That fatal day on which Vesuvius, at whose feet the city stood,

burst out into an eruption that shook the earth, poured torrents of lava from its riven sides, and discharged, amid the noise of a hundred thunders, such clouds of ashes as filled the air, produced a darkness deeper than midnight, and struck such terror into all nearts that men thought not only that the end of the world had come and all must die, but that the gods themselves were expiring on that night a sentinel kept watch by the gate which looked to the burning mountain. Amid unimaginable confusion and shrieks of terror mingling with the roar of the volcano, and cries of mothers who had lost their children in the darkness, the inhabitants fled the fatal town, while the falling ashes, loading the darkened air and penetrating every place, rose in the streets till they covered the house-roofs, nor left a vestige of the city but a vast silent mound, beneath which it lay unknown, dead and buried, for nearly seventeen hundred years. Amid this fearful disorder the sentinel at the gate had been forgotten; and as Rome required her sentinels, happen what might, to hold their posts till relieved by the guard or set at liberty by their officers, he had to choose between death and dishonor. Pattern of fidelity, he stood by his post. Slowly but surely the ashes rise on his manly form; now they reach his breast, and now covering his lips, they choke his breathing. He also was "faithful unto death." After seventeen centuries they found his skeleton standing erect in a marble niche, clad in its rusty armor-the helmet on his empty skull and his bony fingers still closed upon his spear. And next almost to the interest I felt in placing myself on the spot where Paul, true to his colors when all men deserted him, pleaded before the Roman tyrant, was the interest I felt in the niche by the city gate where they found the skeleton of one who, in his fidelity to the cause of Cæsar, sets us an example of faithfulness to the cause of Christ—an example it were for the honor of their Master that all his servants followed.

This property of a good soldier was eminently illustrated by Caleb. One of the twelve heads of the tribes of Israel whom