The reward of virtue.
The sages and moralists of ancient as well as modern heathendom, amidst their vague and conflicting ideas of religious truth, have held in common an idea which Christianity more definitely and authoritatively teaches, that there is a future state, in which virtue receives those rewards and vice those punishments which are not the unvarying consequences of either in the present condition of things. This universal sentiment of humanity, this ineradicable instinct of every human soul, must be founded in truth and have been implanted in the mind of man by his Creator to stimulate him in well doing and deter him from evil. Yet that future, which is so near, seems so distant that fathomless ocean, strewn with a million wrecks, from which only a plank separates, looks so like a remote firmament that it is necessary ever to remind men, from the schools of the philosophers and the pulpits of the sanctuary, that this earth is not his abiding place, and that the greatest business of life is to know how to die.There is no such consolation to struggling virtue, there is no ray of illumination to the mind which broads sadly over the evil in the world, like that which the hope of a compensating future casts over the perplexities and woes of the present. It is the lighthouse at the entrance to the harbor, which guides and welcomes the storm tost mariner, and gives him assurance of a foothold where the treacherous elements against which he has struggled can no longer disturb his security and peace. In times of great public convulsions, when the waves and hurricanes of human passion are let loose to work universal havoc and destruction, the stoutest soul might recoil in helpless despair but for the sustaining conviction that a Righteous Judge occupies the throne of the universe, and that hereafter, if not here, virtue will receive its reward and vice its punishment. There are times when there seems no earthly incentive to any man to do his duty; when self-sacrifice, toll, privation, and peril receive not even the miserable reward of ephemeral praise; when alone, unnoticed, unknown, men of whom the world is not worthy, walk the earth, feeding on husks that swine would reject, and performing the deeds of angels. There are in the Confederate ranks, and have been there for three long years, thousands and tens of thousands of pure and noble men, who have given up home, and every earthly comfort at the call of duty; who have been burned by the summer sun, and tread barefoot the winter snow, and faced fearlessly the carnage of a hundred battle fields without the hope or expectation of emolument, of promotion, of distinction from the great mass to which they are attached, or of any human reward in any shape or form. No one knows them, no one hears of them, their ragged garments are not even decorated with a badge of honor, and when their war-worn bodies fall, they sometimes remain unburied, and the forms which were once so dear to mother, sister, wife and children, and so long were the living bulwark of their country, become the prey of ravenous birds and beasts. And whilst the good and valiant thus suffer, the selfish, the corrupt, the mercenary and ambitious, are rioting in riches, indulgence, and glory! How dark and mysterious all this, when viewed apart from the light which the Future Life of Man throws upon his present existence!
Let the inspiring thought that the reward will one day come, and animate the humblest soldier that shoulders a musket in the armies of his country. He who holds fast his integrity amid trials and temptations like those which beset the privates of a great army; he who preserves the purity he learned at his mother's knee, and can respect with a child's docility the prayers of his childhood; he who can do and die for others without reward, and scarcely gratitude, he, above all others, above Generals, Presidents, and Kings, may claim a country hereafter better than that which he fought for here, and rewards, compared with which, all the treasures and laurels of earth are worthless stubble.
