largely toward the enactment of the Confederate provision by which all the members of regularly organized Christian denominations or churches which have from their earliest establishment uniformly taught and practiced as one tenet of their faith non-arms-bearing and nonresistant principles, shall be perpetually exempt from all military duty to the Confederate States of America, or to any state belonging thereto, upon the payment of five hundred dollars to the person duly appointed to receive the same, for every member so exempted, and otherwise subject to military duty under existing orders.

The above is not the “Law of Exemptions” in exact words, but it is that part of it which was made for the Brethren, in exact sense.

SATURDAY, April 5.  This forenoon I am about home.  In the afternoon I am taken to Harrisonburg and put in the guard house.  My place is in the large jury room of the court house, up stairs, with others who are captives with myself.  Rain this evening.

SUNDAY, April 6.  Rain and snow all last night, and continues on so all day.  Have preaching in our captive hall.  My subject is “Righteousness, Temperance, and a Judgment to Come.”  I aimed at comforting my brother captives and myself with the recollection that Paul was once a captive like ourselves, and that in this state of imprisonment he preached upon the text which I have selected for this day.  I said: 

Brethren, if any have cause to tremble, we have none.  Those should tremble who seek to lay obstacles in the way of others who aim to do good and no evil.  As a rule, prisoners are nervous and sometimes tremble when taken into court:  but judges are proverbially calm and self-composed.  Hence the old adage:  “As sober as a judge.”  But this order is entirely reversed in the case of Paul before Felix.  Here we see that Paul is calm, collected and self-possessed, and that Felix is first nervous, and soon trembles all over.  In this trial it appears that the judge is convicted of guilt by the prisoner himself, and that the prisoner shows himself clear.  But this is not the only case in which an innocent criminal has stood before a guilty judge.  Felix had never heard such a sermon before.  All that he had ever heard were most probably eulogistic in character, and spoken in praise of the Roman emperor and his subordinates.  Felix was one of these, and it was natural for him to appropriate quite a large share of this praise to himself.  But he did not find a eulogist in Paul.  Panegyric had no place in Paul’s earnest nature.  Life and death, holiness and sin were subjects of moment too great and too real to be trifled with.  If Paul would have stooped to flattery he might have quickly obtained his release, because Felix and those following him in office confessed they found no cause of death in his case.  They kept him bound merely to please the flattering, deceitful Jews.