that truth of Christ’s teaching, which has unaccountably been let slip out of our modern theology, that his help is temporal as well as spiritual, deals with coarsest, most practical needs, and is sworn to her who struggles to be true to her best self, that what she asks, believing, she shall receive. That is the point,—­believing.  “Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.”

How many tragedies of life besides finespun novels would suddenly be brought to an end, if the heroine were only a common-sense, believing Christian of the old-fashioned pattern!  Doctor Blecker, going into the war after the day he parted from the girl at Harper’s Ferry, with a sense of as many fighting influences in his life as there were in the army, had no under-sight of the clear mapping-out of the years for him, controlled by the simple request of the woman yonder who loved him.  She dared not repeat that prayer now; but it had gone up once out of a childish trust, and was safely written down above.

Let us pass over five or six months, and follow Paul Blecker to Fredericksburg, the night after that bloodiest day for the Federal forces, in December.  It was the fourth battle in which he had taken part.  Now a man grows blase, in a manner, even of wholesale slaughter; he plodded his way quietly, indifferently almost, therefore, over the plateau below the first range of hills, his instrument-case in hand, drinking from his brandy-flask now and then, to keep down nausea.  The night was clear,—­a low, wan moon peering from the west, a warm wind from the river drifting the heavy billows of smoke away from the battle-field.  He picked his steps with difficulty, unwilling to tread upon even the dead:  they lay in heaps here, thrown aside by the men who were removing the wounded.  The day was lost:  he fancied he could read on even the white upturned faces a bitter defeat.  Firing had ceased an hour ago; only at long intervals on the far left a dull throb was heard, as though the heart of the Night pulsed heavily and feverishly in her sleep:  no other sound, save the constant, deadening roll of ambulances going out from this Valley of Death.  The field where he stood was below the ridge on which were placed Lee’s batteries; for ten hours the grand division of Sumner had charged the heights here, the fog shutting out from them all but the impregnable foe in front, and the bit of blue sky above, the last glimpse of life they were to see,—­charging with the slow, cumulative energy of an ocean-surf upon a rock, and ebbing back at last, spent, leaving behind the drift of a horrible wetness on the grass, and uncounted murdered souls to go back to God.