J. William Jones, Christ in the camp, or religion in Lee's army

John Anderson, of Company C, Thirteenth Virginia Regiment, who was mortally wounded at Second Manassas, gave me, when I told him that the surgeons said that he could only live an hour, many messages to loved ones, which they have cherished as a precious legacy, and among others sent this to his father: ‘Tell father that it would be very hard to die here on the roadside, away from home and loved ones, but for the fact that I have with me the Friend that sticketh closer than a brother, and He makes it all peace and joy with me.’

A Georgia captain, who was shot in the mouth and unable to speak, wrote in my diary, when I visited him in the field-hospital at the Wilderness: ‘I do not know how it will be with me, whether I shall die or recover, but my full trust is in Christ, and I am perfectly resigned to God's will. I am ready still to serve Him on earth or to “go up higher,” just as He may see fit to direct.’

When I asked a soldier named Wayland, who had professed conversion in one of our revivals a short time before, and was mortally wounded in ‘the bloody angle’ at Spottsylvania Court House: ‘Now that you are about to die, what is the ground of your hope?’ He replied, with a sweet smile: ‘Jesus says, “ Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.” I have gone to Him, and I do not think that He will deceive me. I believe that He will be true to His word.’

And repeating this over several times, his face brightening into something like ecstatic radiance, he went to realize the preciousness of the Saviour's promise.

Major Augustus M. Gordon, who fell at Chancellorsville, said —they were his last words—‘Lay me down now, captain, for I am dying. I am not afraid to die, for I know I am going to be with Jesus.’

We read, in one of the Georgia papers, of a Georgia soldier who, at Chancellorsville, had his left leg shattered from the ankle to the knee, but who, hearing that a comrade was wounded, said to those who were about to bear him to the rear, ‘He is worse wounded than I am: carry him off—I can wait here!’ Before the ambulance-corps could get back, a minnie-ball had passed through his unselfish, generous heart.

The chaplain of the Ninth Louisiana Regiment (Rev. F. McCarthy) relates the following:

‘A young man named Winn, of the Eighth Louisiana, was ’