desire before I leave the world, as my best legacy to my family, my serious, solemn advice, to make choice of God for their God. He has been my father's God, and the God of your mother's predecessors. I solemnly charge you to make it your first care to seek after peace with God, and being reconciled, to make it your study to please God in all things.

Wait diligently upon the means of grave, attending the worship of God in his house; study his Word, after secret prayer, especially family and the public ordinances.

Beware of mere form of these duties; but cry to the Lord for communion with him, so that you may worship him in spirit and in truth.

Follow God fully, without turning aside. I have often devoted all of you to God, and there is nothing I have so much at heart as this: that you may indeed be the Lord's; and if you turn aside from his way, I will have this as a witness against you in the day of the Lord.

Be good to your mother, as you would have God's blessing. She will need your comfort. Beware of religion that is most taken up with public matters.

The sum of the gospel is Christ crucified. I commit my body to the dust, hoping and expecting the spirit will in due time quicken my mortal body. My spirit I commit to my Lord Jesus Christ; to him I have entrusted it long ago.

Now, my dear boys, this is my last legacy, that we all meet where there is no more death, sorrow nor sin.

Your devoted father, R. L. Dabney.

Be kindly affectionate one to another. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

T.W. Gregory, Esq:

hen the tempest of defeat and reconstruction swept over the South, bearing away every landmark of social status and political faith, he stood, with folded arms, amid the flotsam and jetsam of institutions which were knit into every fibre of his being, and ancestral traditions which were a part of his daily life.

With a heart to great to break, and a courage too high to yield, he took up and bore the burden of his life through the new order which had cometeaching Southern youth not to despise the cause for which their fathers died, not to forget the proud traditions of the past, not to repudiate the blood of patriots shed, and to study the constitutional question settled in this world by the late war; but, in his opinion, never to be ultimately decided on a basis of right and wrong until the great hereafter

And when our people forget the example and precept of such as these; when they forget that from them have come down to us, pure and undefiled, the ancestral faith and devotion of our fathers; when they forget that to such as these we owe the heritage of principle and courage and chivalry, upon which must be built our future greatness; when we forget to prize the purity of motive, and honor the patriotic blood of those who fell at Shiloh and Malvern Hill, then 'may God forget us!' 'If this be treason, then make the most of it.'"

Mr. James Henry Rice, Jr.:

s Dr. Dabney sat in the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church, the other day, and preached a sermon long to be remembered by those who heard it, his appearance was both venerable and patriarchical. As Dr. Joynes admirably expressed it, 'He symbolized the union of a Christian apostle with Homer.' The towering figure (majestic though recumbent), the flowing locks and the sightless eyes of the speaker, and withal the fire and passion of his utterance, proved the justice and aptness of the characterization. That, in a few words, pictures the great Virginian as he was. The old heroic poetry lived in him, and found a vent in the beauty and worth of his long and illustrious life; and the deathless spirit of the Berserkers fired him to the last. He was a born gladiator, though he combated principalities and powers, and not foes of flesh and blood. Dabney never waited for evil to mass its forces; he fell on it with savage fury in its camp, tracked the beast to its lair, and there laid hold with the dauntless courage of his kind.

"And there was that in him that cannot perish. The lesson of such a life deserves close reading and diligent consideration. In a material sense, he would have bettered his fortunes by a more temperate tone in dealing with the many questions which his intellect grappled. But it was the nature of the princely man to spurn anything that savored of a compromise of principle. He fought long and hard, and died unconquered and not convinced of the efficiency of gunpowder and the bayonet to control reason or subvert truth."

Headstone inscription:

obert Lewis Dabney, M.A., D.D., LL. D.,

Born March 5, 1820

Died January 3, 1898

Minister of the Gospel, Professor of Theology in Union Seminary, and of Philosophy in the University of Texas, Major in the Confederate Army, and Chief of Staff to Stonewall Jackson.

"Prove all things, hold fast that which is good."

DABNEY

In unshaken loyalty of devotion to his friends, his country, and his religion, firm in misfortune, ever active in earnest endeavor, he labored all his life for what he loved with a faith in good causes, that was ever one with his faith in God.

His biographer, T. C. Johnson:

is work was to cut huge blocks of solid granite from the quarries of eternal truth, swing them with his derrick crane on to the ramparts of the citadel of conservatism, spike them into a solid whole with a Titan's hammer, and hurl thence, with more than catapultic force, huge boulders into the very camps of the enemies."