Leonidas Polk Family Papers

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he was ready to admit any interest in religion but because he had promised his father to call on the chaplain. McIlvaine presented him with two tracts, requesting him to read one himself and to drop the other into the hand of someone who would benefit by it. The cadet promised compliance, and, perhaps in the spirit of sport, dropped the second tract, and popular summary of the evidences of Christianity, into the room of Leonidas Polk.

One week later Polk appeared in McIlvaine's quarters too choked with emotion for coherent speech. After several ineffectual attempts to make himself understood, he was finally able to stammer: "Tell me what I must do -- I have come about my soul. I know not what I want -- I am entirely in the dark. What must I seek? Where must I go?" He left the chaplain's study a confessed Christian, and forty days later he was baptized, together with another cadet, in the presence of the entire corps. The service for adult baptism had never been witnessed there before. It was an impressive scene, and all

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went on quietly and with the deepest solemnity till after the last words of the office when the chaplain addressed a few words of exhortation to the two, ending with the sentence: "Pray your Master and Saviour to take you out of the world, rather than allow you to bring reproach on the cause you have now professed." At this Polk, who had been admonished by the chaplain to be on his guard lest he give rein to his intense emotion, could hold himself no longer, and there came from the depth of his heart an Amen which spoke to every other heart in the congregation. Thirty-eight years later, when the death of the bishop-general was reported in the papers, one who had been an accidentl spectator at his baptism wrote to McIlvaine to ask if he were not the cadet who had interrupted the chaplain's exhortation with that heart-felt Amen, which had made such a deep impression on him that he had the sound of it yet in his ears. Better than to have "fired the shot heard around the world" was it to have said an Amen that reverberated for a