[
71]
Chapter 5: helps to the revival-colportage.
So important was the work of Colportage in promoting religion among the soldiers that we feel constrained to devote to it a separate chapter.
And the pious laborers in this department are eminently worthy of a place by the side of the most devoted chaplains and missionaries that toiled in the army revival.
Receiving but a pittance from the societies that employed them, subsisting on the coarse and scanty fare of the soldiers, often sleeping on the wet ground, following the march of the armies through cold or heat, through dust or mud, everywhere were these devoted men to be seen scattering the leaves of the Tree of Life.
Among the sick, the wounded, and the dying, on the battle-fields and in the hospitals, they moved, consoling them with tender words, and pointing their drooping spirits to the hopes of the gospel.
The record of their labors is the record of the army revival; they fanned its flame and spread it on every side by their prayers, their conversations, their books, and their preaching.
They went out from all the
Churches, and labored together in a spirit worthy of the purest days of our holy religion.
The aim of them all was to turn the thoughts of the soldiers not to a sect, but to
Christ, to bring them into the great spiritual temple, and to show them the wonders of salvation.
If any man among us can look back with pleasure on his labors in the army, it is the
Christian colporteur
The number of religious tracts and books distributed by the colporteurs, chaplains, and missionaries in the army, we can never know.
But as all the
Churches were engaged in the work of printing and circulating, it is not
