[78] position and no prescribed duties. In a sphere where everything is concentrated on one sole end, he alone finds himself of no direct use towards that end, and apparently superfluous. In this difficult position, nine men out of ten are almost useless, while the tenth achieves a wide-spread influence. Arthur Fuller seemed to be one of the latter class. The prime qualities required by his new position were moral energy and tact; he had always a superabundance of the one, and he must have developed the other, or he could not have been so successful as he evidently was. For instance, it is the custom in some regiments for the chaplain to be the caterer for the officers' mess. The first proposition to this effect, in the Sixteenth Massachusetts, was promptly met by a Scripture text, ‘It is not reason that we should leave the word of God and serve tables.’ The Colonel was not quite pleased, it is said, with this piece of frankness; yet afterwards, at a complimentary dinner of the officers, when they had vainly implored the Chaplain to take wine with them, the Colonel finally proposed three cheers for the Chaplain, as ‘a man whom we all honor the more, because in public and private he is uniformly consistent with his principles.’ In accordance with these views, the Chaplain was soon at work in resisting the most perilous of army vices. He writes:—
We celebrated the close of the year 1861 by forming in the Sixteenth Massachusetts Regiment a Division of the Sons of Temperance. At an early hour the new chapel-tent of the regiment was filled to overflowing with soldiers eager to listen to an exposition of the principles of the organization, and to unite in the movement, if it commended itself to their judgment. Over one hundred officers and soldiers were proposed for initiation. Authority had been received by the chaplain from the Grand Division of Massachusetts to organize this Division, which is to embrace not only soldiers of this regiment, but Massachusetts men connected with other regiments at or near Camp Hamilton, or with the naval vessels lying off the fortress.He formed also an ‘Army Christian Association,’ and a ‘Soldiers' Teachers' Association,’—thus transplanting the
