The Yale expositor. (Yale, St. Clair County, Mich.) 1894-current, 1897-03-26


Or perhaps the mother fingers long
enough TO see a son get on the wrong
road. and his former kindness becomes
rough reply when she expresses anxiety
about him. But she goes right on,
looking carefully after his apparel, re-
membering his birthday with some me-
mento. and when he is brought home
worn out with dissipation. nurses him
till he gets well and starts him again,
and hopes, and expects, and prays, and
counsels, and suffers, until her strength
gives out and she fails. She is going,
and attendants, bending over her pill
low, ask her IL she has any message to
leave, and she makes great effort to
say something. but out of three or four
minutes of indistinct utterance they
can catch but three words: MY poor
boy!" The simple fact is she died for
him. Life for life. Substitution!
About thirty-six years ago there
went forth from our northern and
southern homes hundreds of thousands
OF men to do battle for their country.
All the poetry of war soon vanished,
and left them nothing but the terrible
prose. They waded knee-deep in mud.
They slept in snow-banks. They
marched till their cut feet tracked the
earth. They were swindled out of
their honest rations, and lived on meat
not mt for a dog. They had jaws all
fractured. and eyes extinguished, and
liCbs shot away. Thousands of them
cried for water as they lay dying on
the field the night after the battle, and
got it not. They were homesiek. and
received no message from their loved
ones. They died in barns, in bushes,
in bitches. the buzZards of the sum-
mer heat the only attendants on their
obsequies. No one but the infinite God
who knows everything. knows the ten
thousandth part of the length. and
breadth, and depth. and height of the
anguish of the Northern and South
ern battlefields. Why did these faith
ers leave their children and go to the
front, and why did these young men.
postponing the marriage day, start out
into the probabilities of never coming
back? For the country they died. Life
for life. Blood for blood. Substitu-
ton!
But we need not go so far. What is
that monument in Greenwood? 1t is to
the doctors who fell in the Southern
epidemics. Why go? Were there not
enough sick to be attended in these
Northern attitudes? Oh, yes: but the
doctor puts a few medical books In his
valise, and some phials of medicine,
and leaves his patients here in the
hands of other physicians, and takes
the rail-train. Before he gets to the
infected regions he passes crowded
rail-trains. regular and extra, taking
the flying and affrighted populations.
He arrives in a city over which a great
horror is brooding He goes from
couch to couch, feeling of the pulse and
studying symptoms, and prescribing
day after day, night after night. until
a fellowphysician says, Doctor, you
had better go home and rest: you look
miserable" But he cannot rest while
so many are suffering. On and on, un-
til some morning finds him in a deliri-
UNI, in which he talks of home. and
then rises and says he must go and
look after those patients. He is told to
lie down; but he fights his attendants
until he falls back. and is weaker and
weaker, and dies for people with whom
he had no kinship. and far away from
his own family, and Is hastily put away
in strangers tomb, and only the fifth
part of a newspaper line tells us of his
sacrifice-his name just mentioned
among five. Yet he has touched the
furthest height of sublimity in that
three weeks OF humanitarian service.
He goes straight as an arrow to the
bosom of him who said Il was sick
and we visited me-" Life for life. Blood
for blood. Substitution!