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I had no joys; nor any fear of death, or reluctance to die; but never was I so sensibly convinced of the value of an ATONING Saviour as then. I could only say, 'Hangs my helpless soul on thee; and adopt the language of the first and second verses of the fifty-first Psalm, which I desired might be the text for my funeral sermon.
The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.
The beginnings of religion lie in the desire to have our sins forgiven, and to be enabled to avoid doing the wrong things again. It was so with David when, in the fifty-first Psalm, he not only cried, 'Have mercy upon me, O God, and blot out my transgressions', but 'Wash me, cleanse me from my sin'. Sin is a double evil.
He was taken to General Howe's headquarters at the Beekman mansion, on the East River, near the corner of the present Fifty-first Street and First Avenue. It is a strange coincidence that this house to which he was brought to be tried as a spy was the very one from which Major Andre departed when he went to West Point.
Old maps of New York show the lanes crossing this section at the time, much like the country roads we see today thirty or forty miles distant from the city. Walls ran along these roads with an occasional house with its gable of the old Dutch type. Mr. Keyser, who dealt in ice gathered from ponds, occupied the site of the present Vanderbilt houses, Fifty-first to Fifty-second Street.
We were now assigned to the Twenty-third Brigade Colonel Stanley Mathews, of the Fifty-first Ohio, acting Brigadier General. The brigade consisted of the Fifty-first Ohio, Eighth and Twenty-first Kentucky, and Thirty-fifth Indiana Infantry, together with our battery.
Julian Romero and the guard followed him. On his way, he read aloud the fifty-first Psalm: "Hear my cry, O God, and give ear unto my prayer!"
Then the clergy chanted the fifty-first psalm, the whole vast throng uniting in one tremendous miserere. If a priest happened to be among the culprits, he was now stripped of the canonicals which he had hitherto worn; while his hands, lips, and shaven crown were scraped with a bit of glass, by which process the oil of his consecration was supposed to be removed.
Hear him in the thirty-fifth chapter: "And an highway shall be there and a way; and it shall be called the way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein." And in the fifty-first chapter: "Awake, awake!
And not until the following morning did the papers announce that President Colwell, of the Canned Meat Trust, having been ordered by his physician on a long sea voyage to refurbish his depleted nerves, after closing his house on West Fifty-first Street, had sailed in his own yacht.
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