June 22 — We had preaching in camp to-day again, and we are getting in a goodly supply of heavenly ammunition from the arsenal of truth — in double doses, preaching in the morning and prayer meeting at night. The ammunition is fixed and ready to fire at all times and under all circumstances, and I hope that we may all pack at least some of it away in the cartridge box of fortitude for immediate and constant use, and not act like the great majority of the world, both saints and sinners, who use it all up in empty ceremonials on Sunday, having not enough left on Monday morning to make a decent skirmish against the inroads of wrongdoing, hypocrisy, and rascality.
This evening at dusk our chaplain held a prayer meeting in camp. It was in a beautiful part of the woods where his tent stood, and the quartermaster pro tern, of Heaven was standing in the door of his tent and issued with lavish supply the rations of holy manna from the Sacred Receptacle that was stocked by Moses, David, and Christ in the dim ages of long ago. Two little tallow candles stuck against the black bark of a rough oak tree, with vacillating and flickering gleam, was the grand chandelier that furnished the light. Mother Earth strewn and carpeted with last autumn’s brown leaves provided vast and ample seating accommodations for the sun-tanned warriors that rode and fought with Ashby through storms of shot and shell, but now had sheathed their trusty blades, and in reverence received their holy rations of moral rectitude in perfect silence and with good behavior, without the least murmur or complaint of who was to have first choice.
Bright stars that flashed their silvery light from the silent dome of the temple here and there peeped through the little interstices in the thick foliage of the overarching forest trees. A solitary cricket not far away chirped its vesper hymn in measured cadences in the same tone and strain that its kindred chanted in the crevices of the old brick fireplace around the hearthstone at home when I was a child. Oh, how nimbly and vividly thought plays on the harp of memory when its sleeping strings are touched by the fingers of the past!
