Washington Reporter and Tribune, May 23, 1861

"Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy," is the divine injunction, obligatory through all time, and we devoutly trust our gallant young men in camp will constantly bear it in mind. It is too frequently the case that war knows no Sabbath, but it nevertheless does not repeal the law of the Sabbath. It is well observed by the Sabbath Committee of New York, that "it remains written on the muscles and nerves that wield the weapons of the battlefield. It is inscribed on the moral nature of every competent volunteer. It flames from every soldier's knapsack which contains—as every knapsack should—the Book of books. It influences the plans and the orders of every wise general in the army of a Christian republic.["]—Beyond the line of necessity, mercy, and self-defence, the blessings and restraints of the Sabbath should visit and control the camp, as they comfort and over-shadow the peaceful abodes of unarmed citizens. Thus may a citizen soldiery escape the peculiar temptations of the tented field; be nerved for heroic deeds; and return to their homes with such after record of their history as is given of Cromwell's army of Christian veterans: "Fifty thousand men, accustomed to the profession of arms, were at once thrown on the world. In a few months there remained not a trace indicating that the most formidable army in the world had been absorbed into the mass of [the] community. The royalists themselves, confessed that, in every department of honest industry, the discarded warrior prospered beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery, that none was heard to ask an alms, and that, if a baker, a mason, or a wagoner, attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all probability one of Oliver's old soldiers."

A large charity should and will be extended by the Sabbath loving portion of our citizens in great exigencies like the present, when war has become a necessity and has been precipitated upon us so formidably, but still there exists no occasion for ignoring the Sabbath. Its sacred rest, its hours of recuperation, are as necessary to the soldier as to the laboring man, and better fits him for the onerous, arduous duties of the camp. Its observance imparts a calm to the fevered and perturbed spirit and gives a new inspiration to the patriotic fires of the heart.—Above all, we deprecate such shows as that which took place at Camp Scott, on Sabbath week, as it would seem mainly to minister to the vanity of our officials and their Sabbath desecrating retinue. Might not any other day have served as well the objects and purposes of these dignitaries and their epauletted military attaches? We can recognize no justifiable reason for this imposing display of the "pomp and glorious circumstance of war" on the Lord's day, and it rejoices us to find the press of our State generally, most unqualifiedly disapproving of it. There may be, and, doubtless, will be, occasions not a few, wherein the holy quiet of the Sabbath will be broken by the dread conflict of arms. Let them be the exceptions, while the rule should ever be when the day can be kept sacred, let it be observed with all possible respect.